Once upon a time guitarists had to contend with clumsy drum machines if they wanted to make a demo. Either that or, y’know, learn to play the drums. But sequencers and home studio software have changed all this. Now you can craft passably life-like drums on your laptop while sitting on your butt in your PJs on the couch. This is a blessing and a curse though. Back when drum machines were actual hardware boxes that you had to physically interact with, it was relatively easy to program something like what an actual drummer might play (at least from a compositional standpoint – feel is a whole different story). But if you get your drums via the MIDI edit window in your recording software, there’s a temptation to over-compose. The following is some stuff that’s worked for me, and hopefully you’ll find it helpful too.
To create convincing drum parts you need to first understand how a drum kit works within the context of a song. A good rule – for me at least – is to think of the hi hat as the time keeper, the kick drum as signalling where the ‘one’ is, and the snare marking an accent. Sure, this is a huge simplification, but bare with me. The other cymbals can also be used for accents, while the toms are great for breaking things up for a fill or for adding some complexity and body to a drum part without confusing the perception of the underlying beat.
Now here’s the tricky part, especially if your’e using MIDI drums to create a demo for a real drummer to play on a final version: everything you compose has to be physically playable by a human. That means you need to pay attention to whether you’re using too many drums at once (real live drummers typically only have two hands and two feet). Try to envisage how the kit is laid out, and don’t program anything that would be too difficult for a live player to reach. It helps to watch a few drum videos or attend a drum clinic or two.
One of the best tips I picked up from a clinic was when Virgil Donati once explained how to trick the listener into thinking they’re hearing something that’s not there. Say you’re playing a part which requires a steady kickdrum on the one and three, snare hits on the two and four, a pattern of eighth notes on an open hi-hat, and accents on the toms, some of which fall on the two or four. What the hell are you going to do? Well, if you’ve established a steady rhythm via the eighth notes on the hi hats, you can drop one of them out of the pattern without anyone noticing, freeing up a hand to hit the  snare on the required beats. Here’s an example of how this may look, using Guitar Pro tab software. On the staff, the F represents the bass drum, the D is a rack tom, the C is the snare and the F on the top line is an open hi hat. In Figure 1 you’ll see that the third beat of each bar features three strikes at once (snare, tom, hat). In Figure 2 we remove the hat from that beat. If you listen close then yeah, you’ll hear the small space left by the absence of the hat. But in a full band mix, and with the impact of the snare and tom hitting at the same time or – even better – slightly offset from each other, you’ll never miss it.

Another trick to really help make your programmed drums sound right is to pay attention to the velocity settings. Personally I figured out the best way to do this by plugging in my MIDI keyboard and hitting the keys at various velocities while using Toontrack DFH Superior samples (it’s out of date now but check out Drumkit From Hell EZX instead. Another good one is Avid’s Strike or, if you’re PC-based there’s plenty of great stuff in FL Studio, but you can even get great results out of Apple’s Garageband). What I found was that lower velocity settings (around 40-60) seemed to work great for hi hats and ride cymbals, while absolutely whacking the heck out of the virtual kick, snare, toms and crash cymbals seems to get the best result. So whether you’re drawing in your drum hits via the MIDI edit window or tapping them out on a velocity-sensitive input device like a MIDI controller keyboard or a drum module, pay attention to the velocity. Change it after recording the part if you need to, and don’t be afraid to use the humanize tool or manually vary the velocity of each strike if your parts sound too neat and machine-like.
Another great trick is to manually shift a particular drum or cymbal just slightly off the beat – either ahead or behind – to create a more lifelike feel. Listen to your favorite drummers and see if you can identify any little traits you can steal borrow. For instance, Mike Bordin of Faith No More seems to like to play the occasional snare hit behind the beat, hitting it with both sticks slightly out of sync, flam-style. Sterling Campbell (David Bowie) sometimes rushes the snare while keeping the kick and hats totally locked in and steady. And Lars Ulrich of Metallica will often hit the crash cymbal on the second beat of the bar instead of the first, which has a slightly jarring feel which works well in some contexts.
A final word of advice: don’t go out of your way to make an overly complex and busy part just because you can. Often even the greatest of real-life drummers end up playing an incredibly simple yet appropriate part. As long as you know the basic rules of what makes a drum part work, you can come up with a convincing electronic drummer for your home recording projects.