Characterful drum dynamics with bus processing

Want beats that pop, interact and breathe? These techniques might be subtle, but they all add up…

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To illustrate a few ways to bus and process electronic beats, we’ve put together this 126bpm techno groove. In this project, we’ve colour-coded each layer and loop: kick and bass are red, open hats are yellow, running percussion and loops are green, and live claps are pink.

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The first step is to route these layers into relevant group outputs. Here in Ableton Live we group channels together with the Cmd/Ctrl-G command. Now, instead of processing each individual layer, we can focus on the four main groups (named K & B, OH, HH and Claps), plus our final glitch percussion ‘hook’.

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First, the open-hat group, comprised of a thin treble loop and thick midrange one-shot. Slow-attack compression gels the two layers together, then a touch of multiband transient shaping is used to dial in custom sharpness in the mix. A splash of reverb adds width.

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Now to the ‘claps’ group, which contains a drum machine clap and a live recording of a crowd clapping and cheering. To bind this signal together and pull up its sustain, we use a trusty Distressor emulation to compress in parallel.

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Onto the ‘hats’ group, which is a collection of four hi-hat, shaker and tambourine loops. Dynamically, there’s not much movement in this overall signal, so we use a volume-ducking plugin in multiband mode to slightly turn down everything above 1kHz over every beat of the bar. It’s subtle, but adds much-needed ‘bounce’.

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Finally, we group all groups (bar the kick and bass) into a ‘All Perc’ group. By applying thickening parallel compression on this group, then automating the level of the parallel signal, we create motion and dynamic change as the simple groove plods along. Finally, a bit of offbeat ducking keeps this in check. Job done!