“Humanize” is a button in most DAWs, and it rarely does what you hope. It shuffles notes and velocities at random, and random is not the same as human. A drummer is not random: they push some notes, lay back on others, play ghost notes quietly and backbeats hard, and they only have two hands and two feet.

To see what that means in numbers, we measured played grooves from our packs: how far each hit is from the grid, and how hard each one is. Here is what we found, and a simple way to use it on any drum MIDI.

In this post:

• The same groove, programmed and played
• Timing: how far off the grid
• Velocity: two kinds of snare
• Two hands, two feet
• A 10-minute recipe
• Questions

The same groove, programmed and played

Here is one bar of a heavy groove from Metalcore Essentials, first the way it looks when it is programmed: every note snapped to the 16th grid and set to velocity 100.

And here is the same bar as it was played:

The notes are the same. What changed is the velocity lane, which now has a shape, and the tiny shifts of each hit away from the grid lines. Across the whole file, the 115 hits range in velocity from 44 to 127. That is the difference you hear.

Timing: how far off the grid

We took 9 played grooves whose tempo is known (from 110 to 200 BPM, from Blast Beat Mania, Djent Metal Essentials and Prog Metal Grooves in 5) and measured how far each of their 901 hits lands from the nearest 16th note.

• The typical hit is about 5 ms off the grid.
• Almost three in four hits are within 10 ms; very few are more than 20 ms away.
• About one in five is exactly on the grid, as far as the file can tell. The files are saved at 96 steps per beat, so each step is 3 to 6 ms at these tempos.
• More hits land slightly behind the grid than ahead of it: roughly two for every one.

So a played groove is tight. The movement is small, and most of it is a hair late rather than early. A humanize setting of 30 ms is several times more than a drummer actually moves, and it turns a tight groove into a sloppy one.

Rule of thumb: move hits by 10 ms or less, keep the kick and snare tighter than the cymbals, and let the backbeat sit a touch late rather than early.

Velocity: two kinds of snare

The snare shows the second difference best. We looked at 110 snare hits from 5 played grooves in four packs.

They fall into two groups. Half of them (55) are quieter than 80, most of those between 40 and 60: ghost notes, the soft in-between strokes that make a groove feel alive. Nearly all the rest sit between 100 and 127: the backbeats. There is almost nothing in the middle. A snare track where every note is 100 has neither kind, which is why it sounds flat even when the rhythm is right.

What to do with that

• Snare: backbeats between 110 and 127, ghost notes between 40 and 60. Keep them apart.
• Hi-hats and ride: accent the beats and play the notes in between a little softer. An 8th-note pattern with every note at the same velocity is the most machine-like sound in a mix.
• Kick: steady, but not identical. Let it move within about ten steps of velocity.
• Crashes: loud on the downbeat of a section, and rarely more than one at a time.

Two hands, two feet

The quickest way to make MIDI sound programmed is to write what no drummer could play. Before anything else, check each moment in the groove:

• At most two things for the hands at once: hi-hat and snare, ride and crash, snare and tom. Not hi-hat, crash and snare together.
• The feet cover the kick (or two, with a double pedal) and the hi-hat pedal. A double-kick roll and a pedalled hi-hat at the same time is a third foot.
• Fills move around the kit the way hands travel: high toms to low, not back and forth at random.
• After a crash, the hand that hit it is busy for a moment. A crash and an immediate ride note from the same hand is a stretch at speed.

A 10-minute recipe

1. Fix the drums first: make sure every lane plays the right drum (see our post on drum MIDI mapping).
2. Check limbs: remove anything that needs a third hand or foot.
3. Snare: set backbeats to 110 to 127 and add a few ghost notes at 40 to 60 before backbeats.
4. Cymbals: accent the beats, soften the notes in between.
5. Kick: vary the velocity a little; keep the timing tight.
6. Timing: move hits by up to 10 ms at most, mostly late, least on the kick.
7. Listen with the drums soloed, then with the band. If it is right with the band, stop.

Or start from grooves that were played in the first place. Every groove in the packs was played by a drummer on an electronic kit and kept as MIDI, not typed in note by note. The blast beats in the post on programming blast beats show the same thing at 200 BPM.

Questions

How much should I humanize drum MIDI?

Less than most presets. In the played grooves we measured, the typical hit was about 5 ms off the grid and almost three in four were within 10 ms. Velocity usually matters more than timing.

Should I quantise played drum MIDI?

Only where a note is clearly wrong. Quantising a whole played groove throws away the thing you paid for. If it needs to be tighter, use a partial quantise (for example 50 percent) on the kick and snare only.

Does velocity matter if my drum VST is basic?

It still changes the volume, and most VSTs switch to different recorded samples at different velocities. Even a basic VST sounds noticeably better with ghost notes and accents.

Are Whack Studio grooves played or programmed?

Every groove in the packs was played by a drummer on an electronic kit and kept as MIDI, not typed in note by note.

The Everything Bundle has all 21 packs of played metal drum MIDI, over 2,000 files, for when you would rather write the song than fix the drums.