Cleaning up a sample with draw-your-own filtering

Filters are essential tools for sample-loving producers. Let’s look at how they can be used to remove unwanted elements from a sampled loop.

We’re starting with this rugged breakbeat loop. As with most breaks, our bar-long loop contains kicks, snares and ‘in between’ hi-hats and ghost hits. Although the hits are weighty, there’s plenty of muddy frequency content swimming around in the break’s bass and low-mid regions… To apply specific high-pass filter values over different hits within the break, we’ve carefully drawn in this pattern of straight lines. By holding Shift as we click on the display, our lines and points are locked to LFOTool’s grid. Before we filter, we’re using a multiband gate (with three bands active) to clamp down on the two lowest bands (bass and low-mid) immediately after the loudest peaks punch through. In contrast to static EQ or filtering, this keeps the high-mid and treble loose, but tightens low-end punch. Once the cutoff response is roughly following the flow of the breakbeat, it’s time to to fine-tune the breakpoints and curves to suit the loop in question. As the break cycles round, we’re sculpting the various straight lines into concave or convex fins to tightly refine the filter response over certain hits. Our multiband gating has tightened things up considerably, but there’s still quite a bit of low-frequency content present amid the loop’s ghost snares and hats. To save us drawing in fiddly automation, let’s load up Xfer Records’ handy LFOTool plugin, so we can draw in a custom filter curve… Our processed breakbeat now sounds punchy and defined, with each drum smacking in just the right frequency areas – the kick is completely unfiltered, the snare is ever-so-slightly filtered, and the hits in between are thinned out more. You can easily save the plugin’s preset for use over your next breakbeat!