Dubstepforum.com

as ive bin making music ive realised that there needs to be rather alot of focus on drum effects, which in dubstep seems to focus on strange compression techniques and equing, so can people drop their knowledge in an understandeble way on how to make drums sound in particular ways, such as taking away fuzz (eqing im geussing but i just play around) what values and settings people like on the compressers and eqs etc, drums are very important

cheers
leo

questions such as

making drums cleaner:what particular settings on what particular effects

which compression settings are good for drums

any other effects that people like
(for me its the ensemble in logic on intricate hi-hats, spaced out vibes)

okay i just realised that synthesized drums are used alot thats interesting

My advice is do what ever you think sounds good. If you think it sounds bad, it probebly does to any one else.
tim

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it's not necessarily about having drums be clean. really depends on the mood of the track

listen to scuba releases and the drums on that
then listen to vex'd
then listen to skream

they're all different

So big a question but a few of my faves.

Old dubstyle production mostly consisted of spring reverb, phaser and space echo. In logic the tape delay is a fine replacement for the space echo (although the bionic delay on interruptor's site's really nice). If you set all these up on a bus and take a send from the snare (mess around with the order as well, as this will create some interesting variations) you'll get some good dub effects which you can mess around with more with automation. If you also add a filter to your snare and play with the cutoff, either with a long lfo or some tweaking, you'll be able to get some nice depth variations to your sounds.

Put each of your drums on a separate bus (or group snares, cymbals, kicks etc) and then say, for snare, add a compressor to the effects chain and sidechain it to the bus your snares on. Fiddle about with the threshold and you should be able to get the echo to drop when the main snares hitting, to give a ducking delay effect, which should help clear up the mix. Recommend using the stereo widener to keep the echoes panned away from the original.

I would recommend filtering out any parts of the drum sound that's not necessary before putting it through effects though as any residual frequencies will muddy up your mix once put through reverb etc, so highpass all your snares and hats. A bit (or a lot of) overdrive on your snares will help them cut through as well.

Also, can help if you put a pitch shifter before your delay/reverb/phaser combo to fatten things up

layering, layering, layering

also, garbage in-> garbage out. If you have doubts about a sample you're using, toss it. I know that seems pretty obvious, but it took me a long time to figure it out.

crimeandgrunk wrote:layering, layering, layering

Not necessarily. The best drums IMO are very simple but sound fat anyway.

crimeandgrunk wrote:layering, layering, layering

good choice of samples & careful eqing

dont get too bogged down in compression before you can write a beat pattern or basslines

i.e dont try and run before you can crawl

Paulie wrote:

crimeandgrunk wrote:layering, layering, layering

Not necessarily. The best drums IMO are very simple but sound fat anyway.

well yeah, of course it all depends, as with everything

but I find it useful to do a little sound design by mixing and matching single hits. The results can still sound simple if it's done correctly.

theres a good break layering thread on DNB Arena, check it out.

Break tutorial for fruity, cubase. tutorial on side chain compression etc.

Linkage:

http://forum.breakbeat.co.uk/tm.asp?m=1967782950