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Out of interest: drum purity


Guest petesasqwax

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Guest petesasqwax

How often are you using drum sounds? Are you a "new track, new drums" sort of a dude; an "if i use em again I've got to process them differently" type; or, "I'll rock them shit's as many times as I like if they're dope enough" kinda guy?

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Guest Symatic

i dont really mind, i've made a bunch of imaschine beats deliberately with the same drum sounds to see what it sounded like in different styles

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One track ,one drumbreak ,so yeah, for myself its the new track new drums approach that you mentioned.

Thats it,then I move on to the next thing im doing.

occasionally I will maybe try another break against the track im working on but I cant remember an example of ever actually swapping out a drumtrack on any of the tunes ive made.

I think its because my ideas are usually set in stone so to speak and 99% of the time its the drums that are the foundation of every tune that I make..its kinda weird but it always seems to be that way round as opposed to the samples dictating which kind of drums I should be using.

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Guest petesasqwax

Yeah, I have to admit - the rare occasions where I don't start with drums first are the ones where I end up never being quite happy with them. I have done some projects where i've used the same drum sounds too - kind of like it was a band thing and therefore it's less realistic to imagine that the drummer would change out an entire kit from one track to the next. Also I reuse drums sometimes because I have a shitty memory and I forget which I've used and which I haven't...

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I'm abhorrent at programming drums so I use either loops or bits or loops or reuse stuff I've made in the past. It's rare I program new drums.

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I have the 'too many drums' problem - I'm a fairly firm believer that unless you're using breaks for their particular sound there are only so many drum hits you can actually tell apart, and any changes you want to make past those archetypes you might as well do with effects... And yet there are a gazillion stock drums in Maschine... I usually end up either selecting the same old ones I know will generally work and tell myself I'll switch them up later and never do, or scroll through randomly and pick one from about 10 shortlisted ones that has the right general character and then play with it a bit.

 

Part of my plan for this year is to create a drum library of my own filled with the archetypes and a go-to effects chain that gets me the rest of the way. I never like using stock drums, but 80% of the time that's what I end up doing!

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I'm pretty much a new track, new drums sort of dude. But recently I've tended to use maybe three or four drum library packs that do it for me so I guess it's possible I've ended up choosing the same ones. I know it's sacrilege to some using pre chopped hits rather than taking a break but I've never had much success with breaks. Chopping melodic samples I can do all day but drum breaks always sound weak and choppy (in a bad way) to me when I try, probably because I don't know how to process them.

 

I do often layer a couple of snares/claps and push one of the hits a bit before or after the other to try and give it a bit of a unique sound. EQ each hit a bit and process the whole drum bus with a compressor, light distortion or an amp simulator mixed in to make it sound gelled together and give it a bit of character.

 

Pete, I'd love to know how you process your drums. The ones on your Axelrod track are sick.

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After roughly 30 years of collecting them, ive managed to acquire a pretty large amount of drumbreaks and because of that I dont ever really feel the need to re-use them again for future projects.

When I first started making sampled music I would often use multiple drumbreaks within the same track but over time I deliberately moved away from that approach and tried to get the maximum possibilities out of using just a single drumbreak because id also completely moved away from how I was sampling things previously and wanted to make my own unique loops instead of using someone elses stuff.
(Like Pete said when he wanted to make his compositions sound more ' band like' and where you wouldnt expect a drummer to change the sound of the kit halfway through the song )

 

Unless...

 

"Oi,Sasqwax we're using a set of Roland V-drums ere wind your neck in trainspotter".. :d

Hehe-sorry Pete!

Ive also got to have breaks with drum rolls or I wont generally use them because im reluctant to spend a week chopping snares and toms into tiny fragments to make a drum roll these days ( yes, i am late to the party I know,..but ive also now seen what you can achieve by sampling a 2-bar break and manipulating it in Abelton and i'm sorely tempted but im trying to hold out for purity's sake. :p )

 

Basically,the drumbreak is king to me and the at heartbeat of everything I do musically, so I strive to create music that compliments the rhythm as much as it can but then I guess that also probably goes for most of us here who do this anorak related stuff to begin with.

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Guest petesasqwax

Dirk - I basically spent the first few years that I was producing doing nothing but drums. It won't make people want to listen to the shit you're making, but when it came down to adding other sounds I knew that I could be confident in my drum programming. What is it you're not happy with? Placement or sounds?

Tenshun - I have a feeling I asked you this before, but if I did I forgot what you said. Do you use the JJ OS on the 1000 and, if so, do you use the effects that offers? I was hearing a friend of mine play with the resample and ring mod options and they offer up some ill possibilities

Chris - as sad as it sounds, I've been doing the same with drum loops. When I want to do something productive but my head isn't in the right place to make beats, I go through the drum collection and work on my library. I've got hundreds to go at - all over which need editing and cleaning up (which really means dirtying up, I guess). Despite having all those drums, I have used stock sounds on a few occasions - the Maschine and Battery 4 libraries are the same, I think, and there are some nice things in there if I'm feeling particularly lazy/impatient

Broma - ah, man, I've layered 2 and 3 hits together so many times, too. It's the perfect workaround if you want a particular character to your hits but you can't find it in one sound. The classic way I've always done is using the attack of an organic kick and then cutting the tail off it and replacing that with an 808. It retains that dusty quality whilst giving it a kind of throb that beefs up everything. When I discovered how to tune 808s into the same key as my bassline, I feel like that properly made them all take off and sit together like they should do. That's a damn nice thing to say about my drums, dude! I generally run them through a combination of a few main things. There's an old 32-bit VST effect called Otium Sonitex which I have to use through jBridger because I have 64-bit Ableton. I use that an obscene amount. Also Decimort is excellent. For the Axe drums I processed them in Maschine first (the first time I've used it) and used the vintage sampler settings (which are the same in Battery 4) - the MP60 at 12 bits and around 22 khz (which is the same settings I tend to use both in Sonitex and Decimort). Sonitex has some vinyl wear options which can do nice things to drums, likewise the basic EQ in there works well for me. Other than that, it's all about tape sims. Waves have a couple of Eddie Kramer models which are both excellent, but there are loads of options that I like - Tone Boosters Reel Bus, u-He Satin etc. Hope that helps :)

Dan - you absolute bastard! I can go weeks without thinking about RZA, Wu-Tang Forever and those fucking V-Drums! I'm with you 100% on not using multiple drum breaks in a track. I've done it in the past, but it always sounded disjointed to me and I was never happy with it... not as unhappy as I would be with FUCKING V-DRUMS, mind!

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I sort of go both ways, just... But I'd never use a drum break twice without completely flipping it so nobody would realise it's the same thing. So in effect I'm kind of a new drum for the every beat, but delve deep and i occasionally repurpose one. With individual hits, as sounds in their own right or for layering I do have folder of favourites I do sometimes reuse. Again, I'll always use them differently and once I've heard any of them on two or three beats I can spot it and get sick of it. That said a crunchy hi hat or whatever is what it is wherever it comes from. Unless it's a really distinctive drum hit that you obviously only use once, things like hihats fall more into good and bad categories, than 'sounds wildly different'.

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Guest petesasqwax

Yeah, that's good point on hihats - I would happily reuse a hihat because, well, it's just a fucking hihat, at the end of the day. Also, as much as I've said I don't really re-use beats, I use an 808 layered underneath almost EVERY kick I use

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If I were to make more tracks, which I'm too busy or too lazy to do, I'd be in the camp of whatever the track calls for. I never know what the hell I'm doing so I just screw around with stuff until it sounds right to me. I don't typically fuck around with any pre-packaged sounds though. Half the fun is pulling sounds from my own records. I will stoop to sampling off of break records and stuff though.

 

Where I struggle the most is whether or not to buy a record just because it has some open drums. I'm always tempted when I find them but sometimes I get them home and they aren't as popping as I thought.

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Guest petesasqwax

Yeah, I think the era if buying records just for open drums is largely a thing if the past... although I have got a little catalogue of drum records that I've accumulated over the years whenever I've happened upon on them

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Guest Psychedelic Schizophrenic

I'm a rock them shits completely differently for the new track sort of guy. I just sample strictly from breaks, I not worried if I use the same break twice on back to back tracks as long as I get that sound I'm searching for. I just load a whole pad bank on the mpc with different breaks I've recorded from my compact flash card, time stretch them to the same bpm as the track I'm working on, use the JJOS loop and hold function and listen to what works. If nothing works then I load up some more breaks and repeat until I've found some that does, then I like to layer and tune 3 different sounding kicks, snares etc to achieve the sound I'm looking for. My last 2 DV sample challenge entries have used the same snare from the Marva Whitney - Unwind Yourself break, just pitched and tuned differently.

 

Do you use the JJ OS on the 1000 and, if so, do you use the effects that offers? I was hearing a friend of mine play with the resample and ring mod options and they offer up some ill possibilities

 

I used that and the bit crusher mode and thought there where complete gash pete. Maybe I'm using it wrong?

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Guest petesasqwax

I have to admit, I don't remember hearing the bit crush in isolation, just with the ring mod, but I liked what I heard.

 

Every time you refer to the MPC I fucking want another one even more than I did already! I made an agreement with my wife not to make any significant purchases for the first 6 months of the year in order to get the most out of the things I already have... but ebay watch list is full of 1000s and I've already bid on a couple of them...

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I use the mpc 1000 jjos fx on some breaks but mostly i run my my stuff through guitar pedals because thats what i use when i perform live.

 

I reuse the same 808 bass hit all the time. I just pitch it differently or run it through a distortion.

 

For drum breaks off records i usually compress the hell out of them to make them all crunchy and hitting

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