Watch: Five ways to humanise your drum sequences
Watch as Dylan shows you five ways to make your drums feel less robotic and more human using Launchpad Pro [MK3].
MIDI drums offer music makers so much flexibility through being able to change the sounds of drum elements on the fly and make minor adjustments at any point, even once the rest of your track is recorded. The downside is often a robotic feel, with every hit at the same velocity, strictly on the grid, and generally not capturing the nuances of a real drummer.
Here are five ways to make your beat sequences feel real and breathe some life into your drum grooves:
- Add swing: this can quickly take your drums from being on the grid to having a natural groove and a slightly ‘off-grid’ feel.
- Add layers: not every snare hit sounds the same, nor is a kick. By layering certain hits on the grid with other samples, you can quickly change the sound.
- Different velocities: for ghost snares and grooving hi-hats, affecting the velocities of each hit in a sequence will add dynamism to your beats.
- Scenes: using Scenes on Launchpad enables you to chain different scenes together so that you can add variations or create breakdowns and build-ups.
- Subtraction: leaving space rather than filling in blank spaces can allow energy to come back in when drums come back in in full force.