DR BEAT: HYBRID DRUMS

Our resident doctor inflates acoustic beats to the max

Having previously served as Editor of drummer’s bible Rhythm as well as Computer

Music, Ronan is clearly the right man for this particular gig. He’s been playing drums for over 30 years and making music with computers since the 90s. While drums don’t have to sound huge to be effective – witness funk, R&B, liquid DnB, etc – for many styles of music, bigger is almost always better.

While upscaling the ‘unreal’ drum sounds of electronic genres such as house and hip-hop is relatively easy, since they’re usually either synthesised or sampled (so already processed), when it comes to inflating the acoustic drums of rock and pop, things aren’t so straightforward. Totally dry acoustic drums always sound a bit feeble – load up a multichannel drum kit and zero all the overhead and ambient room mics to hear what I mean – so real effort is required on the part of the producer to improve them.

Fortunately, there are several areas on which this effort can be focused. If you have a suitably equipped virtual kit, you can push those room mics back up in the mix to add natural reverb. If you don’t like the sound of the room in question, though, or you’re working with a less involved instrument, a separate reverb will do the trick.

But reverb really just puts your undersized drum kit in an oversized space. To bolster the sounds of the kick, snare and hats themselves, dynamics processing is key, in the shape of compression and distortion.

Here I’ll use all three techniques to power up an unobtrusive raw drum sound – first individually, then in combination.