Learning percussion and beats

[Ravich]

I am wondering if anyone has some tips here. I took classical piano lessons from a young age, but I never really learned much about percussion other than a few months of lessons when I was younger.

So does anyone have some recommendations as starting points? I have samples at my disposal...

[ectogemia]

This is my kryptonite right now as well. And weird... I took piano lessons from a young age as well. Music twins, I guess. I except that I don't have any samples really at all. I've visited some free sample sites and downloaded a few dozen, but mostly, I'm unimpressed.

Where'd you find yours, specifically the drum samples?

Wish I could have helped

[Ravich]

I get my samples from EWQL mostly, but you'll definitely have to cough up cash for those. The biggest disappointment with them is that they're not very easy to use. I really wish I had a library or 2 that were useful for just sitting down and writing without seemingly endless tweaking. My drum samples are Storm Drum 2.

With percussion, I've just sort of realized that I really dont know how to approach creating beats that can be looped for a few measures. Really simple things like in Apokelypse (youtube) the music isnt that good, but it has the right idea, and I really had to stop and think about what the bass and snare/snare roll were doing. It's very simple but I have no idea how to approach creating something to fit a scenario.

[ectogemia]

I'm with you on the tweaking. Electronic music as a product is a wonderful feeling and endlessly entertaining to listen to. Electronic music as a process is fairly often just painful.

Sooooo maaaannny knoooobbbss tooooo fiddddlllee wwiiittthh. And none of those knobs write your music for you

I've found that I can make some fairly decent beats by focusing on the type of sound I want rather than the rhythm. This way, I'm not thinking so much about rigid beats, but more about an overall sound. Basically, I isolate the instruments I want first, then, if the rhythms will be simple, I start fiddling with the step sequencer and create a few bars of percussion before I ever listen to any of it. If the rhythms are a bit complex, I'll open up the piano roll and write my parts there. More often than not, they sound fairly close to what I actually wanted, and I just kind of tweak the rhythms from there.

The "writing by feel" thing works well, again, for simple-ish beats. Things like breakbeat and D'n'b... really, what the hell? I have no idea how people come up with that, although I do know that there is a fair amount of delay involved in some beats to make them sound far more complicated than the notated rhythm actually is. I experimented with this and got some cool results. Give it a try.

Thanks for the heads up on those samples. I'll have to check them out.

[CC Ricers]

For breakbeat & DnB stuff... genre-specific sample packs are fine, but I would also recommend breaking out for some more creative beats. Like, use drum packs made for house music on DnB.

Ghost hits are also very very important for a lot of DnB. Most of the unused 16th notes are filled with some kind of hi hat beat, and maybe a shaker for accent. Vary your hi hats by velocity/attack, and also slightly by pitch. It makes all the difference by making a naked DnB beat sound more pleasant to listen to.

[Ironblue]

CC is right for sure, controlling the velocity as much as possible is so so so so important for making a beat sound natural! Also the ghost notes (tiny, weak hits on a snare or hi hat) CC mentioned are invaluable to make drums sound good as well, especially in faster paced music. if im playing a fast beat on my kit (that isnt just metal double bass pedal runs) i am -always- filling up spaces with ghost notes

Listen to songs that you think have a really good sense of rhythm and percussion and try to place where everything is in time. Where the snare is (for example, in a measure of 4 beats, having the snare on the 3 is a very different sound from having the snare on the 2 and 4; such is dnb) Look up some drum tutorials on youtube for different kinds of rhythms (jungle/dnb, latin, samba, metal, etc).

trying to "sing" (beatbox) the rhythms in music will give you a better idea of what each line of percussion/drums are doing.

i highly recommend looking up videos by jojo maier or bernard purdie, they know how to make a beat sound nice n fat!!

[Arcana]

It's like cheating, but I learned a lot of beats by simply looking at the preset patterns on drum machines.

If you have a drum machine, load up their "House" patterns and look at them, compare them to the "Trance" patterns, the "DnB" patterns, and the "Disco" (ha ha) patterns. You'll learn where the hits go, what they sound like, and so forth and it'll give you a base to work from so that you can vary the patterns/sound but still make your music resemble the genre you want to make.

[dannthr]

Analysis.

You studied piano for years, what makes you think you can just jump right into writing for percussion?

You have to study that too.

Everyone here seems to think that you're looking to create electronica music with your percussion, but from your samples, it sounds like you're trying to understand orch or orch-fusion percussion.

Either way, analysis.

Your biggest weapons are and always will be your own ears, use them to listen to how other people write percussion--like something? copy it--do this until you feel confident that you've really created something worth-while.

[The Vagrance]

Your biggest weapons are and always will be your own ears, use them to listen to how other people write percussion--like something? copy it--do this until you feel confident that you've really created something worth-while.

Pretty much, when I first started almost all of my drums came from breaks as opposed to hits, and that exercise in and of itself has helped out a lot. Try only working with breaks, and not programmed breaks or drum loops from a drum machine or something, but like, Funky Drummer or other old-ass funk and jazz breaks.

[ectogemia]

I've been using this method I came up with recently, and it's been working well. You can do it anywhere. It helps me get through class every day, yay! It's very abstract, so it may not make much sense to you, and it may not useful to anyone but me.

Anyway...

I tap out a reallllly slow tempo, like maybe 30-45 bpm-ish, and kind of "feel" a kick and snare in my head, whatever comes to mind first. Basically, mental percussion improv. It's usually a fairly simple pattern. Then, I start subdividing the beat. I count sixteenths in my head and try to place exactly where the kick and snare are occurring in my mental beat. I've been doing this for a few weeks, and I'm finding that I can think of a beat now and usually reproduce it in the piano roll with few flaws, but only a few weeks ago, I couldn't do it for the life of me.

If you can't come up with a groove that challenges you to place the hits, just pop in some OCR tunes into your iPod/Zune/whatever and pick a slow song with drums for some material. I've transcribed some OCR beats that way.

Once you get access to your DAW, open up the piano roll and slice a loop or use some hits to try to reproduce your beat. See how accurate you were just using your ear. Give it a shot. It worked for me, at least.

Of course, the next logical step is to use different subdivisions or to tune your ear to pitch and velocity changes. Check out the FL studio Fruity Slicer tutorial for some techniques. Analyze it. It certainly helped me.