Vehicles for Composition: How I Write Drum Parts

I figure while video content is on the backburner I could talk about the process I've landed on for composing drum parts for the upcoming Mirrors album. At the very least I'll try and film one or two of these grooves in the meantime.  This one has proven to be among the more unique scenarios I've found myself in. Fortunately, I've got more time up my sleeve than usual to consider my parts for the album, as well as the creative freedom to go in all sorts of directions.   

Given we're working with very dense and melodically driven heavy music, within relatively straight forward song structures, it's become a mission to create a solid backbone for all the different layers (most importantly, the vocals) while also injecting personality and excitement into the drum parts. This is very challenging to do while simultaneously being the one to glue it all together.   

Pro’s and Cons of Programming vs Playing for writing drums 

 The initial idea was to compose all the parts on the drumkit alone. This was borne out of a long history of programming parts for a full album then learning them on the kit for recording in the studio later. Anyone who's written drums via both programming and also behind the kit may have noticed the ideas that tend to emerge are very different. Both approaches offer their advantages.   

Programming gives you the advantage of being more objective about what you're composing, taking the role of the listener rather than the player. You can discover incredible subtleties that can totally reshape a part - such as deleting a single kick drum that opens up an entire section, or moving a tom to a snare etc. Another advantage being that you don't have to take the time to learn what you've written (although this can quickly turn into a disadvantage if you get wild with the parts you’re writing, see; first Hadal Maw album “Senium”). There’s been a few instances of spending a significant amount of time learning a part on the kit, only to find it just doesn’t work with the music. Programming can eliminate this disappointment! 

Composing parts behind the kit can result in a much more organic approach. This is where it gets harder to articulate the spirit of the kinds of parts that come out. There’s a kind of energy and spontaneity that is hard to achieve while inputting notes one at a time on a computer. Playing in the moment sparks an instinct that nothing else can. Another benefit, which is somewhat self evident, is that you’ve already done most of the work as far as learning your parts is concerned.  

Starting the process: Pressure creates diamonds 

Given the amount of time available, I started composing from behind the kit. This is incredibly time consuming because in order to truly critique the ideas, you need to record them and evaluate them in a setting where your cognitive capacity isn’t being occupied by the actual playing of the parts. While this was happening, the songs themselves were being tracked for the album by the rest of the band (these days I’m finding drums being recorded last to be increasingly common).  

As the tracking has been rounding out, the time to book dates to record drums loomed. Given how lengthy the process of writing behind the kit was proving to be, coupled with the ability for immediate feedback from the band being prohibitive (not to mention Covid related restrictions), drum programming had to re-enter the picture. For those interested, I’m currently using Toontrack Superior Drummer. It’s worthwhile investing in something that can recreate a human sound as much as possible. 

Nothing gets a job done like a deadline, so here’s where I’m at and it’s producing some really inspiring results. I’ve mapped out my basic ideas from writing while on the kit, into the programmed drums (as a side note, there are already skeleton drums programmed by Tyson (Mirrors guitarist) and Scottie (Producer)) and then started building my parts from there to send back and get a thumbs up from everyone else. No point in investing the time into fully developing parts if they’re just going to get vetoed.  

From there I spent a good amount of time fully fleshing the parts out. It’s a matter of seeing how the parts marry up with the rest of the song, the impact it has on the feel and also (this part is key) removing parts that interfere. Creating space is one of the most powerful things you can do. Using your parts to act almost like faders on a mixing desk to pull certain parts into focus. It just comes down to finding the right part in that moment, it’s not like there’s the perfect part out there waiting to be unearthed, but you can certainly derive a particular feeling from what you’re hearing and use that as your compass.  

As of writing this blog I’m at a phase where I’m learning the parts that I’ve programmed. I was originally attempting to play while reading the midi map and learn it that way to save time. However, I found that by notating the parts on paper, while not only transferring it into language I understand better, the act of writing is so much more beneficial to committing things to memory.  

On top of that, being able to read these patterns in musical notation makes it possible to notice particular patterns you can draw on and integrate into the rest of the song, creating a stronger compositional through line. This might sound like overthinking, but when I program these parts from the page back into the midi and listen back, the results speak for themselves. For me, creating a drum part that has its own identity from start to finish is the goal, rather than just a collection of disparate beats and fills. 

Refinement: Separating the wheat from the chaff 

In this process there are also things that will occur spontaneously while playing, so some of the more rigid programming is being replaced with something more organic. With the direct feedback mechanism of the software, I can hear how well these ideas marry up with the music and can adjust accordingly. 

The process will pretty much continue until it’s time to start doing some preliminary recording (or pre production), which will predominantly focus on the quality of performance. I’m taking steps in the programming to ensure the sound of the drums and the performance is as close as possible to what I’ll be playing so as to not leave any guess work in the studio (time is money!). Then, the only concern becomes execution. However, I can’t rule out that changes won’t occur in the meantime or even the studio.  

Other Processes: Set and Setting. 

This is basically an overview of the approach I’m currently taking (I’m roughly 2 months out from the recording date) so I’m sure things will change. As mentioned previously, considering I started at just coming up with ideas off the kit, this wasn’t a process I would elect from the outset but courtesy of happenstance, it’s panning out quite well. Sometimes when I’m hired for a studio session, for example, I might learn the skeleton of a song, come up with a bunch of ideas to bring along and leave the rest to the session where I can be directed by the client as needed. Sometimes I’ll be directed to improvise, sometimes I’ll be directed towards a specific idea. So when it comes to the setting where I’ll write, it changes all the time depending on the scenario. 

The actual process of composing parts on their own is another blog post altogether.

Welcome!

Well, they say change is as good as a holiday, don’t they? Welcome to my new website and if you have no idea who I am, then welcome! I’ve had a .com that has been dormant for quite some time as I’ve been more focused on social media and sporadically adding things here and there to my blog, so when I decided things needed a revamp, I thought it would be great to have everything integrated into a single hub, all my info, media, blog, and socials in one place. But this just isn’t an overblown resume for my work, I want this to be a resource that you can keep coming back to. 

The first addition to this website I’m currently developing will be a lessons page where I’ll be adding free educational material that people can enjoy, or current students can refer to and supplement their current learning.  I’ll be adding this in the coming weeks. If you want to be able to find out when that is up and running, you can subscribe to my monthly newsletter (fear not, it’ll just be a brief update and it’ll always have content). 

If you haven’t read any of my blog material (you can visit here), I try to centre the subjects around areas of improvement. My original purpose of my blog was to just generally yammer on about my activities and then one day when an article unfurled into a spiel that gave something that people could take away and help themselves with, it got a great response, so I’ve started gearing things in that direction with the best of my experiences.  

While I have been developing my craft on drums for around 20 years, I still consider myself to be a student. It doesn’t stop with drums either. Whether it’s business, marketing, learning other instruments, song-writing, audio production, video production, health and fitness or anything in life for that matter, I’m always looking to share in my journey with things that have worked for me and things that haven’t, especially the latter. Some people seem to think that people who are “successful” or just good at what they do are “naturals” or “freaks” or whatever label you want to use. However, based on everyone I’ve met or worked with, I can tell you, this isn’t the case. These are people who work incredibly hard and are also persistent, I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t achieved anything without these simple qualities, with emphasis on “people”, because that’s all they are. Above all else, these people make mistakes, they experience failure just like all of us. 

So I hope to share my own stories, experiences and those of others so that I might be able to impart just a small nugget of wisdom that might put you on a path to getting you a little closer to where you want to be. If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, you can subscribe to my newsletter, get in touch on social media if you have a question or perhaps even book in a lesson. Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you soon.   

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