No static, MORE Groove – Create ULTIMATE Groove Templates with…

No drummer in this world can play perfectly on BPM. You will see this, when it comes to recording drums. You will recognize that recorded drums don’t fit your grid perfectly, they have a natural groove. Having a groove is not a bad thing. It makes the record sound more human and a lot of organic music (especially Rock music) is created with a human being on the drums :).

If you want to create music that way, the tricky part starts – adding more instruments via MIDI (f.e. a bassline), but the quantization of your DAW only offers the option to quantize on your grid. You’ll hear that the correctly quantized audio won’t match the drums because of the natural groove. Now you have two ways: place the MIDI files exactly yourself, so they match the drums or build your own groove template, that matches the drum recording. This is not hard at all and you only need Beat Detective (which is integrated in Pro Tools from the beginning).

Select your recorded drumloop and open Beat Detective. Define the length of the selection, you want to analyze in the selection window. Then analyze the audio by using the sensitivity fader.

After you’ve done this, click on extract. Now save the extracted groove either on your computer or to the groove clipboard.

Now it’s time to add another instrument, for example a bassline. Play the line you want and then record it to a MIDI track.

Afer recording, you need to quantize your line. By pressing ‘option + 0 (zero)’ (on Mac) you open the quantization window. The normal presets might perfectly fit the grid, but they don’t fit the drums, because of the groove. Select your new created groove template as quantize grid and click apply. Your MIDI notes might not fit the grid perfectly, but they have the same groove like the drums. If the quanization changed the duration of your notes, just click ‘change note duration’ in the quantization window and choose legato and click gap, then apply.

You’ll hear that quantization to your own groove template doesn’t sound as artificial as perfectly beatmatched notes. With this technique, you don’t need to work without quantization, but still create natural grooves THAT ROCK!