Building Drum Kits

[panner]

anyone got any tips for building drum kits. Like how many sounds would you use. being useing battery but it always confuses me to many sounds in it and gets messy

[shonky]

Well, I'd suggest

Kick
Snare
Open Hat
Closed Hat
Ride Cymbal
Shaker/Tambourine

Which should provide you with most of what you need. You might want to add a crash cymbal too if you use them a lot. Toms hardly ever seem to get used in dance music (apart from those old melodic synth toms that sometimes get used for retro effects).

Personally speaking, I'd usually want to layer a ghost snare in there (much softer hit, not accented) which you can use to add groove to your patterns.

If you can set up a separate group for hats in your sampler, then put both in there and set it to mono so that the open hat will not play when the closed hat is playing and vice versa to make it more like a real drum kit. You might also want a semi-closed hat in there too for variation.

[shonky]

Oh and either layer your kicks and snares in the sampler (beater noise and weight for the kick, bite and body in the snare) or do it in an audio editor beforehand.

[djake]

Well, I'd suggest


Toms hardly ever seem to get used in dance music (apart from those old melodic synth toms that sometimes get used for retro effects).

i fink they should be used more not them cheesy old ones thou

if used correctly they can really work wiv dance music

[nospin]

some booms, clicks, snaps, blips, beeps... get creative with percussion...

[decklyn]

yeah I pick the oddest shit when sample shopping for percussion.
The results are usually pretty good. particularly poirier is a good example on my myspace of my picking strange percussion and working a tune around that.

but yeah layer your sounds.
I don't make a "kit" i work my percussion in straight audio. I usually have a couple snare tracks. Sometimes 3 (goddess in the myspace player has 3 snares as an example)
I like to have a couple layers of percussion as well. Particularly snares I layer up a lot. I look for one that has the qualities that I want when run through verb, and then I look for something shorter with more mid "punch" to keep things physical. After someone notied snares were weak in a tune I've really made a point of ensuring that when the snares hit it's physical as well as textural. You need to feel them a bit - so I look for some snares that have that real punch when layering, but usually keep the more textural snappy one as the focus. last couple tunes I did the standard kick snare hats w/ odd percussion, and then I took an amen chopped it processed it and layered it overtop for more aggression and step. (goddess being a perfect example). By removing a layer and adding it you can create a sense of progression through the tune. Make sure the bottom layer is sounding really good and then add the top so that you're not mixing them to be reliant on one another - instead you want synergy. Make sure the EQ on the top and bottom make sense with each other.

I unno. that's just where I'm at anyways. everyone does it different.

[decklyn]

what i really want to know is how people are approaching hats!
i'll make another thread for that though.

[two oh one]

Shaker/Tambourine

I don't see how these homo instruments fit in with the self consciously aggressive thing that Dubstep is becoming, yeah?

I thought the sound of breaking bones, cats being strangled and people driving their cars through orphanage dorms made for more badman percussion tracks, yeah?

Yeah?

[decklyn]

don't forget gunshots.

*******ARGression!*****

[two oh one]

The thing you need to do is make sure the different parts play together nicely.

The kick and snare can question and answer each other, and what's this? Oh, those cheeky little hats are joining in the conversation. What fun this is!

Make the kit sounds like a cohesive whole, not a bunch of random bollocks downloaded off dodgy webpages.

If you grab a bunch of different hits that have been recorded from real kits, they're all going to be from different spaces and will sound like it. You can either drench them in reverb and hide the problem (heh heh), or gate the room ambience off them and add your own room to them. Or pick the ones that already sit together, or find some with no room sound because they have been recorded in a giant foam box.

But, mixing and matching odd parts is sometimes what people go for consciously. Or not.

This is why fat men with beards full of last nights curry spend ages tuning drums (and mic'ing them up).

[decklyn]

The thing you need to do is make sure the different parts play together nicely.

The kick and snare can question and answer each other, and what's this? Oh, those cheeky little hats are joining in the conversation. What fun this is!

Make the kit sounds like a cohesive whole, not a bunch of random bollocks downloaded off dodgy webpages.

If you grab a bunch of different hits that have been recorded from real kits, they're all going to be from different spaces and will sound like it. You can either drench them in reverb and hide the problem (heh heh), or gate the room ambience off them and add your own room to them. Or pick the ones that already sit together, or find some with no room sound because they have been recorded in a giant foam box.

But, mixing and matching odd parts is sometimes what people go for consciously. Or not.

This is why fat men with beards full of last nights curry spend ages tuning drums (and mic'ing them up).

two oh one is bright. "question and answer each other". i like when music is such a communication it becomes cognitive like that.

[shonky]

The kick and snare can question and answer each other, and what's this? Oh, those cheeky little hats are joining in the conversation. What fun this is!

That to me is always how you should programme drums. If you're really vibing on that bit then the rest of the tune should pick up the enthusiasm.

Drawing drums is for losers

[COURT]

So... drawing them into the matrix is for loosers?

Please fill me in...

[shonky]

So... drawing them into the matrix is for loosers?

Please fill me in...

Just my feelings on this, but does seem to be the most complicated, grooveless way of programming drums. If you can tap out a rhythm on a table, then you should be able to tap it on drum pads or a keyboard. This to me is why most dubstep drum programming is so cliched and lame, because where the snare and kick go are already adhering to a formula.

To my mind you should only use the matrix editor for minor corrections.

[COURT]

I completely agree i always manually input then quantize.

[serox]

Hmm, I never put that much thougth into it, maybe I should.

I use standard drum kits, often 909 drum kit. I will then tab out where I want the hits with my controller. I add some FX as I go along but only a small bit.

I dont like using any drums that have had FX added to them first. I want everything standard or it wont fit imo.

[chunkie]

also,

i try not to think of it as 'drums' but more as a 'rhythm section'

ie dont feel limited to typical drum sounds/kits, for example some old idm stuff where breathing is used as hats and i've heard a lot of stuff where people are using glitch sounds as snares, with an actual punchy snare layered and mixed-in low to give it weight

[el hombre invisible]

anyone got any tips for building drum kits

Tune 'em.

[panner]

Thanks guys for tips