Groove Templates
A groove template stores the milliseconds of push and lag, not the note pattern.
Related
A template is not a note pattern
Hand the same beat to another drummer and the notes land in nearly the same places, yet it sounds like a different record. What changes is how far the second sixteenth is pushed, how many milliseconds the snare sits behind the beat, how the hi-hat velocities curve. A template stores those deviations, not the pattern; saving the notes only saves a loop.
What to measure
| Item | Usual range | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Sixteenth swing | 54–62% | Sets straight versus swung |
| Kick ahead | 5–15 ms | Low end arrives first, feels steadier |
| Snare behind | 10–25 ms | Creates the laid-back backbeat |
| Velocity range | 40–110 | Controls dynamics and breath |
| Note length | Hi-hat 30–80 ms | Controls dryness and density |
These numbers are starting points. A real template is tuned to the tempo and instrumentation of the song; the faster the music, the less the same millisecond gap is perceived.
Extracting one, then scaling it to tempo
Pick the steadiest eight bars, align the transients to the grid, measure the deviation on each beat and average. One section overfits: the four sections of a single drum take may not share the same feel. Make two or three variants, one tight, one loose, one behind, rather than one universal template.
When the template follows tempo, the millisecond offsets need to scale, or slow songs drag and fast songs stiffen. A change of instrumentation matters too: a template built around room-mic tails may lose those tails when the kit becomes samples. A template is a starting point; set the skeleton with it, then adjust to the song.
What a template must not do
It cannot replace arrangement. If the sections have no shape and the bass collides with the kick, no groove template rescues the track. Nor should you import someone else's feel wholesale; the template should contain your own choices, or every song turns into a copy of the same session.
Listen in the library
All tracks from midicn-lib — inline badge is the license tier (C1 commercial / C2 non-commercial / C3 study only).
Along the same line
Sources
- Ableton Live 用户手册，Groove Pool 与 warp 标记（厂商文档）
- Magenta, Groove MIDI Dataset 数据说明（公开数据集文档）
- Bernard Purdie 关于 half-time shuffle 的公开访谈