MIXING MIDI DRUMS CHEAT 

SHEET 

3 Techniques for Realistic MIDI Drums 

1. Make the Performance More Realistic 
a. If you can play drums, use an electronic drum kit to play your 
performance into your drum software 
b. You can achieve similar results using a sample pad or keyboard 
c. A third option is programming the drums manually and then adjusting 
the hits to give it a more “human” feel using velocity and timing 
adjustments 
d. Lastly, use the loops that come with your drum software. Often times they 
are already programmed to sound very realistic 
2. Choose A Realistic Drum Kit Sound 
a. Once you have a loop or a part played in, listen to different sounds or kits 
in the context of your song 

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 b. Often times the main drum kit in your plugin may not sound all that 
realistic 
c. Search around and mix and match until you find a good fit 
3. Mixing the Drum Kit To Sound More Realistic 
a. Mute the included reverb that comes with the drum software and use 
your own instead 
b. Add the drum set to a general reverb you use for the whole mix to make it 
gel with everything else 
c. Take note of all the drums playing in your software and mute or lower the 
volume of them. (mute a bottom snare for example if you don’t like it) 
d. Extract all the individual samples from your drum software and place 
them in their own tracks in your DAW so you can mix them like normal 
e. Use a reference with a real drum kit and try to get a similar sound if you 
can 
f. Try using saturation on the drum bus to get rid of any “sterile” sound the 
samples may have 
g. Try using parallel compression 
i. Use a compressor with a mix knob to balance the compressed 
signal with the clean signal 

Once you have finished getting your MIDI drums sounding as realistic as possible, you 
can continue on mixing your entire track with great sounding drums! 

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