marching drums
how to approach this?!
i’ve been fiddling around for some days but i just can’t achieve my desired outcome.
there are music sheets on the internet but I can’t read notes.. sadly I can’t find any (free) midi files that can help me on that.
i hope to find some help here..
Use a sample
Recruit a high school kid.
what are you looking to do? learn to read the notes or play the sounds?
this is a good question I’ve tried to figure out as well, the best person I’ve heard do it is Afrojack…his marching drums and drum rolls especially are the cleanest and most natural
Any tips on that/where to find samples of it..I know in most of afrojack songs there is always something else behind the drum in the low end so it is difficult to isolate the frequencies
Are you talking about drum rolls/fills?
Glitch mob has some pretty serious drum line rhythms.
otherwise i’d recommend searching youtube for drum rudiments. you could also search youtube for drum cadences.
Ya I was talking about drum rolls, not necessarily used for a build
(picked randomly).
or learn the rudiments and put your own rhythms together.
Okay thanks, but how would you mimic those longer drum rolls when producing in a DAW (I’m not recording myself btw, I don’t play the drums haha)
Trial and error, simple as that. It’s all midi notes so just keep going until it feels right.
Well what more are you looking for? Dude just said he’s not a drummer so anything short of using samples he’ll have to program them himself.
This isn’t rocket science, but it does take time and effort, and there are no short cuts to those two things. Just work it out for yourself and keep at it, and the more you do it the easier it will come to you in later tracks you work on down the road.
if you’re programming the drum rolls, take this should help:
a drum roll is played when the drummer plays 16th notes but “diddles” each note, effectively playing 32nd notes in a left left, right right maner.
so a 9 stroke role - right right left left right right left left right, is really 4 16th notes and a final tap.
marching snares are an excelent example of these double tap drum rolls.
There are other types though, press rolls for example is when the drummer presses the stick down onto the head resulting in more than 2 hits per hand and also giving it a muffled forced sound.
you’ll also notice in the candence i posted there is a lot of strait 16th notes with accents:
play this as all sixteenth notes (and repeat):
Loud soft soft Loud soft soft Lound soft Loud soft soft Loud soft soft Loud soft
I googled marching drum samples and got some pretty useful results. 
Google pulls through once again! Who would have thought?
Maybe it will also help to put a tiny amount of delay on the drums because when you play a real snare drum, your sticks will bounce a little bit so you will naturally have some sort of echo, maybe apply an high pass filter on the echo to keep it subtle. The tip from xyloft with the accent is also very important.
(I haven’t tried to make a drum pattern doing it this way but i played the drums for a long time so i do know little of how the sound should be like)
i can read drum notation 
send me sheet music and i can translate gives me something to do