drum and bass production tutorials, tips, samples, forum [dnb secrets] - Drums

New York Drum Technique

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:31:53 -0400

Hi All, I'm new to this forum so thought the best start would be posting something pretty useful.

The parrallel or "New York" technique is just to thicken up your beats.

Start off with your drum track on a single channel, usually best if the mix on your drums is the best you can get it. Then send some of your drum track to a send channel with a compressor loaded on it. Usually sounds better if you dont send the whole signal, but have it loud enough to feel the difference.

These are guidelines for the compression parameters now, but in my opinion, compression should always be applied soley by ear and never using preset etc.

The compresser should have a fairly high ration, a fairly low threshold (-20db) and a quick attack, this ducks out the peak volume part of the drum hit. Then by ear adjust the release so the compressor opens on the tail end of your drum hits, add some make-up gain to bring the compressed channels levels to a nice hight, and hopefully your drums should sound fuller.

To reduce phase effects because of two tonally identical channels, fiddle with the eq on the send channel a little until your results are best, I find upping the high end usually brightens my drums up

Practice until it works, and until it sounds right. Hope this helps

How to achieve rolling Rides?

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:22:31 -0500

Hi all,

I'm really starting to concentrate on Hihats and Rides in my beat production now. I notice a vast amount of tracks out there bank on the rides for flushing out the drums and given some movement to the rythm. However I am struggling to get that rolling sound from them.

I am new to NI Battery and will be getting V3 soon but for now I am plotting beats with my Proteus2000 (Drumkits) just so I can lay down the midi notes first. I will replace each of the sounds with Battery sounds when it arrives but I am using Battery V1 for now.

The problem is adding that rolling feel to the rides. They sound OK but not real enough. I have search and replaced the rides with any samples I have on HDD (Which is loads) but still don't get that movement, I'm searching for.

I've tried adding modulations like "sample start" or "velocity" or "pitching" but I'm wondering if you can offer any advice on achieving this sound that I hear so often.

Thanks for your time...
Ste

Shed some light on some of your info on this site? (Crank or some1)

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 03:38:06 -0500

Some superb info on this forum but I have trouble understanding some of it.

Most of the terminology is directed to FRUITYLOOPS but I'm sure SONAR can do the same. I hope you can shed some light on the following and if similar processes are possible within SONAR...

I appreciate you may not use SONAR but if anyone can give me an idea of how to replicate some of the following processes, I'd appreciate it:

Quotes:

"Making organic live drums with drum hit envelope random automation"

I have Battery V1 / Kontakt V1 and Vsampler. with SONAR 3. How can I do the same? (How do you apply randomization in Battery?)

"Layering break with itself: simple & phat"

Looks interesting but again how can I recreate this in SONAR. I'm not sure how to "Layer both channels" to program both at once

"Tweaking & automation of drum hits' decay"

Possible in Vsampler or Battery/Kontakt?

Thanks in advance for any replies here. Keep up the good work.

Multiple drum tracks in one piano roll with fl studio layers

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 16:41:28 -0400

after boring with chopping audio loops in fl audio tracks
i tend more to use piano roll with ni intakt.

so my latest setup for multi kit/loop drum sequencing:

i have several intakt instances as childrens of one layer.
every intakt sampler has its own key zone.

so i can easily program all drum edits in one piano roll:

Using rex files with DirectWave

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:17:52 -0400

yeah, tried fl studio's directwave and i like the way to make nice groove with it.

first , i've loaded rx2 sliced break into it
getting more sure that rx2 is a nice format
cause it loads to many drum samplers like
intakt/kontakt/battery and fl slicer

to make the stuff rolling and proper ghosts
i set amp envelope a:0 d:x s:0 r:0
where x - needed length of hits.

then to add that fucking proper ghosts
i've modulated decay by amp follower
so the quiet hits have shorter decay.

so i made ghosts with less velocity
and they got rolling.

and some slight mod with random lfo on decay
to make drums more live.

drive fxs not bad to make drums beefy.

Making organic live drums with drum hit envelope random automation (fruity formula controller)

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 02:35:31 -0400

recently i started to get bored with sliced breaks cause even i have 4 bar break, anyway all hits are the same when they are repeated.

so in the last track in fl studio i automated fl slicer's attack, decay and decay tension with fruity formula controller. and that made drums more live. i like it.

i chose from factory presets: syncronized randomness
the formula looks like that: a+(SeededRand(Round(SongTime*4))-0.5)*b
this gives 'sample & hold' lfo synced to 1/16 or 1/32 notes - dont remember.
tweak SongTime*4 - change 4 number to get your sync.

a knobe is a base value
b knobe is deviation

i think this method can be aplied with any sequencers & plugins that support automation.

Making natural ghosts with peak controller in fl studio

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 07:03:09 -0400

shit, so easy.
just put peak controller on snare channel and
bound decay time to it.

so snares with less velocities will have less decay.

nice way to make natural hosts from main snare when suitable ghosts are unavailable

Converting stereo multi-miced breaks to mono: solving phase cancellation problem.

Fri, 12 May 2006 08:01:07 -0400

when i put stereo breaks in mono i often got some phase cancellation problems when the left & right channels eat each other. that's because multiple microphone recording i guess.

hi-end degrades often especially so i lose brightness of breaks.

hmm, that's so easy but i thought out solution only today
the cure is to low-pass one of the channels (preferably with less hi-end presented) before mixing to mono. so phase cancellation doesnt occur in hi-freq domain.

moreover more complex eq could be applied according to audio material presented in each channel.
and even extra different processing could be applied to each channel.

the files attached:

break.mp3 original break
breakstereooff.mp3 simple mono mix (hi-end degraded)
breakmonolowpass.mp3 one channel low pass (more hi-end)
breakmono.mp3 custom eq & processing

Thinking of moving away from fl slicer & sampler because of lo-fi envelopes

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:15:16 -0400

if u think to check this just go to the project options and try playing enveloped drums with lowest & highest timebase (ppq). u will notice that quality changes so that's clear that fl sampler envelopes operate on midi rate rather than audio sample one.

that isnt so wrong, maybe using with most of samples is ok, but drums is definitely ugly harsh when applying envelopes.

so i'm thinking of changing the sampler for drums. that would have audio sample rate envelopes.
at least i think that's essential for me currently.
tired of of that harshness caused by low envelope rate. too discrete.

Layering break with itself: simple & phat

Fri, 12 May 2006 05:37:42 -0400

in fl studio i sometimes use the following to make break more crisp & phat:

1. chop a break in fl slicer.
2. copy teh channel.
3. pitch up the copied channel 5, 7 or 12 semitones up.
4. layer both the channels. so now it's possible to program both at once.
5. tweak envelopes of both slicers for needed groove.
some interesting results when one slicer has short decay , the other does long ones.
another trick is to make slow attack on the lower (first) break, so attack will be done with pitched up hits.
6. another trick is to swap stereo channels of one of the breaks and adjust mix with stereo enhancer. that's useful when break in stereo.
7. switching phase of one of the breaks gives some 'compressed' attack. also option to try.

recipe for using ARP in flstudio to record drums

Fri, 12 May 2006 05:37:44 -0400

ingredients:

1 midi controler
1 loop to resequence
whatever elso you want to add.

just examine the arpegio setting for the flslicer with the firefight loop. the time was set by ear using a knob on the midi controller, i set the arrows pointing towards each other, and set the apr to auto. other settings might give good results, i liked this so i stuck it. you can turn the arp off to see what it does. don't mind the odd key assignment for the slicer, that was just the way my pads were setup. latency at 5ms.

for this i midi recorded a very bad bassline 1st and then recorded the drums. then re-did the bass in pattern 5.

i think it came out smoking, for the two hours of total effort.

Your drum processing insert chain

Fri, 12 May 2006 05:37:51 -0400

ok, mine looks like that (order preserved):

1. stereo enhancer. to narrow stereo field if required.
2. eq to initially shape the drums, remove obviously excessive freqs, junk and so on.
3. compressor to shape groove. usually to add punch with slow attack, fast release and gain or expand to make drums smoother.
7. multiband compander to work with bands' dynamics (like making snare standing out)
4. reverb to add space & breath to the drums. also for some eq like increasing dumping of low or high freqs.
5. some saturators/limiters/tubes to increase RMS if needed and add extra meat. reverberation is processed also to make it more tasty.
6. final eq to shape drums after saturation if needed.

of cuz the order can be slightly different, some units - ommitted

so how do u guys fuck ur drums?

Tweaking & automation of drum hits' decay

Fri, 12 May 2006 05:37:59 -0400

when i was a beginner it was hard for me to choose a right break for a tune.
one thing i didnt understand that drum hits' decay was so important to match overall feel of a tune. so i rolled thru my break folder only to found that almost all nice breaks dont fit my chillout tune.

later i found that solution was easy - just to make hits shorter with decay so they could sound more delicate.
so i began to tweak decays for every tune and that brought nice results.

some ideas rose like using more longer decay to rise tension in a track and automating it to create more live drumming feel.

my solution is to use fl studio slicer & automate decay.

the first attached clip is with decay automated.
first it gets longer and then shorter again.

the second clip is with decay automated by pattern.
nice groove changes here.
first powerful kick & snare then delicate ghosts then again speeding up.
sounds something like switching between different breaks. nice.

midi drum recording tips

Fri, 12 May 2006 06:11:25 -0400

i have found that when recording midi notes for drum parts, from ones drum kit there are some tricks that can help it sound very jungle like. It is all is based on quantization.

I play in my drum part and record in the entire drum part or a loop if that is what I need. Then using FLStudio I quantized to one of the pentuplet settings [cant remember which, just try them out] they are in the misc folder of the quantize folders. then I quantized again using one of the other quantize templates, to add a specific feal to my drum part. One could use the ragga template or the funkbreak or one of the two amen templates. However when quantizing the second time where I add a genre of musics groove I do not quantize the start, duration, or end time and all the timing stays to the previous pentuplet grid spacing, all the second quantize does is impose the velocity template of the specific type of music.

I also discovered that pentuplet/quintuplet quantizing seems to make notes that are 3rd's such as 12th or 24ths sound groovier as well. I do not know why pentuplets do not make 4/4 sound good but they do work well for the 3rd's.

This was a very interesting discovery. I hope in helps those of you who are midi recording.

Layering beats / breaks / drums with FL Slicer

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:02:55 -0500

my latest tendency to layer multiple beats gave me one problem - i need chop & rearrange beats simultaneously while preserving ability to have a dedicated bus for each beat.

since i'm currently using 2 bar beats (premade) sliced in fl slicer by 1/2 beat for rearranging in piano roll the solution came quickly: just use common layer for several fl slicers where all beats intended for layering together are sliced by 1/2 beat.