DR BEAT: HYBRID DRUMS

Layering acoustic and electronic drum sounds

1 The MIDI file in the Tutorial Files was recorded from an electronic drum kit. No quantise has been applied, so the feel is 100% live. At the simplest level, I can fuse acoustic and electronic kit sounds by putting Toontrack Superior 2 in an Instrument Rack and layering that with another kit – Battery 4, for example.

2 We’re after rather more detail than that, though – separate sources for kick, snare and hi-hats. Remove Battery 4, and let’s start with the kick drum, which I rather fancy underpinning with a subby TR-808 kick. I load D16’s superb Nepheton into the Instrument Rack. Now my acoustic kit is doubled up with a full 808.

3 Since I only want the kick, I zone the key range down to just C1 in the Rack’s Key editor, filtering out the snare and hats. I really only want the sub part of the 808 kick – increasing Nepheton’s Decay extends the sub tone, and filtering out everything above about 130Hz gets rid of the kick’s attack.

4 For the snare, I load an Ableton Live Drum Rack and fill its E1 cell with identical Instrument racks, containing Synapse Audio’s Dune 2 synth (playing a snare patch) and AudioThing’s Hand Clapper plugin. That’s one thick, frequency-rich snare, but it’s also very loud, so I turn the new elements down.

5 Rather than just layer the acoustic hi-hat with an electronic one, let’s instead work in an additional hi-hat part designed to change the feel of the whole loop. Using Simpler and a sample from Live’s Core Library, I throw an offbeat hat in on a new MIDI track, and lower the level to blend it in.

6 The open acoustic hi-hats at the ends of bars 2, 6 and 8 clash with the new hats, so I delete their triggering notes. The new hats give the loop a semi-quantised feel, but depending on the track it ends up in, I might eventually elect to fully quantise it anyway. Catch my final hybrid drum loop in the video tutorial.