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Ghosted Notes Revisited  [ Edit ] 

I discussed drum programming a while ago, but didn’t provide any examples. That was a mistake that I will now fix.

When programming drums, I recommend using ghosted notes to make the beat feel more solid. This is what real drummers do, and while you don’t always want to emulate a real drummer, these little quiet notes can really help your beats feel good.

Listen to the following three examples. These are all mp3s of a two bar pattern at 88 beats per minute. For sounds, I used samples from an Alesis D4. I know I’ve talked about how I love ns_kit, but for programming simple beats, it’s overkill.

• [Listen] We start with a sixteenth note based funk beat. I created this in Logic, using the default velocity (volume) for each note. It sounds very precise and boring, but is a fine starting point.
• [Listen] In this example, I’ve taken the notes and adjusted their velocities. The first bass drum hit, and all the snare hits, are a little louder; all the hi-hat notes are softer, with small accents on every quarter note. Already there’s noticeable improvement — the hi-hat is not so overpowering, and the beat has shape. It doesn’t sound so flat.
• [Listen] Finally, I added some very quiet notes in strategic places: a couple 32nd notes at the end of the first bar, and several sixteenth notes elsewhere. This sounds like something you could almost move your feet to. Maybe. Anyway, to me it sounds the best of the three.

This beat is certainly not going to cause Clyde Stubblefield to lose sleep, but considering the improvements I made in the two minutes I spent from start to finish, you can probably hear that the small amount of work really does pay off. You could also potentially quantize the notes in the sequence (that is, move them forward or backward in time slightly) to change the feel, but that’s not something I play with much right now. I’m more interested in making fake drums feel better than to make them sound “real”.

Also, if you’re concerned that these extra notes will make your composition sound too busy, remember that they will get largely eaten up by the rest of the sound in your song. They will cease to be annoying, but will still be there offering a little bit of help making your music feel good.

You can download a MIDI file of the final beat. Feel free to use it as a starting point for something cool.