Thanks man
Your fills are hand written? That’s why they sound real.... ok so it takes a lot of tweaking almost measure per measure?
It’s more than measure to measure, it’s every single MIDI hit! Hahahaha....it’s tedious!
I didn’t want to scare you away with velocities yet, but might as well give you the rundown now.
The velocity of the MIDI note is how hard the drum is being hit, you’ve got 0-127, with 0 being the lightest hit and 127 being the hardest. It’s VERY easy to put everything at 127 and say, “That’s metal!”, but that’s not how real drummers hit the drums. No two hits are exactly the same and a lot of complaints about drum samples in professional albums is that it sounds like a machine because it’s so unrealistic.
Snares are the only thing I’ll peg at 127 and I’ll only do that during choruses or a section where I want the snare cracking really hard. Everything else, especially the kicks, need to get adjusted. Thankfully, you’re using Logic and they make it SUPER easy. “Burying the beater” is what drummers do when they put their foot down on the kick pedal, smash the beater into the head as hard as they can and leave it resting against the head. That mutes the resonance of the kick drum and doesn’t let it ring out, that’s the sound you get when you leave the kicks at 127. You want all that oomph and balls a kick delivers, keeping them between 119-124 will allow for that, while varying the velocities enough to make it sound more human.
I’ve found kicks and toms sound best between 119-123. Fills I’ll program by hand, but what I’ll do for the kicks is open the piano roll, highlight the entire row of kick drums and then in the Edit window (press E) you’ll see on the top left Function, click that and you’ll see a drop down menu, go to the bottom and click MIDI Transform, then you get another drop down menu, click Random Velocities. The box that pops up allows you to type in the range of velocities, so you just type in 119 and 124, then since the kicks are already highlighted, just click Operate Only and it’ll adjusted all of the kicks at once.
I do the same thing for all the cymbals/hi-hats. Toms, on the other hand, I dial in one at a time. If you listen to drum fills, they usually crescendo or decrescendo (get louder towards the end or get quieter towards the end). This is exactly what gives fills all their life/human character. So I click each MIDI block in the fill and adjust the velocities individually, if it’s a crescendo, I’ll start the first one around 75 and work my way up to 124. Start watching some of those drum instructional videos and listen to how it sounds when they’re playing fills, you’ll hear the volume go up and down depending on the fill. Just do your best to program that in there.
My general guide line for metal-
Kicks: 119-124
Snare-127 (the only thing that’s ok to hit 127 on repeatedly...if it’s a calmer part, I might drop it down to 125 or 126, but usually I just keep them at 127 unless it’s used in a really dynamic fill)
Toms- 119-124
Cymbals- 121-127 (On downbeats or the start of a new section, I’ll almost always put them at 127 to accent a change)
Hi-hats- these are tricky because it’ll depend on what your VST is doing, sometimes they can get really overpowering, because they’re being picked up in the overheads as well, for verses I might stay around 80-100, but if it’s just a crazy heavy section, they might sound better around 100-115. The sound of them doesn’t change too much with different velocities, that’s more a volume thing. Toms/kick/snare all change tonally when hit harder or softer, cymbals not so much.
So when I start writing these out, I’ll write out, say 2-4 measures of a verse, then do all the MIDI Transform stuff with just those measures, then I’ll copy and paste them after to fill out the rest of the verse. If you’ve got some variation in the first couple measures, you’ll be fine copy and pasting them, no one is going to say, “Oh man, the velocity on the 2nd hi hat hit was the same in the first measure as it was the 3rd measure”
Between copy/pasting and the MIDI Transform/Random Velocity function, you can haul some ass on these and speed the process up. It took me over a year to find that MIDI Transform function.....so I used to type these in hit by hit!
Start working on a drum MIDI, my email is
RevDrucifer@gmail.com, you can send them to me there or upload them right in here, I’ll load it up at home and go over it then send you back a revised version if it ”needs” any revision. I’ll post one of mine up for you later, so you can drop it into Logic and look at it in the piano roll and see what it looks like as far as velocities go. It’s certainly tedious, but man, when you really work at it, the results are more than worth it.