Sequencing Drums With "feel" Options

[slowintrepid]

Ok folks I've been producing alot of music on my computer that isn't electronica at all.

thus my drums now feel very very ridgid
I need to get more feel and consistency when sequencing drums..

I either use battery into cubase, or I just use reason

and no matterr what my drums don't sound good (rhymically)

I've tried playing that parts on my keyboard and nothing.

I've tried using the pen tool nothing....

and I've tried different quantitisation methods (like swing and what not)


but still nothing can someone shed some light on this for me

[Podolski52]

Yup..

I also experienced it to be very tricky to getting the right feel to a drumtrack. From my experience I can tell that it is not only the timing of the sounds (the quantisation) but also the dynamic range that is crucial to a natural or 'warm' feeling. If you are working with sampled drumsounds this means that you need quite a few velocity layers to produce a rhythm that does not sound to rigid. This is true for drumpatterns of around 4 bars (as I often use them being mainly a hip-hop producer) as well as for the drum programming that kolo described (a way some of the jazz artists in our studio employ).
There a quite a few drum sample libraries with enough velocity layers out there that you you can use in conjunction with a softwaresampler to get decent results. Since we did not find the kind of dirty sound we would like to use (doing Hip-Hop, Soul and Jazz) we developed one on our own. Here are the links if you want to listen to some demos:

http://www.funkequipment.com/audio/FunkDemo.mp3
http://www.funkequipment.com/audio/Ultrafunk.mp3
http://www.funkequipment.com/audio/TheJam.mp3

Since we are dedicated but a very small team (in fact 1 person did most of the work but it wasn't me) any advices or comments to the sounds would be welcome.