The Bongo Thread - creating realistic percussion loops

[skwiggo]

I was listening to the new track by Guy Andrews on Hotflush -



I've always wanted to create my own realistic sounding percussion loops (bongos, congas, claves, cowbells etc.) for my tracks like at 1.30 onwards in this track. I've got loads of one shot samples of the bloody things but everytime I try and make a loop out of different samples it sounds cheesy and unrealistic. I've tried velocity and swing (both preset groove patterns and manual method of taking grid snap off and moving hits about) but I'm not really getting anywhere.

I don't really want to rely on premade percussion loops either as it's not as fun!

So I thought I would make a thread dedicated to this type of drum programming as I'm sure there are other folk on the forum who are interested in making this stuff too.

One thing I have started doing is making percussion one shots mono and then panning them around to fit them into the stereo space of the track. I don't think this always works that well though. I think using velocity and groove also makes a difference but to me there's still something missing to make the lines actual sound like their being played.

I read this from Blackdown's interview with Shackleton (sounds very time consuming lol): "I love it, but it's really hard to chop-up and program the beats and then get them to flow so they sound organic. I'm reasonably pleased with the results so far. Bass is important, but, for me, there has to be more going on than just that. There's a guy called Chronomad that has got it going on like I want it, but I think he's actually playing the percussion and looping in. Mostly I'll get individual hits of a drum, then I'll feed them into different inputs, knock the tone off on some, add reverb on another, time-stretch another etc, so that I'm left with a range of different sounds that a single drum could produce. Then I normally loop a bassline and follow the bassline with the drum until I'm happy with the progress of that particular drum, then I'll do the same with some other percussion. Now during the course of that, the impact of additional sounds will affect the initial dynamics, so that I'll have to go back and alter that, which in turn impacts on the rest. It's a long and laborious process and I can never remember what the tune sounds like because I'm not listening to it, I'm so caught up in looking at the tree that I can't see the forest!"

Anyway...has anyone else got any tips to share?

[fv2k]

Playing them in yourself with drum pads and then correcting hits with quantization or velocity adjustments is a great way to do it

You should also analyze percussion loops you like and deconstruct them in order to figure out what characteristics you like

[skwiggo]

Playing them in yourself with drum pads and then correcting hits with quantization or velocity adjustments is a great way to do it

You should also analyze percussion loops you like and deconstruct them in order to figure out what characteristics you like

both good ideas - i dont have a drumpad at the moment but mite get one soon just for this reason. cheers

[Warwolt]

I think part of what makes it sound unrealistic compared to recorded loops is the fact that you'd reuse the exact one hit over and over again, making it sound choppy. By doing that timestreetch/reverb/tonealtering process on one sound you end up with several more "hits" from the same drum that you can use to make it sound more fluid. I've done the same with a snare that I layered, I bounced out two .wavs with slightly different levels on the layers that gave me a soft and a hard hit. Alternating between those in rolls gives a really really fluent sounding drumtrack.

I think you could do the same with the bongos, by layering two and bouncing out several ones. Cutting hits from the same loop would probably work really well too.

[ehbes]

Also, volume automation is gonna give you a much more natural feel to it, great idea for a thread, let's hope it doesn't die quickly

[skwiggo]

I think part of what makes it sound unrealistic compared to recorded loops is the fact that you'd reuse the exact one hit over and over again, making it sound choppy. By doing that timestreetch/reverb/tonealtering process on one sound you end up with several more "hits" from the same drum that you can use to make it sound more fluid. I've done the same with a snare that I layered, I bounced out two .wavs with slightly different levels on the layers that gave me a soft and a hard hit. Alternating between those in rolls gives a really really fluent sounding drumtrack.

I think you could do the same with the bongos, by layering two and bouncing out several ones. Cutting hits from the same loop would probably work really well too.

I will definitely try this too, it sounds like it could work! I've got loads of good one shots but not many loops. Maybe I should get some loops and chop them up and use different hits. I think another problem is using samples from lots of different sources which makes the samples in the loop not gel very well. In a perc loop or using that timestretch method you wouldn't have to worry about that so much. Cheers for the good tips keep em coming!

Also, volume automation is gonna give you a much more natural feel to it, great idea for a thread, let's hope it doesn't die quickly

Thanks aswell! Yeah I hope it doesn't either, other good threads such as the House/Techno production thread etc. need bumping too. Keep the good stuff alive!

[Sonika]

Send all the hits to a bus and then color the bus with some EQ reverb compression etc

[skwiggo]

Send all the hits to a bus and then color the bus with some EQ reverb compression etc

I do this as standard for helping to mix the percussion but doesn't really make perc loops sound more realistic if they already sound shit. Of course it makes the percussion gel more with the rest of the track though. Usually I group all of my drum sounds including one shot bongos etc. together and process with multiple parallel compressors EQ'd for each part of the spectrum. I'm goin to try some of these tips out to make a loop and i'll post it up here later.

[hudson]

Record yourself tapping out the rhythm on your desk or something, then lay down the samples to that, edit the velocity and pitch, etc.
Or just sample/cut up a loop.

[madmeesh]

Hey man -

Take a listen to the clip in my sig; the drums were chopped up and resequenced in Melodyne. I think it's hard to achieve realism with single shots, as you're going to always need those in-betweens, those quieter hits, those rests that are filled with just the sound of air moving.

That being said, I think Shackleton's older tunes are an example of tribal single shots used to great effect. If you're more inclined towards using a lot of different samples, I'd wager that getting higher quality samples, and working on arrangement would be the ticket.

[joegrizzly]

Record yourself tapping out the rhythm on your desk or something, then lay down the samples to that, edit the velocity and pitch, etc.
Or just sample/cut up a loop.

[Brothulhu]

Another tip if you want them to sound realistic is make sure they can be physically played, a drummer only has 2 hands and 2 feet

[skwiggo]

Hey man -

Take a listen to the clip in my sig; the drums were chopped up and resequenced in Melodyne. I think it's hard to achieve realism with single shots, as you're going to always need those in-betweens, those quieter hits, those rests that are filled with just the sound of air moving.

That being said, I think Shackleton's older tunes are an example of tribal single shots used to great effect. If you're more inclined towards using a lot of different samples, I'd wager that getting higher quality samples, and working on arrangement would be the ticket.

The percussion in your sig sound brilliant, really realistic! Unfortunately don't have access to Melodyne to do something like that. The warp modes in Ableton seem to fuck up the transients when I try to do the timestretched or pitched methods discussed above so I've given up with that. Apparantly Shackleton uses Soundforge for editing his percussion which is probably better for the task I dunno

You're probably right about the arrangement which is another problem! Too busy and the percussion doesn't cut through the rest of the instrumentation. Mixed too sparse with few elements and I find my loops sound rigid and unrealistic compared to other tracks which is embarassing

[skwiggo]

Another tip if you want them to sound realistic is make sure they can be physically played, a drummer only has 2 hands and 2 feet

Thats another good one! Less is more as well, I think attempts where theres about 7-8 different types of sample going at once sound pretty bad tbh.

[Brothulhu]

Also maybe use panning to make the samples come from the right place? Like if you look at a drum kit the snare and the kick drum are pretty central so keep them in the middle but cymbals, toms, etc. are to the left and right so subtle panning might make it sound more real

[motox2121]

I too have recently been searching for quality bongo loops / hits. I can't seem to get that super groovy house feel in my drums. This is a great thread keep the info coming!

[cheshirebeats]

If you want your percussion to sound like it was actually played out and recorded, then play it out and record it.
Sequencers are nice but honestly they're shit if you want to sound real. MIDI is a nice way to get things you can play into a form thats more flexible on your computer than an audio file, but if you want to sound real then clicking notes into a piano roll is both pointless and boring as fuck.

Use drum pads, use a sampler and a midi keyboard, tap out the rhythms on a caps-lock keyboard, whatever.
The honest truth is that you can't sound like a drummer unless you're doing something analogous to drumming.
Just like you can't sound like a band unless you're a band.

[didge]

How good is your sampler?

In Ableton's Sampler under the MIDI tab you can assign velocity to pitch, filter cutoff, volume envelope time etc.

So for example a harder hit will have a quicker, snappier attack time than a softer hit, so you could assign velocity inversely to envelope time. Or a softer hit won't have as many high frequency components a harder hit so you could apply a bit of low pass filtering which opens up with velocity. Or a harder hit will usually start higher in pitch than a softer hit (for membrane drums like kicks and snares anyway) so you could assign a pitch envelope that increases with velocity. You get the idea...

There's a section in Sound on Sound Synth Secret's that explains how to synthesize drums and it describes how they work in pretty easy terms, might be worth a look for more ideas.

[deadly_habit]

get multiple nuances of them and tie them to midi velocity, like sounds of using the heel of your hand, palm, etc and at various strengths of hits
that way when you have them tied to say drumpads you get a more natural progression of sounds lined up
other than that typical way of gluing together drum sounds from various sources on a buss

[idontreallygiveashit]

Move them a tiny bit right on the playlist.