No more dull drums!

You finally found the super drum kit! So, you quickly play in the beat and rock out. Disillusionment often follows soon after when the sounds just don‘t seem to pop or the pattern, as a whole, sounds flat and boring. Be sure that this can be easily changed! 1 Kick boost

Let‘s start with the main actress: the kick. If she doesn‘t have any kick, the rest of the game will be hard to get going. A typical problem is a lack of punch, so let‘s give her some. Call PROGRAM EDIT and switch to ENV: PITCH. Here we change the envelope to AHDS, SUSTAIN to 0, DECAY to 40 and DEPTH to 1600. 1

2 More click & belly

These are good starting values: for our Jomox XBase 888 Kick this immediately works fine. If you want the bass drum to click more, set DEPTH to a higher value. If you want it to have more belly, turn DECAY up further. To make the kick more saturated, we switch to the DRUM FX and add about 50% TubeDrive and 30% SoftClipper. 1

3 Toms & Hi-hats

Last but not least, there‘s an AIR Maximizer effect on top. This makes the kick really loud and a bit rougher. We also add pitch envelopes to the toms to make them pop more. For hi-hats and rides, we‘ll take a completely different approach: Go back to the DRUM FX and turn HighPass up to 2 kHz or higher, depending on the sound. 1

4 Modulate pitch

We use this to cut away the lows and keep the mix clean. Then we switch to the LFO Section, select S&H as WAVEFORM at a RATE of about 8 Hz and ramp up PITCH to 40 and PAN to 70. This makes the hi-hat sound ever so slightly different, which makes a big difference, especially with 16th note patterns. It also makes the overall mix wider. 1

5 Remove static

We do the same for the ride. Here, we select Noise as the LFO WAVEFORM and set PITCH only minimally, to about 8. We leave the RATE at the moderate value of 2 Hz. Particularly longer sounds lose their static quality this way. We garnish the sound with an AIR Delay, which we add at 40%. It is important to keep the RATIO of 55:100. 1

6 A/B comparison

This ensures that the Delays on the left and right are slightly offset and, consequently, create a larger stereo field. All in all, the kit sounds much more interesting now. In the issue downloads, you will find an example project with the processed kit in SEQUENCE 1 and the original in SEQUENCE 2. The difference is more than clear here.