Get Bigger Drum Sounds Now

Although it's not appropriate for every genre, sometimes you really need big, bombastic-sounding drums to give a track the feel and attitude it needs. Obviously, having sounds in your library that are appropriate to begin with is the easiest way to get this result, but to me, that's not as gratifying as doing it yourself. So today, I thought I'd share some tips for getting bigger, more aggressive drum sounds.

1. Compressed Reverb
Most of the time, you probably add a bit of reverb to your snare sound to give it a more natural sound. When you're going for that "larger than life" sound, however, you may get better results by using reverb in combination with compression to get a decidedly UNnatural sound. The key here is the order of your effects. Of course, unless the sound you're using is already compressed, you'll probably want to add some on the track's insert to add some snap or body as you would normally. But to take things to that next level, try adding some compression to your reverb send AFTER the reverb. This changes the shape of the reverb's decay in a way that certainly isn't reflective of the way real life reverb works, but definitely gives more body and oomph. Don't be afraid to  be a bit more aggressive with this than you might normally. We're not after subtlety.

2. Gated Reverb
If you're not familiar with it, a gate is a device that essentially blocks out the sound on a channel after it drops below a certain volume level. They were originally designed mainly as a way of keeping noise levels down, so when, for instance, an electric guitar part isn't playing, you're not getting a whole ton of hiss during these empty portions. Peter Gabriel and producer Hugh Padgham found another cool use for it, though. By placing a gate after a reverb, they found you could get some really cool, unnatural sounding drum sounds because the gate would cut off the reverb tail after it dipped below a certain volume. This is often incorrectly attributed as the "Phil Collins" drum sound (he WAS playing on the record, but he didn't invent it), and was EVERYWHERE in the 1980's. The downside of this is that it can definitely give a bit of a retro vibe to your track, but since that sort of thing is currently considered pretty chic, it might be perfectly appropriate depending on what style you're working in.

3. Layering
If one drum sound isn't cutting it, try building hybrid monster drums made up of 2 or more sounds combined into one. The key here is to make intelligent choices when layering. Layering multiple samples with the same characteristics and frequency balances is just going to result in mud. Instead, look for drum sounds that each contribute something unique to the overall sound. Maybe one sound is tight and snappy to add some punch, while another has a nice, full body to it to give it a sense of size, and yet another one has a metallic ring to bring out some aggression. Stop to think about what purpose each layer is supposed to fill before you start hunting for the right sounds and the process will go a lot smoother and faster. When you've built your hybrid, layered snare, try sending all of the layers to the same bus and compress them together. This can help to 'glue' the sounds together sonically and make it sound like a single monster drum rather than several individual sounds.

4. Parallel Compression
Parallel, or "New York Style" compression is a popular way of adding more edge and impact to drum sounds without completely losing any sense of dynamics. Basically, it involves mixing a very heavily compressed signal behind the uncompressed signal so you essentially get the best of both worlds. You can achieve this end in a couple different ways. The simplest way is to duplicate the drum track in question, compress one heavily and bring its level down so it sits behind the uncompressed signal. A better and more flexible technique, however, is to send the drum sounds to a bus, apply the heavy compression to the bus, and then set the balance between the compressed and uncompressed signal using the wet/dry mix on the channel's send. This gives you a lot more flexibility when mixing and is a much more efficient way to do things when you're working with several individual tracks of drums. Don't be afraid to try this with bitcrushers, distortions, amp effects and other dynamic smashing effects too.

5. Contrast
This is probably one of the most underrated and under utilized techniques there is. There can be a temptation, particularly among beginners, to try to make a track sound bigger by filling it with nothing but big, aggressive sounds or heavy reverbs. This actually has the opposite effect, though. You need to put your sounds in a context where the listener's ear can assign a 'size' to them by contrasting them. You can think of it like this - suppose we have two pictures of a man. In one picture, he is standing by himself in a completely featureless landscape with nothing around him. Your first instinct is probably that he is a normal sized man. If we place him next to the Empire State Building and he towers over it, however, we now see him as some sort of horrible, giganto mutant. The same thing applies to audio. If you take a trance track, for example, and most of the elements - the drums, the bassline, etc - are bone dry, and then add in a lead line that is bathed in a huge reverb, that lead is going to sound even more enormous. Contrast simply allows us to exaggerate the differences in perceived 'size' to the listener.

So there's five to get you started. Do you have a favorite technique for making your drums sound huge? Share it with us in the comments!