What’s up y’all?
This is Henny, and today I got three tips to dramatically improve your drum programming skills and a way to get better drums when you’re making your beats.
Let’s go want to come up with a quick video.
Many people have been asking me how you get better drums, better drum programming and your beats.
So I’m going to break down a track that I have given you exactly three tips to think about when you’re thinking about your drum programming.
First tip.
Let’s talk about texture.
Right now, I have a track that I have created.
When I was working on my homie Isaiah Thomas’s documentary.
I was working on a track for him.
That was kind of like his comeback track when he first got back to the Cavs.
And his first game with the Cavs.
And so it was very dramatic and had a lot of, you know, a lot of energy in the track.
So I want to show you exactly how it broke down the drum programming.
And let’s talk about texture.
In my headphones going on.
We’re about to go, live baby.
The main thing you want to think about when you think about texture is making sure you have different elements to your drums.
Right, you think of drums, you think of a kick, think of a snare, some hats, percussion.
All around, it’s going to create great drum programming, right?
So the main thing you want to think about when you think about texture doesn’t have distortion or grit.
Is it kind of fat and round?
Does it snap?
Does it pop?
Does it click, you know, does it crash?
All of these things you can hear when you hear your drums.
And when you’re making great hip-hop tracks and you’re trying to create those standout drums.
Specifically, if you want to create drums that become your own, you want to layer right.
A lot of people talk about layering drums.
So let me show you, I have these three kicks in these three snares.
Alright, this is the track that I created solo on this track.
So now you see I have all these kicks on the play that I’m gonna play you the kick in the snare that I started out with.
I recommend starting out very simple and then building your programming around it.
A lot of people want to go very intricate at first.
Think about it as drawing, think about it as really building something up.
Start simple.
And then build your intricacies around that.
Let me slow just for kicks.
Don’t worry that I had that little pop at the end.
I kind of like that sometimes, but it’s filling out that kick because you want to have a great snappy crispy top end, a hefty mid, you know, a booming bottom of that kick.
So I layered three kicks for this.
I also brought in this, so you have your top right.
And then at the bottom now with the snares another step, so you have to win a clap.
Every other one was a clap texture.
Now the texture is great when you’re building your initial drums and getting that sound right that layer together.
From there, you might want to add different pieces like I like to add bells or things or something underneath the snare to kind of give it a little extra tidiness to it.
So check this out.
I added this thing underneath it.
So if I go in here, it just almost sounds like metal hitting metal, right.
The second thing you want to think about is embellishment.
What I mean by embellishment, that’s like adding you know everything around a drum.
Right?
So you take your drum, your kick and your snare and start there.
Then you start to embellish and Bellus with your hats embellish with your percussions, so let me show you how I’m doing that.
I started with some hats.
I reverb those a little bit right.
That gives it space.
Think about your drums, always think about your music in a 360 spiracle way, right, you want stuff sitting on the sides, you want to sit and kind of close, you want something sitting right in the middle, you want to sit down at the bottom, If I look at this whole thing right here, and I look at my drums, it’s the entire thing.
It’s just not the front.
It’s just not up, down, left, right, but it’s all the way around in a sphere.
That’s how I listen to music.
And so reverb will always kind of bring things out and around.
So that’s why I put my hats like that.
So if you listen, give me some initial hats.
But maybe I want to get the rhythm going a little bit better.
So I added more hats.
I always like to use my Apple Pencil when I do my hat.
Because in beatmaker through you can literally just roll around it was their pencil.
Pro Tip layering embellishment.
Another way I like to embellish it by adding fields or Doom Doom or something like that, or Tom’s or doo doo doo doo, either some things that can give you a little bit more rhythm and embellishment to your initial texture, your initial layers, right?
I have that.
That’s just a snare and I’m a snare roll.
I put that kind of in front of where the snare would hit back, back.
So that’s a way that I could kind of give it a little bit more embellishment right to the drum.
You’re starting to come together.
Now, when it comes to drum programming, the swing is very important.
Your third tip is always making sure it has a swing doesn’t matter.
If you’re doing maybe a trap beat that’s more on the one, you know, it’s going to be bouncing like that.
Most people don’t bounce their heads like that.
But if you give it a little bit of swing, it’s going to give it more rhythm.
And it might be so subtle that people don’t even realize it.
A lot of times, what I’ll do is I’ll take my high hats, and I’ll you know go in there.
It doesn’t matter what program you’re using.
Instead of them being directly on the one, I will just go ahead and swing them out, giving a little bit more space in the track.
So they’re not hitting directly on one.
And I’ll do that by switching my editing to freehand on beatmaker three.
And I’ll just drag it.
So yeah, it could start on the one.
But I just kind of dragged it out just here just a little bit just to give it swing.
So maybe I wanted a little bit more.
It’s kind of just a taste.
But the swing is so important.
When you put the swing into your drums, it’ll definitely give them more rhythm.
And sometimes people can’t even tell that you did it.
It just feels different.
It increased the way that it feels.
And so it’s not just so staticky.
And when you have static drums, sometimes you don’t get the rhythm that you really want.
And so a lot of times I would add percussion and I would add hats and everything around my good texture drum.
Right, that’s straight up and down and just layer it and give it a swing.
The last thing I brought into this track drum-wise was a sample that I found online.
I found a drum loop online and I and I said yo this works perfectly with the drums and then the intensity that I wanted.
Let me show you how I did this.
Let me play it for you originally how it is.
Right.
So the first thing I did was saturate it.
texture, add distortion, add a little bit of saturation, distortion, overdrive, something to your error.
Wait to kind of gives it more in your face when you hit them 808.
You got to hit them hard.
So the first thing I did was add saturation.
Some people probably wouldn’t use that together, and that would be that the whole kit itself I just used to delay or what I had So I put in a six-band EQ, and I just kind of dropped the high end off of it.
The next thing I did was use the maxima plugin and kind of beefed it up.
And lastly, I put a little bit of low five dirt just to give it that extra crunch.
So now you just basically I must, I must the hell out of the snare and you know the bell underneath it, just to kind of give it that um, and when you add that to what I already had with the texture of the drums, the embellishments and the swinging of the elements that If you use these three tips, texture, embellishment, and swing to your drum programming, I promise you, when you think about that, it will take your drums to a whole nother level.
It will take your drum programming to a whole nother level.
This is how that track came out.
So I know that track is heavy, it’s big, it’s crazy.
I just wanted to give you a quick video because seemingly all my videos are super long these days.
I wanted to give you three tips.
Hopefully, you learned something about those three tips and you can take them to heart.
Hopefully, you learned something from that.
Hopefully, you got something from that quick video about how to get your drums better from using these three tips.
Let me know in the comments down below.
If this would help you or maybe I missed out on something that you know of that can help people with their drum programming.
I really want this community to help each other, so if you have any ideas, put them down below, give me a like, give me a share.
Give me a comment.
Follow me on my Instagram.
Follow me wherever I’m Atman.
I’m just trying to hold y’all down as much as I can.
When I come around as I said that, but yes, that’s it three tips for the day.
I’ll catch y’all in the next one.
