Making Better Grooves/Beyond Quantization

If you don't want to get too deep into it, the easiest thing is to delay or anticipate the snare or kick drum about a 7th of a 1th note.

You can also reserve that delay or anticipation of the beat for only one section of the music so that the groove between sections is slightly different.

To get deeper into it... Altough there are a lot of things you can do, one thing is to have the 1st and 3rd beats arrive early by a 7th of a 16th note. You can have this apply only to the drummer, only to the rhythm section or the whole ensemble depending on what you like to hear.

If you've pushed the bass drum ahead or behind the beat just make sure that the 1st and 3rd beats of the measure are the ones that are closest to the actual beat (aka tactus... Google it).

Another thing you can do is when the snare and the kick drum are "simultaneously" on the same beat. Just make the snare slightly earlier than the kick drum.

You can also make the snare latest on the 4th quarter note of the first bar of a 4 bar groove (it may still early if you've pushed all those beats ahead but the 4th quarter note of the first bar should not be as early as the other ones) and make the snare earliest on the 2nd beat of the 4th BAR.

It's a lot of work but another thing you can do is to have either the drummer, rhythm section or the whole band accelerate through the middle of a 4 bar groove (aka the 2nd and 3rd bars of a 4 bar groove). If only the drummer accelerates in the middle then he has to lay back on the 4th bar so everyone comes in at or near the same time when the down beat comes. The downbeat would be the 1 (aka 1st beat) in 1234 of the first bar of the next 4 bars.

The chorus is frequently made to play slightly faster than the verse. And when anything repeats there should be slight tempo variations such as when the verse comes around again or the chorus.

Delay the 1st snare when speeding up to make it more convincing. You can also push one of the other instruments ahead of the beat such as the bass, guitar, piano/synth etc...

James Brown used to make the Bridges slightly faster than the previous section.

He also used to have sections decelerate slightly toward the end of a tune to make the ending more convincing especially after the bridge. So when the verse comes around again after the Bridge (which was slightly accelerated) then that verse is slightly slower than the last verse played and the chorus after that may also be slower than the verse that preceded it or at least slower than the last chorus played.

Relationship between the Bass Guitar and the Bass Drum

To my way of thinking you can’t use ANY preprogrammed sequences or prerecorded drum loops unless you’re doing a certain kind of hip hop or trance music and even then, it could always be better if they weren’t doing that. There is an inverse relationship between the bass guitar’s activity or the lack of it and the importance of the vocal line or the absence of the vocal line.

The bass guitar and the bass drum should be similar if not sometimes exactly the same. That’s how we know they’re supposed to be part of the same song and not completely unrelated gobbledygook. Let’s say you created a killer bass guitar part but don’t have a drummer and then slap some beat with that. They’re never going to sound like the close-knit family that they’re supposed to without significant tweaking of either the bass part or the drum part.

Another issue is making the drum part sound like a human could have played it even if everyone knows it’s a machine. I've got a handy dandy guide to drum programming which I'll put up here soon.

Hopefully, your drum or bass part won’t be as boring as this but, not surprisingly, preprogrammed bass drum parts often ARE as boring as this. Notice I’ve taken a basic four on the floor ala Copeland and repeated it with variation, then repeated all of that with variation again. The last four lines are the completed section of music, with stronger and stronger rhythmic cadences built right in.

The numbers below signify the importance of each rhythmic location both on and off the beat. 84627351. The least important is given a number 1. That is the first one I’ve chosen to change. I’m taking my rhythms from a pool of rhythms and going through them one by one. You don’t have to do this. It’s just one way of working. You could just as easily use the same one from the gene pool several times.

The off-beats are the least important and the on-beats go 4231 in descending order of importance and hence likelihood to change. As you can see form this, beat one is the least likely to be given an embellishing rhythmic event.

I got these ideas from someone who knows drum programming. This will help your bass drum and bass guitar stuff sound MUCH better. You would of course be using your ten times more interesting bass guitar rhythm in this bass drum part instead of the example I’ve created except with variations at the locations indicated.

There ARE other ways to create the variations in the bass drum. This is just one sure fire way.

There should also be a relationship between the high hat and the keyboard/guitar parts and most probably the vocal rhythm. The relationship to the other parts should be heard in either the high hat’s accents if it’s straight eighths or straight sixteenths or it’s actual rhythm it it’s not straight eighths or straight sixteenths. Just click on the picture to see it larger if it’s not large enough already.