Programming Rock/Metal Drums

[MixolydianPony]

Any tips on programming rock/metal drums? I find that it's very easy to have drums that sound too mechanical. How does one avoid this? Also, how do you write a fill or drum solo? Random 16th notes?

[Versilaryan]

Step 1: Make a really minimalistic, standard rock groove.
Step 2: Add kicks here and there, snares on offbeats, and move things around to shake things up a bit.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit from all the great music you're making

My best piece of advice would be to listen to drums. Find your favorite, most dynamic rock songs and listen to the drums, where the kicks are, where the snares hit, how the cymbals keep the groove. Actually playing the drums (or Rock Band drums) is another option, so you can see drums from the drummer's perspective.

More direct advice would be to put more things on the offbeats and make good use of a large variety of cymbals. The easiest way to make a rock groove mechanical is put too many things on the beats or in straight eighth notes.

As for drum fills, unless you want something really dramatic (in which case, I'm the wrong guy to ask), simple licks (in jazz, we call them turnarounds) are effective. Just make things slightly busier at the last bar or so of the phrase, and then throw in a short ditty that leads into the crash hit starting the next phrase. Like a few quick snare drum hits, maybe some high toms.

[EnnervateIndustries]

Take your DAW, open the Beat/Bassline editor (or the non-LMMS equivalent) and start turning drums on and off on the beats until you like it and it fits.


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[ChocolateChicken]

Any tips on programming rock/metal drums? I find that it's very easy to have drums that sound too mechanical. How does one avoid this? Also, how do you write a fill or drum solo? Random 16th notes?

This is a pretty late reply, but I will post this in case anybody else wants to know how to program metal percussion.

I think the biggest thing that you might want to avoid the most when programming rock or metal drum tracks is making it sound like a dance percussion track. You know, the typical - [kick] [hihat] [kick+snare] [hihat] - loop.

There are many different genres of rock that you can employ with your drums, but because you mentioned "metal," my advice will apply to hard rock, or heavy metal. Or just metal in general.

First of all, you want the right drum kit for the job. And by that I mean HARD drums. Like, if the snare in your drum kit sounds pretty soft and gentle, get rid of it. Find a drum kit or a drum library that contains hard sounds; after all, that is what metal is.
And because you will be using an acoustic drum set for your rock/metal song, always remember to program the drums so that they could actually be played by a real drummer if he were to cover your song. In other words, never have more than 4 things being hit at the same instant. That's the rule. The purpose of this is to make the percussion track sound realistic - small details, I suppose.
Also make generous use of the kick drum.

For the drum solo, you could just randomly fill 16th notes, but I would also listen to other drum solos from other metal bands' songs to get a better idea of what a solo usually sounds like. The purpose of a solo, for any instrument, is that it isn't repeated anywhere else in the song and that it sounds awesome, for lack of a better adjective. With metal, it is also the performer's chance to show off their skills, so go crazy and program something awesome!

[MixolydianPony]

Coming back to this a long time after the original post, I can say that I more or less know what I'm doing, and there was one thing in particular that helped the most...

I found MIDI or Guitar Pro files of some songs with my favorite drummer, and just looked at what he was doing. I found Dream Theater stuff the most helpful, because Mike Portnoy does a lot of different things. He almost never just plays a (boom)(tap)(boom)(tap) sort of rhythm.