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Im using Drum rack in ableton to start off with. My drum beats are sounding pretty shitty and mechanical, i want them to sound more realistic and to flow better. Even jsut my kick and snare sound really plastic and mechnical. Im using a vengeance sample pack so i cant really blame the samples for my loops sounding shit. Iv been reading around and have tried changing velocities of my percussion and slightly shifting notes off the grid. Heres an example of one of my loops (ignore the excessive reverb, i cant be bothered to record another sample)

http://www38.zippyshare.com/v/99845001/file.html

any help would be appreciated!

i can tell you're a little new at this... i'm gonna be honest... there's not a lot you can do, your first beats are gonna sound like shit.. just keep practicing and making 'em, and you'll get the hang of it. that's really all you can do, since you've already been given the best advice i could give on the subject (turn off the grid). i could listen to your beat and tell you how I WOULD improve it.. but then i might as well make the beat for you. finding yourself artistically and expressing it with drums is a long learning process..

shahbazi wrote:Im using a vengeance sample pack

listen to some garage

imo, lose the reverb on the kick (as you know already), keep the snare are is, ditch those hat sounds all together. Dont know whats happened to them, if its the original sample or theres a distortion on them, I dunno, I would get rid of them and look for some natural sounding, real hat samples if you want a less mechanical beat, those hats sound very metallic and synthetic.

Cheers guys, just trying to nail making a decent sounding beat which has natural flow and doesnt sound artificial, any more advice? my kick and snare alone seem to sound really computerised

try to fuck around with non quantized hits...

learn to feel the rythm each drum hit actually has itself...

silence is the most important instrument when u make a drumtrack

buy a cheap midi keyboard and groove the beat out to a click dubbing in extra hits each time around the loop.

Shuffling, triplets, velocity and panning changes, use note fine pitch controls too if ableton has em, I know fruity does. Offtime delays, can stress that one enough. All about your sample selection, those vengence packs sound mechanical as hell imo, so they are gonna sound that way when you use em too, imo.

Reckon you should learn to turn the quanitze off and then start by laying some hihats on the 16's and kick/snare on 1-3, then slide every other hihat so it happens a millisecond later then the grid says it should. This'll give youthe idea of what shuffle will do, and is a pretty nice little groove, elaborate on the concepts though.

Try laying 3 hihat notes, on normal time, then restretching them so those 3 hits take up 2 beats. Is called a triplet. Its win.

there is nothing "wrong" with that loop. the sounds are fine, you just need to get some experience under your belt

draw/play random beats, delete them, do it again, delete them do it again

What I found was a good way of learning how to make beats was to find a tune you like the drums in and bandpass it. If you change the frequency of the bandpass you'll hear the different drums. I was surprised to find how many kicks there are in certain tunes (I used a benga track). It also let me learn how important velocities are when programming drums.

Chop up some breaks to use for your kits.

once again, velocity and sample library. nothing else you need to fuck with imo.

don't use all bright, clear, punchy samples. Use some of the smaller, dirtier, dustier samples-- vengeance has many, but they're not the ones you'll instantly gravitate towards.

use those, quantize to one (or many) of the groove pools in ableton-- or just straight 24th notes-- and THEN try layering some bigger drums.