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Thoughts about "humanizing" virtual drums |
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Written by Misko
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Tuesday, 16 September 2008 |
While I am a beginner in recording/mixing, I have 14 years of experience playing live with a band (I'm a guitarist, and the band is punk-rock). I've been fortunate to play with some really high-quality drummers, watching and listening how they do their thing on an almost daily basis.
So now I'm trying to do my solo DIY home-made album and for the drums, I use Superior Drummer 2. SD2 has this useful feature called "humanize". It's a kind of "velocity randomizer" where the program randomly shifts the velocity of the hits in an effort to reproduce the not-that-perfect feeling of live drumming. But it has it's shortcomings.
It is too random. Drummers have a more organized velocity, their grooves match their feelings and the feeling of the song.
- They tend to increase velocity right before entering into the chorus. Usually this is most noticable on the hi-hat, they open it increasingly couple of beats before the chorus.
- The chorus is with higher velocity. This is understandable.
- The second verse is usually with slightly higher velocity than the first, because the feeling of the past chorus is influencing it.
- Drummers like bridges. It gives them an opportunity to release themselves and bang the ride cymbal, like running across an open field. Velocity is usually between the verse and chorus levels.
- Drummers like dramatic endings. Usually the velocity of the last beats of the song is going up untill the very last (and the heaviest) hit.
These observations cannot and should not be a rule, as music has no rules. But it should provide a musician lacking the experience of live-playing with a modest insight into the way most drummers tend to play.
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