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Here are some screenshots from the yet to be released plugin, Extreme Drumsynth 2.

FunkDemo

A lot of times, programmed drum patterns don’t sound as interesting as real drums. I’d like to cover a few of the reasons for this and what you can do about it to make your drum patterns sound better.

Pattern recognition

Our brains are really good at recognizing patterns.  This can be both good and bad when we’re trying to create interesting drum patterns.

If the patterns are too similar to each other, over time we get bored with them, and recognize them for what they are: repetitive, robotic sounding drums.  We try to deal with this by tuning them out.

On the other hand, if patterns are too chaotic, we won’t recognize the structure in them and they sound like a random stream of drum hits which isn’t good either.

So, the challenge is to get a good balance where the patterns are similar enough to provide structure, but there are enough surprises to keep us interested.

Adding variations to drum patterns

When programming drums, it’s good to start with a basic drum pattern, and then add a few small variations each time it repeats to keep it interesting.  Here are some variations you can experiment with:

Accents - Drummers will accent certain hits, and the volume will naturally vary a bit from hit to hit.  So try to program some accents in your beats, and try to vary them a bit from one beat to another.

Ghost notes – Drummers will sometimes add some extra snare hits to make the patterns more interesting.  These extra notes are usually played quietly so that they are just barely heard.

Fills - Drummers like to add extra fills when they can, and not just every 4th bar.  The fills don’t have to be complicated, a couple of extra hits every once in a while can go a long way toward making patterns more interesting.  Drummers will also sometimes let their sticks bounce two or three times occasionally, so you might try occasionally changing a few of your hits to double hits.

Sounds - Where you hit a drum, and how you hit a drum can make drums hit sound different from hit to hit.  Unfortunately you don’t get this same natural variation from most drum machines, so you have to do some extra work like using filters, multiple samples, and envelopes to get your drums to have some natural variation

Timing - Perfectly quantized drums sound robotic and unnatural, but randomly varied timing for every hit sounds sloppy and unprofessional, so there must be some ways of making our timing sound more interesting.  We can start by playing with the swing, try sliding the offbeat eighth notes backward a bit, and you’ll notice the feel of the beat changes.  You can try sliding these notes back just a bit for a subtle swing feel, or you can slide them more until it feels closer to a triplet feel.  The right amount of swing can vary based on tempo, or music style, so experiment.  You can also try the same thing on sixteenth notes.

Another experiment is to slide certain sounds forward or backward in time just a bit.  For example, moving a snare drum track forward can give the beat a little extra drive, and moving it back can create a more laid back feel.

Occasionally playing certain drum hits an eighth note early or late can create an interesting pattern variation.

Summary

These are a few ideas that you can use to make your drum patterns more interesting.  I hope they help you as you program your own drums.  Feel free to add your own ideas.

This is based on the process explained here, but adapted for Extreme Drumsynth.

clap tutorial

Create a new patch

Right click on a pad and select “Cut” to set all settings to their default settings.

Master Section

• Attack = 9 o’clock
• Release = 9 o’clock
• Turn off Osc1
• Noise Fader – Draw a noise envelope that looks roughly like this:

Noise

• Adjust the Initial Lower Filter Cutoff to 650 Hz
• Adjust the Initial Upper Filter Cutoff to about 13 kHz
• At 20% Time, add an upper filter cutoff point at 6 kHz
• Set the velocity modulation for the upper filter cutoff to 12 o’clock to make louder hits brighter.
• Set the random modulation for the upper filter to 9 o’clock to make
• Adjust the filter shape using the xy pad. Move the value a bit the left to emphasize the low frequencies.

LFO1

• Select the downward saw waveform
• Set the Rate to 10 o’clock
• Set the Random modulation of the Rate to about 9 o’clock so that every hit sounds a bit different.
• Create an envelope on the lfo depth that looks like the following:

• Select the Noise Fader and set its lfo1 modulation to about 10 o’clock

It should sound roughly like this:

Clap Example.mp3