All about Drums...

This was copped from UGH.net written by Bernard Jones...

Well...

If your mindful of your sequence and know what you want out of it I personally see no harm in bouncing down every so often to save on space and cpu etc etc.

I mean if my kit is sounding sweet I'll render a few pieces of it wet and delete the main tracks and keep the bounced version in the mix... it works for me.

But when you look at it as a whole... 25 tracks of "drums" isn't really that bad to establish groove. Doubling kicks and other percussion can really create new sounds and push them into the mix... you just have to do it till it sounds full. Understand that there are going to be sounds that you are playing as percussive pieces and they have to sit in your drum mix right.... Like remember when Joey used to use the Mario Brother's Fireball sound all the time. I'm sure he was tracking that out in his percussion arrangement... Like another part of the drum kit. I all works out in the end and you can really spice your tracks up by adding subtle things here and there.

Creating swing can be simple or as complicated as you like it.... Cubase in Joey's case is known for a dope ass swing setting you can litterally turn the swing up and... bang... hot shuffle!

Some people like to allign their samples and notation to fit a swing type of setting. Taking each sample by hand and moving it in time till it is humanized or swung to taste.

Also for Live users....

There is a little "0" next to the metronome. It's your swing setting. Use it to taste. When using it on your samples and notation understand that ableton has a swing setting in the bottom left corner of the sample window and you need to set this to divy the sample at 16, 32 or straight 4 over 4. Use it only on things you INTENTIONALLY want to humanize or swing... because if you lay it on a sample that is not meant to be swung in the mix it will shift the sound enough to where you hear artifacts and displeasing harmonics in the case of re-pitch. I usually when writing in a swing style set my master swing to about 30-60 to taste, set my drum and MIDI samples and notes to swing 16 for kicks and effects... swing 32 for highs and snares. Keeping my bass at a straight setting and melodics as well. Give it a whirl and see what you come up with.... and never be affraid to turn off your quantize for a bit and move the samples by hand too....
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This was copped from UGH.net written by Nate Laurence out of Minneapolis...

*Another trick is to do some layering with your hi-hats. You want to hit the full range of sound so lay down a low-hat, mid-hat, and bright-hat on top of each other. Then, in Reason, shift one of those hat layers off just a little. It will give you that "swing" effect. Just a trick I use.


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This was copped from UGH.net written by Scrubfish out of Chicago...

*I would say approach your beats with the effort you would put into the rest of your track.. For the longest time i would throw a beat together in a minute. Throw a kick down, some hatz, and a clap. Wasn't the main focus of my tracks. I later realized that beats are the heart of your tracks and time must be taken on them. Unless you are going minimal on the beat..

I AM NO MASTER AND NOR DO I THINK I AM , but this is what i have dealt with in my productions and i am still working at it..

I think a big part of it is that you have to layer kicks, hatz, and claps to get a phat sound.

Listen to the different frequencies and figure out which fill out the range you want. Ghost samples do a great deal. (samples that are there but to untrained ears you wouldnt know it. hell even trained ears probably wont hear it in someones end product, but you can tell the difference because you can take it out and put it back in.) You may have a kick underneath another kick, and probably will not hear it a great deal. Doing this will give you a wider range and accent the kick all together..
Try using a kick with a higher freq snap on it, and then underline it with a low end or mid range kick, or both. sometime you will use three different kicks to get a full round kick. But when it comes to adding a bassline you may have to work around that and reinvent a kick. If you have a low end bassline like a sub and a real low end kick they might conflict and cancel each other out. I like to stick to a mid range kick so it gives my bassline room to breath. You can always find a bass that will work with the beat if you do not want to change it, or you can try compressing the kick and bass together and see what happens. there are so many different scenarios and you gotta find what works for you.

If you dont want to use the swing feature in programs you can draw all your beat hits out on the line. then go back through and slightly move a set of the drum sequence to be off. Example: Your Kick is four on and your clap is every other . you can select your hat track and slightly move it off line. You may also want to set of your claps with that too. Snares, mostly get offset. Those and ghost hats help the beat feel more swung. Also think of offseting the layered samples as well. you may have a clap on line, but if you offset the layer clap by just a little, that will give you a phater clap sound. Doing this is a bit more work, but end result is really nice. Listen to hip hop when it comes to phat snares and kicks. I think they have, or had the market on that shit..

Also you can just play your drums and do not quantize. that will give your beats a natural swing. You can later decide what you want on and go in to those parts and quantize them.
Just look at your beats as if a drummer were actually playing them live. They will never be exactly on, so when you make your beats you have to go a slight bit out of line and then back in, or slightly off the whole time. I guess you could equate the feeling of your drum pattern as a feeling of one of joey's filter movements in his tracks. If it was visual you might see it as an up and down motion and a left to right motion like a pendulum. If that makes any sense. (thats how i see it. Im sure its different for everyone)

I would imagine that these techniques have been around forever its just a person finding them and being able to incorporate them in thier own work. Spend some time making beats, and just beats. Start fucking with shit to see what happens.

As for doing what someone else is doing.....I think imitating is how we learn, and once we have it we can break those rules to make something different.. We get our inspiration from other people sometimes..You cant tell me that the big producers got thier inspiration only from themselves.. If that was true they wouldnt be sampling the shit out of everything. Crate diggers and sound diggers get inspired by shit that someone has already done.. Now dont get me wrong.... The guys holding it down in house are fucking insane creative, but the inspiration started somewhere..Someone will do something catchy and you might want to do something like that. I thought that is how house music creates genres and perpetuates the creation of new sounding music......We gotta start somehwere and if no one is there to help us then how else would we learn if not by imitating(this could be a whole different disscussion) If it sounds phat and you like it, go with it man..


latz.. scrubfish

by the way ... my beats suck ass.. pz