Creating "natural" breaks

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Hi guy's.

I starded making dnb a while ago (after a period of dubstep) and I am loving it!
But there is something that I don't understand, when I make a drumloop, I edit a excisting break and add more hats/snares/etc + effects but I want to create a break
by my own.

How do you make a natural, smooth, break? When I make breaks, they sound too fake,
I want to make breaks digitally that sound like real drums. Help me
 
i'm no expert on production, but from what i've learnt so far, making samples and shit sound more like a real drumkit requires lots of tweaking and layering sounds onto each other.

for example, even if you get a transcribed drum solo and put all the right parts of the drumkit in the right spots, it will hit all the notes right but it will obviously sound like a computer even if the samples are from a real kit.

from my limited experience on drums, i've found that i get the best results from getting like 3-5 different snares/sounds to make a really good snare hit for example. this might not be the best way to do it but that's what i've got so far.

it also helps to know how drummers actually play when sequencing drums.
 
cant find it. but it said pretty much that, select a natural sounding kit and try to think like a real drummer when you program your break. program it in half the bpm you intend to use it for. then its all down to the processing which i seem to recall he would have ssl plugs for, but thats all i can remember right now. then resample, slice up and go ballistic, but i think that goes without saying.
 
Layering 1 or 2 kicks and snares on top of some clean breaks seems to do the job for me. Hit placements important too and velocitys
 
Think about how a drummer plays each hit - he's not going to hit each hi hat at exactly the same velocity each time, and it's not going to be exactly on the beat, you'd have to be an amazing drummer to do that! When you're layering sounds up turn off the snap on the grid and try and place the hit by yourself.

This is a good tutorial on how to get a nice human like shuffle too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez1dvI4nQio
 
As op just said, always try and alter the velocity of your hits (as a real drummer would naturally). Also, try putting things slightly out of sync by adding a "shuffle" to you beats, etc. That vid Woodz12 posted will help you out. :)

Real drummers make slight alterations to their timing at an unconscious level - that's why they sound so cool. So resist the urge to over quantize, as I originally did.
 
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To create a natural sounding break, you'll need to start with natural sounding drums, so forget about vengence sample packs, layered distorted samples etc. Get yourself something like BFD or Superior Drummer or Kontakts Abbey Roads intstrument, and program in your beats to that. It'll help to vary the timing and velocity of the hits, yeah, and spend a lot of time working on the ghost notes and hihat details, but the real trick is in getting it to SOUND right. You need the notes to decay properly. Most sample pack sounds are brutally distorted, heavily compressed, and people just keep adding more compression all the time, so any resemblance to a realistic sound is gone. Also, as you hit different parts of a drumkit, the rest of the kit vibrates and buzzes, and this is recreated in the better drum vsts mentioned above. Also, they mix in the sound from both close micing and overhead micing, and reflections from the walls, etc. All of this adds up to gel the whole kit together sonically. Next, you want to take this realistic drum kit sound, and simulate recording to tape, overdrive/dist, age, and damage, so you get something like a 40 year old break on a cheaply produced vinyl. Lastly, speed it up and there you have it. Your own break.
 
adjust velocity of individual hits
saturate and compress. Compression is key to getting punchy, but natural drums

And also there's the old you can't polish a turd thing, make sure your samples are good :D
 
digital quantised samples comptuerised daw'ised programmised does not sound 'natural'

Drum and bass doesn't sound natural anyway, what you on about?

They pretty much summed it up already up there.
 
also

i think if your looking to create a break alone then your gonna want alot of good samples. it all depends what sorta drum and bass your making, id look to somthing more minimal if you want to be doing your own beats. rather than having lots of sounds just have a few and make em sound sexy. I'm also pretty sure most tunes will have a underlaying break like the amen or somthing going on.
 
in fact i totally overlooked using samples like the amen n all the other breaks for soooo long. since i started to use them my beats and breaks have been sounding more, 'natrual' (i think :S)

carefully cutting up a few breaks and rearanging them to taste and a bit of eq can go alooooooong way.
 
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