Note: I originally posted this on a separate blog, but have since moved it to my personal blog.

When I made my first album back in 2023, I hired a drummer via Fiverr to record all of the drum tracks. I did the initial ideas using Addictive Drums, but could not get the sound I wanted. I’m a big believer in momentum, and hiring out a drummer was the right choice to get the album done.

However, for my second album, I thought it would be a good challenge to learn how to get VST drums to be “good enough” for a release.

In this post, I’ll walk through my process of how I record virtual drums. Everything from tracking the drums, to making them feel more real, to mixing. I use AddictiveDrums2, but these concepts will apply to all drum VSTs like Steven Slate, Superior Drummer, Get Good Drums, etc.. Hopefully after reading this, you have more confident to use virtual drums in your next release.

Step 1 - Recording Your Drums

Before we talk about tricks to make your drums sound better, we first have to record them. There are a couple ways you can go about this.

Option 1 - Hand-Clicking

This is the easiest way to record your drums since it requires no external equipment. Just load in your VST on a new track in your DAW, arm it for recording, let it record empty for a bar or two, then open it up in your DAW’s MIDI Editor and get to work.

This is actually how I prefer to record my drums. I find myself changing notes a lot and just clicking the drums in and copy/pasting lets me iterate quickly to get the beat I want. Others may find this approach slow, but it’s a good default option.

Since you are clicking the drums in, everything will align perfectly on the grid and make things sound a bit robotic to start. Don’t worry though, we’ll discuss how to tackle this problem in a later section.

Option 2 - Using a MIDI Controller

If you have a MIDI Controller, you can map your drum VST to your MIDI Controller, letting you press the keys to record your drums. This lets you record things a bit quicker and also gives you the added benefit of making the timing feel more real. Since our timing as humans is imperfect, you’ll notice the drums feel realer. Also, you won’t press every key the same each time, so you’ll get some good variance in the loudness of each note.

The flip side of this is if your timing is not good, it may sound pretty bad to start. Not to worry though, using your DAW’s built in quantizer will help get the notes to be better aligned to the grid to make any timing issues disappear.

Option 3 - Using an Electric Drum Kit

If you already have an electric drum kit and the skills to play it, then this will be your best option for recording drums electronically. Just map your kit to your VST, hit record, and get playing.

Step 2 - Humanizing Your Drums

If you went with Option 1 for recording your drums, you’ll need to do some work to make them feel real. The other options have the benefit of a human recording them which will give variance to timing and velocity. But if you’re just clicking the drums in, every note will be the same velocity and perfectly timed on the grid and it’ll make your drums sound not good.

Most DAWs will have a humanize function that you can apply to MIDI notes to randomly adjust their timing and velocity.

In Reaper, if you highlight your notes in your MIDI Editor, go to Edit → Humanize, you’ll be greeted with this dialog box to edit your notes:

Mess with adjusting the timing and velocity a bit and see how it sounds to your ears. You should notice a pretty immediate improvement to your drum sounds.

I ended up taking this a bit further and writing my own script to handle humanizing. This was totally unnecessary since the stock Reaper humanizer works well, but I wanted to try making my own Reascript so it was just a fun experiment. If you want to try it out, here’s the GitHub repo.

Step 3 - Mixing Your Drums

Setup

The first step when starting to mix your VST drums is be sure each drum has its own fader on your mixer. To do this with AddictiveDrums, follow these steps:

Add AddictiveDrums to a new track and select Yes on this dialog box that pops up:

That should open up the AddictiveDrums window. From there, click on ‘EDIT’ at the top right.

Now for each fader at the bottom, click on the arrow button at the very bottom of each track and choose ‘→ Separate Out (Pre Fader)’.

Repeat this for each fader and now you’ll have much finer control on your drums. For each drum, you can now change sound level, apply compression, reverb, etc..

Some Mixing Tips

Here are some mixing tips I’ve found helpful throughout my time with using AddictiveDrums. Many of these are personal preference, so just test them out and see what sounds right to your ear.

Also, I’ve mostly used the ‘Studio Rock - Contemporary Rock’ kit, so some of these may be specific to that kit.

Overhead Mic Levels

One of the first things I do with the mics is adjust the overhead mic levels. I pretty much always start with roughly these levels, where Overhead is louder than Room which is louder than Bus.

Kick

The kick on this particular kit is extremely punchy. I normally try to tame that a bit by taking some high end off and boosting the low end. Normally something like this:

Snare

With the snare, I’ll typically add a bit of reverb and then add a high pass filter to remove some of the low end. If the snare is getting lost in my mix, I’ll sometimes boost some of the mid-high frequencies.

Wrapping It Up

I’ve used all these tips to release my own album. If you want to hear these tips in action, feel free to listen to the album.