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Important Drum Techniques Part 2
🕑 Added 2024-10-09 16:15:01 +0000 UTCBack with part two of my most important drum techniques blog! 📝
There are some many avenues you can go down in music production, it's often hard to know where to put your time. Even more than that, it's hard to remember all the tips & techniques you pick up along the way. The best way to manage all this infomation is to take notes. If you ever hit writers block or are struggling with where to take a track, you can just dive into your arsenal of tips & techniques and whip one out to save the day. 🥷
Break Layering - Playing two or more breaks at the same time.
There is often a primary break which is louder and more dominant in the mix and a secondary backup break, however this is not always the case. The most important things to consider when layering breaks are:
Phase - How the hits of the two breaks are aligning. You can either move the slice markers or the midi notes to adjust these to taste.
Tuning - Pitching certain breaks up/down can help them fit better when layering with another break.
ADSR - How the amplitude envelopes of the two breaks compare. Sometimes, a really snappy break with short hits works well with a more splashy break with longer hits. Using ADSR decay or a transient shaper to pull in the sustain of breaks can help you fit them together more cohesively.
EQ - EQ is another super important tool in break layering. When using two or three breaks, they often want to fit different parts of the frequency spectrum. eg. High end breaks with hi-hats/rides/shuffles vs low end boomy breaks with fat kicks and snares.
Sample Selection - This is probably the most crucial element in break layering. Actually picking two breaks that work well together. It can save you a lot of work down the line!
My Hero Break Pack - patreon.com/posts/just-hit-5000-on-87430834
Break Swapping - This is a great technique for creating fills or variations. You can swap to another break in the last bar of an 8 or 16 bar phrase. Another common technique is to build your main break passage from multiple breaks using both break layering and break swapping.
One-Shot Drum Layering - Quite often, especially if you’re using more obscure breaks, they can lack impact in certain areas. This could be kick power, snare snap or high end energy and groove. It’s common to layer these breaks with one-shot hits to enhance them. These can be sampled from other breaks, drum machine samples or general one shots.
Similarly to break layering you need to think about - Phase, Tuning, EQ, Amplitude Envelope & Tonality.
Here are my favourite drum layering tools I use everyday - patreon.com/posts/drum-layering-84311344
EQ vs Drum Layering - This is a very common question I get. Sometime it can be easier and just as effective to pull up the kick of your existing break with an EQ rather than layering it with a kick from another break. There is no right or wrong here. Drum layering can often provide interesting & unexpected results, but is time consuming and can be quite challenging.
Snappy Decay Breaks - This is a one of my favourite techniques to make variations from an existing break. The best way to do this is to slice a break at all the hits, program it to a pattern, then set ADSR sustain to 0 and pull in the decay. Another, less effective but easier way to do this is with a transient shaper.
Akai Time-Stretched Snares - The classic way to do these is obviously with an old AKAI Sampler. However, Amigo VST gets incredibly close for £10. There is also a renoise method i’ve show a few times using the Sxx command.
Timestretch FXs - Whilst I mostly do time-stretching to snares, it can sound amazing with a whole resampled break. As it throws off the tempo of the break, you often have to be quite clever to make it work in time with the rest of the track.
Delayed Bongo FXs - Sometimes it’s hard to know what rhythm to play with the bongos. A more subtle, atmospheric style is to play a few notes into a 1/2, 1/4D or 1/8D delay and let them ring out. Always sounds amazing.
Percussion FXs - Enhance percussion with phasers, resonant filter sweeps, massive mono reverbs, Short rhythmic ping-pong delays.
Forwards Reverse Snare Hits - A Renoise classic using the Bxx command. These work amazingly at the end of a two or 4 bar section to subtly whip back into the next section. You can even go forwards + backwards multiple times for some crazy FX.
Mono Gated Reverbed Snares - Another Drumfunk killer techniques Photek style. Bounce out a single drum hits with a big mono reverb on it. Usually 30% + on the wet mix. Then load it back into a sampler. You can then trigger & pitch the snare but also abruptly cut off its long tail. These also work great in reverse to build energy towards a drop etc.
