Layering synth drums with samples
The tutorials and walkthroughs covered this month are mostly in homage to the sound of electronic beats, but what if your productions favour sampled drums or you have a penchant for recording drums live? Does that mean that the techniques explored here are irrelevant to your workflow? Not at all. In fact, learning how to program electronic drum sounds from scratch might be the missing link between your choice of drum sources sounding merely good or sounding fantastic. What do we mean? Well, like many other producers, you might discover that the punchiest, most impactful drum hits are found when samples or live drum sounds are layered with electronically generated ones. Here’s an example…
Put a microphone in front of your kit’s bass drum and make a recording, or load up an acoustic drum sample kit and hit C1 (there’s usually a kick assigned here). Once you’ve got an audio file or MIDI note triggering your kick drum, put an EQ over it and have a look at its active frequency areas. How does it look way down in the sub bass area? Now load up an 808 kick sample and compare frequency content. You may well find that those same frequency areas are significantly more impactful as the 808 plays back. Now, line up the 808 sample under your acoustic kick drum and loop it, turning the volume of the 808 down to zero before you do. As the drum sample plays, slowly bring up the 808’s fader until you can ‘feel’ the weight of the extra bass content. You probably won’t need much volume before you do. Now mute the 808 altogether and listen again to that acoustic kick. Depending on the context of the music you’re making, adding electronic kick drums to acoustic drum samples might not feel right at all. But let’s be clear – in the example above, what’s being suggested is reinforcement and inflation of particular frequency groups in order to provide extra weight, potentially by extending the lowest frequency content into areas which your drum kit, microphone or recording space struggle to accurately produce. Drum layering like this is an extremely popular technique, both in terms of boosting ‘weaker’ recorded sounds with rich samples or in the context provided above, by recognizing that electronic drum sounds have many characteristics and properties which can be extremely worthwhile.
Another example would be when you’re looking for more ‘length’ from a snare drum. With acoustic drum recordings or samples, drum ‘length’ isn’t really negotiable as the drum hit decays from the moment it’s struck, so drum hits can suffer for an immediate loss of energy. Producers and mix engineers have looked for ways to ‘extend’ drum hits like this for years, with gated reverb and transient design two post-production techniques employed to increase the perceived duration of a sound. But synthesizers have no such problems, as their amp envelopes contain variable decay time and, in more extreme cases, a sustain level too, meaning that percussive sounds can last as long as is required.
So popular has the technique of drum layering become that dedicated sample libraries to this approach are now available, with Native Instruments’ Kontakt 5 library DrumLab a great example. This offers twin layers of sound which can be customised for both the ‘acoustic’ and ‘electronic’ samples it offers, setting balances and tailoring sounds based on the strengths of both approaches to drum sound production. And don’t forget that in the spirit of giving your productions a unique sonic twist, the infinitely varied ways in which you can blend acoustic drums or samples with electronic ones should allow you to develop a creative and original musical voice. Check out the final six-step walkthrough to see some of the above in action.
Programming drum sounds from scratch might be the missing link