Recording E-Drums – MIDI, Velocity Editing, & Humanization

Some thoughts before you start…

1. Recording MIDI vs direct outs:

A lot of people who own electronic drum kits seem to think the sole advantages are being able to play with headphones and having the option to change the sounds of individual drums.  However, the biggest advantage is actually the ability to record midi and use external sample libraries.  That said, you don’t need to spend thousands on an electronic drum kit.  In fact, the simpler the e-drum setup the better.  The high-hats that come with the big Roland TD-20 drum kit are actually harder to control than the small rubber pads that come with the Yamaha base model electronic drum kit.  Using a base model electronic drum kit in combination with some premium sample libraries is the best way to get excellent drums sounds.

2. Delay / Latency:  

Depending on how you’ve got your sequencer set, and whether you’ve compensated for the natural delay of the drum trigger to the monitor mix, you might find that your recorded midi track is slightly out of sync with the bedtracks or the metronome.  

3. Easy fix:

Simply select your midi region and move it left or right in the timeline while listening to it, until it matches up to the metronome.  (I recommend changing the settings in your sequencer so that you don’t experience this delay in the first place.

Look up “latency compensation” in your sequencer manual).  Important tip: don’t select the midi notes and move them.  MIDI drum tracks often have controller data contained within the region (such as the high hat open/close control or cymbal choke control) which isn’t directly tied to the notes within the region.  What can happen is you might move your midi notes and accidentally leave the controller data behind which would result in out of sync high hats.  Instead, move the entire midi region.

4. Layered velocity tracks:

I don’t personally do this, but I know it works for some people: an option for having more dynamic and expressive drum tracks is recording multiple layers of the same take with different velocities.  I don’t mean recording multiple takes, I mean you can split the incoming midi signal onto 3 or more separate tracks.  The first track should be set to a low velocity sensitivity, the second – medium, and third – high.  This way you can switch between the three tracks like a comp, and choose whichever velocity setting sensitivity level you prefer for different sections of the song.

Velocity Editing

Velocity is typically the measurement of the speed a MIDI controller’s note off position to it’s note-on position.  Although velocity is a measurement of speed, in the case of MIDI it often translates to how hard a note was pressed.  For example, when you a hit a drum quiet and then loud, the difference between the two hits isn’t just volume, it’s also timbre; the instrument vibrates differently.

Velocity information allows your sequencer to choose which volume level, timbre, and audio sample to trigger.  In a drum sampler program or a drum machine, velocity is typically routed to volume and sample selection.  However, most good modules and drum machines also have velocity routed to a low pass filter which makes the hard hits brighter as well as louder.  It’s something that should be done for you, but isn’t difficult to implement within your sampler program.

5. Rainbows: 

Some sequencers display velocity information in a color spectrum, with red being the heaviest hit, and purple being the softest.  This is handy because it gives you an at-a-glance impression of the dynamic characteristics of a track.

6. Ghost hits or “random purples”:  

Ghost hits are these little minimal velocity notes that sometimes appear all over your track but don’t seem to make any musical sense whatsoever.  They often occur during a swell or a heavier part of the track where the drummer is playing with a little more energy.  What’s actually happening is your drum pads are being triggered by the vibration of the heavier hits of neighboring pads.  If this happens you can easily fix the problem by deleting or muting the ghost hits.

They almost always appear as purple or dark blue notes.   Listen before deleting, as sometimes you might accidentally delete a note isn’t part of a drum roll or an intentionally quieter part of the track.  To prevent this from happening in the first place, you can set up the sensitivity of individual pads on your drum kit, but you’ll need to do this for each new drummer you record because sensitivity and playing style will vary from pad to pad, and drummer to drummer.

7. Machine gun or “wall of red”:  

This goes along with my previous point about ghost hits.  The setup process for pad sensitivity is a lot like setting levels with with an acoustic drum kit: you need to hear the performer before you can set levels, and you need to know the dynamics of the song so you can leave enough headroom.  So, just as vibrations in the frame and pads of your electronic drum kit might trigger ghost hits, when your drummer plays harder than the threshold setting of your drum pads, you’re going to get what I call “a wall of red”.

This is when we start to get into robot / machine gun land.  The machine gun effect is when every note in your midi drum track has been recorded at the same velocity. The samples start sounding like a machine gun as one audio sample is triggered over and over in a loop.    Sometimes this is an effect you want; it might reduce your need to compress your kick drum as every kick hit is already triggering a note at the same volume level.  But, for the most-part this should be avoided.

Some of the better drum sample libraries and sampler programs have a build-in anti-machine gun affect which basically ensures that no two notes of the same velocity played back-to-back will trigger the same sampled audio.  With the anti-machine-gun option turned on, you’ll get a different audio sample for every sequential drum hit.

That said, red walls should still be avoided at all costs because they take away the drummers natural expression and ruin any semblance of realism in your drum track.  It’s easy to transform a line of drum hits into a wall of red, but it’s difficult to change it back to a rainbow without some serious editing.

8. Humanizing or “gaying up your track”:

In most sequencers, the humanizer function take a wall of red (or any color for that matter) and randomizes the MIDI notes by velocity, note length, and note position.  Visually, on the extreme end, it can randomly turn a wall of red into a rainbow of colors (velocities), hence why I call it “gaying up your track”.

With the humanizer function you can set how much your want to randomize your notes.  As well, you can humanize individual hits or entire tracks, so if your cymbals are sounding machine-gunny, then you can gay it up.  The only issue here is that the changes are random.  You can set the parameters and degree of randomization any way you like, but the humanizer function doesn’t know the feel of the song so the changes might not be appropriate.