Techniko's snare tips

Here's a nice set of tips that I'm willing to give out to enhance drum programming. Only if you want your drum to be realistic and energetic of course.

-Layer two snares together ; One that has a snappy punch and one that has some phat plastic mid freq.

.....Once you found two snares that go well together.....

-Sample some reverb ; Apply 2 different reverbs on your lower snare, both mixed 100% wet. Render each reverbed hit to its own sample.

-Reverb One should have dominant pre-reflections or sound metallic.
-Reverb Two should be hollow, long and atmospheric.

.....Now you should have 4 samples: Snappy Snare, Phat Snare, Metal Reverb, Hollow Reverb.....

-For main snare hits ; Use all 4 samples together. Sometimes leave one reverb out to create variety in the sound.

-For secondary hits or ghost notes ; Use only the Snappy Snare and/or Phat Snare. You should also set the Snappy Snare to cut the Hollow Reverb.

...Experiment!

-TechNiko
BigBeat programmer.

Synthgeeks whitenoise drum tips

With white noise & a sampler with decent low & high pass (band pass is a bonus) filters you can make some cool drum sounds.

Kick: use a low pass filter set all the way down with a fast envelope to open & close it quickly for a good thump. You can use a second layer of noise with a very fast (a few milliseconds) amplitude envelope for the initial "beater" tick.

Snare: resample the kick from the above example & pitch it up a couple/few semitones. Add a second layer of noise with a short-ish (100-200 or so) amp envelope for the "snap". Use high or band pass filtering to change the snap's color. Use a low pass filter around 5000 Hz with some resonance for a "ripping" sound- use an envelope to shape the sound a bit.

Hihat: basic hihats are quite easy- for a closed hihat, use a high pass filter & fast amp envelope. Lengthen the envelope for an open variant. Play around with adding layers with different amp envelopes & filtering for different sounds.

Other: for a filter-snap type percussion sound, use the kick example & play around with the filter envelope. Filters with high resonance & fast envelopes are always a good place to start for percussion sounds.

Hennessy's mid frequency tip

If you empty an ashtray into a barrel of wine, you get a barrel-sized ashtray. If you pour some wine in a huge ashtray, you still have got a huge ashtray. That's life. But sampling is nicer stuff, especially when you're producing deep house and you are struggling with how to spice up your drum part.

Technically, deep and minimalist house have got a sort of 'gap' in the mid frequencies of the mix, due to the fact that sonically there is almost nothing between the kickdrum/bassline and the hihats. To fix this I use a method that most of the times gives really satisfying results. This is the procedure.

Start with a dirty loop. Search between old records or live performances (I found huge golmines of sampling material in progressive rock, latin and ethnic music) and sample a rhythmic beat. Define the loop points, slice the loop and low down the decay of each slice (if you are working with Recycle or Cubase SX) or just add a wild compression in order to obtain a kind of noise gate that will enhance the rhythmic feel of your nasty loop. Next step, add a simple pattern of your best sounding, clean samples of the very basic drum elements. Deep 909 basedrum, handclaps, up-tempo hihats. Now equalize in order to locate the processed loop in the background (a bass cut eq combined with some filter resonance applied on mid frequencies can help a lot). Process both parts with another kind compressor to melt the two ingredients into a new one. That's all. This cheap lo-fi injection helped me a lot, and everytime I try again the results are always new (and not too bizarre).

Josmoker's drumsound tip

You can get very nice, strong sounds out of drum samples if you loop a very short part of them - run it through a filter and this can get you i.e. a nice bass sound out of a bassdrum (surprisingly *g*) but i also got a heavy guitar-type sound out of it... Of course also in this case it is true that a lot of experimentation is the key to finding the really nice sounds.