Enhancing Drum Machine Emulations musically by adding fluctuations 😊👉

I love playing e-drums with sounds from vintage drum machines (such as the LinnDrum, 808, or 909).
The main difference between many VST emulations (or oneshot drum samples from these machines) and the original analog devices is, above all, the musically valuable liveliness (resulting from the purely physical analog nature of the device or the technically induced fluctuations in the old drum synths). In contrast, oneshot drum sampler software (without additional emulation of fluctuations) usually sounds sterile and “machine-gun-like,” and the audio output is therefore less musical and less appealing.

To compensate for this, I come up with a solution, such as feeding in additional oneshots (often of the same sample) using software samplers with pronounced humanizing settings (such as the powerful freeware sampler TX16Wx).

Here ( password: BecauseDrumGeek ) you can hear the differences in one of my VPROM3 * (Aly James Lab) setups (which is inspired by the “A-ha - Take On Me” style); specifically, it’s all about subtle hihat fluctuations. Depending on the tempo, playing style, and whether you’re playing along music (vs. standalone drumming) (e.g., “flat” with no dynamics), different levels and variations of the “humanizing” element make sense.

To check out the differences, you can do side-by-side comparisons in the Reaper project using simple track mute/solo functions.
The track names are self-explanatory:
∙ Track1 : Humanizing 1
∙ Track2 : (max) Humanizing 2 -- max fluctuations
∙ Track3 : (min) Humanizing 3 -- min fluctuations
∙ Track4 : ORIG [(+1dB) without Humanizing - Hihat 1dB louder]
∙ Track5 : ORIG [without Humanizing - original Hihat level]

To achieve these deliberately subtle fluctuations (after all, the original LinnDrum machine doesn’t jump around in a random round-robin fashion either), I primarily work with two additional software samplers here: "Oneshot2" and "TX16Wx". The drum sound produced using AJL-VPROM3 (LinnDrum emulation) as the source can, of course, be played in real time for e-drumming.


Enjoy ❗️😊



VPROM 3 ∙ (higly recommended) :


* Specifically regarding VPROM3 : Don't get me wrong—VPROM3 has a built-in hihat humanizing/fluctuations engine (and it can produce very good results — so VProm’s hat generally isn’t sterile)—but for some of my purposes and playing styles (loading various custom hihat PROMs), such as in my case with the a-ha-ToM-style LM2 sound, the onboard humanizing/fluctuations engine isn't suitable—so I want to apply my custom fluctuation engine.