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Another Approach to Gated Drum Sounds

Some time ago, I walked you through how to create your own 80's-tastic gated drum sounds. As with just about anything related to music production, however, there is more than one way to achieve an end. So today I want to show you an alternate, slightly more flexible way to create gated drum sounds.

The first step is to select your drum sounds. Once you have done so, apply a medium length hall or plate reverb to the sound in question. Whether you do this as a send or insert, you want a ratio of about 80% dry to 20% wet.

Once you've selected a reverb you like, go ahead and bounce your drum sound down to an audio file. Trim off any excess 'dead space' and load it into your sampler of choice.

Usually, when dealing with drum sounds, you'd select your sampler's "cycle" mode which plays the sample from start to finish no matter how long you hold down the key that triggers it. In this case, however, we want to turn this mode off so that the sample only plays as long as you are holding down a key.

Once you've done this, you can control the length of the "gate" simply by changing the length of the MIDI note. The advantage this holds over traditional gating is that literally each note can have its own gate length allowing for much more dynamic gated effects. For example, you can have a long reverb on the 2 and the 4, and have short, cut off "ghost" notes playing in between. The effect is wonderfully artificial and "fake" sounding, but can lead to some very cool sounding rhythms if you play around with it enough.

Create New Rhythms Instantly in Stylus RMX

Spectrasonics's Stylus Rmx is a great piece of software for all things rhythm-oriented. It's a great way of centralizing your drum loops in a single place where you can experiment with layering, effects, and even the structure of the loops themselves. In the latest version, they added some great new features that allow you to produce instant variations on any loop to expand your options still further.

But, before this feature was added, I liked to experiment by triggering one loop's slices from another loop's MIDI file. This is kind of a variation on a trick I know a lot of fellow musicians used to do back in the day of hardware samplers. Just for the hell of it, I'd occasionally load up the sequences for a song, and then load in the wrong samples for each track to see if anything interesting came out of it. A lot of times it was garbage, but quite a few times it also produced something cool and unexpected. Here's how to do it in Stylus.

1. Open up an instance of Stylus RMX and select a loop.

2. Drag that loop from the MIDI file drag and drop window (the little blue box with the name of the loop in it) and drag the MIDI file from Stylus's interface to the software instrument track Stylus is assigned to in your DAW. This creates a MIDI file that will trigger the slices of your selected loop. As you can imagine, this gives you more flexibility with loops and allows you to actually edit them to your heart's content. But we're not interested in that for now. Hit play in your DAW and you should hear your loop play as expected.

3. Now, select another random loop in Stylus and hit play again. Stylus will trigger the slices from your newly-selected loop with the MIDI from the first loop you chose. You can keep selecting new loops until you find something interesting. Because every loop will have slices of varying lengths, often the results are very strange and off-kilter - perfect for IDM stuff. Some results will be more musically coherent than others, but remember if you get something that's cool, but not quite there yet, you can move notes around in the MIDI file using the piano roll editor in your DAW.

The more loops you have, the more variations and happy accidents await you!

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Part 7: Make a Hard Techno Kick in ES2

Logic's included ES2 synth is seriously underrated, especially given how old it is. I think a lot of people were put off by the kind of odd interface, and that's a shame because there is an amazing amount of firepower in this synth if you take the time to learn how to use it. Today, we're going to make a hard techno kick drum using ES2. Note, however, that you should be able to follow along with just about any modern virtual analog softsynth.

1. Create an AUDIO INSTRUMENT track and initiate an instance of ES2 in it. ES2 defaults to a very nice sounding synth sweep, but this is a bit far removed from the sound we're trying to create, so call up the preset CLASSIC HOUSE ORGAN from the 05 SYNTH KEYBOARDS folder.

2. We're only going to need one oscillator for our kick drum, so go ahead and disable OSCILLATORS 2 and 3 by clicking by clicking on the numbers next to each one until they go from green to grey. OSCILLATOR 1 is a simple sine wave, which is handy, because the lowly sine is the most useful waveform for synthesized kick drum sounds.

3. Before we get too far into this, let's deactivate some of the modulation routings we won't be needing. The MOD MATRIX is right below the OSCILLATOR section. In slots 2-4, go ahead and change the TARGET to 'OFF'. With that done, go to slot 1 and change the TARGET from CUTOFF to PITCH 1. This is telling ES2 that we're going to want to change the pitch of OSCILLATOR 1 with a modulator of some sort (the SOURCE). Right now it's set to ENV 2, but in the interest of keeping things simple, we're going to change it to ENV 1. ENVELOPE 1 is a simple attack/decay envelope which is very well suited for percussion sounds. If you play a few keys, you won't hear any modulation taking place. This is because you still need to set a MODULATION AMOUNT by using the green slider to the right of the SOURCE/TARGET window. Go ahead and set it around 89% of the way up. If you play some keys now, you'll hear a percussive 'chirp' at the start of the sound.

4. The sound doesn't decay like a drum, though. It still sustains like an organ. So go to ENVELOPE 3 (which is the AMPLITUDE ENVELOPE), and bring your S (for SUSTAIN) and TIME values down to 0. Go ahead and make sure the A (ATTACK) value is all the way down too. Set the D (DECAY) level to around 240ms and your R (RELEASE) value to around 350ms.
We're getting there, but it still doesn't sound like a big, menacing kick drum yet.

5. Part of the reason is because the pitch is too high. So go ahead and change the OCTAVE setting for OSCILLATOR 1 down to -36 semitones (3 octaves down). You should have something similar to a kick at this point, but totally lacking the nasty attitude.

6. Remedy this by cracking the SINE LEVEL (a suboscillator useful for adding low end to sounds) and the DISTORTION level all the way up. Set the TONE of the DISTORTION to about 50% to brighten it up. Make sure to turn the INTENSITY level for the Chorus/Flanger/Phaser all the way down too.

7. We're pretty close at this point, but you may notice an inconsistency in the punch of the kick each time you hit it. This is because the OSCILLATOR is in FREE RUN mode. This is useful for emulating old analog synths, but not so much when it comes to drum and percussion sound. To achieve the same quality every time, we need the OSCILLATORS to restart every time we hit a key, so select HARD from the little drop down menu located above the DISTORTION dial.

If you've done everything correctly, you should hear something like this:

Producing Breakbeats

There's no doubt that software has made working with sampled breaks in your music easier than ever. There's no more worrying about getting breaks in sync, no more worrying about time-stretching the proper amount, or any of the other garbage that used to be required when sampling was still in its infancy. One problem that has remained, however, is that a break is a single entity on a single track - meaning that if you want to apply compression, EQ, or effects, you have to do it to the entire break. Or do you?

Normally, when you're producing real or MIDI drums, you can record each instrument on its own track so they can each be effected individually without effecting the other parts. You might want to put some reverb on your snare, but you don't want it on your hats or your kick. Or maybe you want to boost the low end of your kick, but that ends up making your snare sound boxy and unnatural. If you've got a program like Propellerheads' Recycle (and if you're working with breakbeats, you probably ought to be), the solution is actually quite simple. Here's how to do it:

1. Prepare your breakbeat in Recycle, making sure all the slice points are nice and tight and where they should be. Save it as a REX file and be sure to use the EXPORT command to create the corresponding MIDI file to trigger the slices in your DAW of choice.

2. Bring the REX file into whatever sampling or looping instrument you prefer. I like Spectrasonics Stylus RMX. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to describe this process on a simple beat consisting of kick, snare, and hi-hat parts. Obviously, more complex arrangements just require an expanded version of this same technique.

3. Duplicate the instrument track your sampler or loop player is on so that you have 3 tracks, all corresponding to the same sampler or loop player. Next, make 3 copies of your beat's MIDI file, moving one to each of the 3 tracks you just created.

4. Open up whatever you DAW's grid editor is on the first track and find all the notes that trigger kick slices. Delete everything else. Repeat the process with the next track, but this time delete everything except the hi-hat part. Finally, move to your third track and remove everything that isn't a snare.

5. You can now record each part on its own audio track where it can be given its own compression, EQ, and effects settings just as if you had recorded a real drum kit.

Obviously, there are going to be instances where multiple parts are playing at the same time (a closed hat and kick hitting at the same time). Don't worry about this. Just separate the parts our as best you can, and you will have a lot more flexibility to properly produce the loop and although it might not be perfect, it'll sound a lot better than it would if you just tried to produce the loop as a single part.

Want to get really crazy? Give each slice its own track and effects settings for extremely intricate special effects!

Rolling Your Own Drum Sounds Part 5: Self-Oscillation - It's Not as Dirty as it Sounds...

In the previous chapter of this series of tutorials, I took you through the process of making a synthesizer kick drum using a sine wave and a pitch envelope. But that isn't the only way to synthesize a kick. If you've got a hardware or software synth that has filters that self-oscillate, you've got another option.

The filters people work most with these days are much more likely to be non-self-oscillating filters, but on many older synthesizers, it was possible to set a resonance level on the filter that was so high, that it would cause the filter to oscillate at an audible frequency - even if you're not feeding any actual oscillators through it. So why is not as common to see filters with that capability these days? The down side of self-oscillating filters is that sometimes the output levels can unpredictably spike to ear-splitting, potentially speaker-damaging levels. So here's your warning. It might not be a bad idea to strap a limiter across your master bus to prevent any... unpleasantness. Or at least work with your volume at a conservative level.

One software synth that features filters that will self-oscillate is GMedia's Minimonsta, an emulation of the famous Minimoog (the original of which, of course, also has filters that self-oscillate), so that is what I will be using in this example.

1. Call up a mono instance of Minimonsta. Although not a hard, fast rule, when working with really bassy sounds, it is best to keep them in mono.

2. We won't need any of the oscillators here, so go ahead and turn them off by clicking the three blue buttons on the MIXER panel that correspond to each oscillator's volume knobs. When you press a few keys now, you should hear no sound coming out.

3. Next, head on over to the filter section and turn the CUTOFF FREQ knob all the way down, closing the filter.

4. Now set the AMOUNT OF CONTOUR (also known as ENVELOPE AMOUNT on many synths) knob to about 50%. This controls how much the filter envelope modulates (ie opens and closes) the filter.

5. Now, turn the up EMPHASIS knob (simply another name for RESONANCE) slowly, and as you get into the 60% and above area, you should start to hear the filter self-oscillate.

6. What kind of sound you are hearing depends on how your FILTER ENVELOPE settings are, so let's make sure those are where they need to be. ATTACK TIME should be set to 0% (1 ms), DECAY TIME should be set to about 50% (525 ms), and your SUSTAIN LEVEL can be turned down to 0%. If you've set everything up correctly, you should be hearing a pretty nice, vaguely 909-ish kick drum.

7. The fun part comes in experimenting. Playing with the CUTOFF FREQUENCY will take you out of kick drum territory and into more chirpy, 'laser gun' territory. Playing with the AMOUNT OF COUNTOUR knob will keep the sound in the bassy end, but will increase the filter sweep, resulting in brighter, bloopier, attack portions to the sound. And messing with your DECAY TIME knob in the FILTER ENVELOPE section with let you change your sound from something light and tight, to something sustaining and boomy, like the famous 808 kick.

Make recordings of different settings, and import them into your samplers or drum sample player of choice. Try combining them with each other, or other drum sounds in your library and you've got an almost limitless supply of synthetic kick drums to keep you busy for quite some time.

Stupid REX Tricks

If you do any work at all with drum loops, chances are, you've probably worked with Propellerheads's REX2 file format. Because there is always a MIDI file associated with a REX2 to ensure the beat slices play back in time, it allows you to do all sorts of things to manipulate and change the existing drum loop.

Obviously, changing the order of slices and making new beats is the most frequent use, but you can do some more subtle stuff as well that can change the feel of a beat in useful ways.


One such manipulation is changing the gate time of the slices. "Gate time" simply means how long a note sounds (in this case those notes are triggering the individual beat slices). By shortening the gate time (I use Logic's handy Region parameters box which has a section for altering the gate time of a MIDI region by a percentage...), you can do everything from cutting off reverb tails on heavily effected beats to creating artificially choppy rhythms where each note cuts off abruptly. Here's an audio example where the first two bars are with the gate set at the normal 100%, followed by 2 bars at 75%, 2 bars at 50%, and finally 2 bars at 25%.



If you REALLY want to get tweaky, go into the grid editor and adjust the gate lengths of each individual note by different amounts for more complex, funkier effects.

When Beat-Slicing Goes Wrong

For nearly 15 years (holy crap, can it be that long?!), Propellerhead's REX (and subsequent REX 2) format has been the industry standard for chopping up drum loops. The files, created in the company's ReCycle software automatically detects attack transients in a sound file and uses that as the basis for cutting the loop up into its individual hits. It can also automatically create a MIDI file for you to import into your DAW of choice to play the sliced loop back perfectly. As you might imagine, this MIDI data is totally editable, which means you can edit and twist the beats into totally new variations that nature never intended.

What's cool about this, is that the MIDI file is in no way 'married' to the original beat. So one method of coming up with interesting 'happy accidents' is to use the MIDI file from one beat, to trigger the slices of a completely different beat. The results are totally unpredictable, so it takes a lot of trial and error before you're likely to find something that works well, but that's half the fun. Have a go at it, and you might come up with a killer new loop that inspires you to finish that track you've been putting off finishing.

Resuscitate Your Drum Tracks

As electronic musicians, it's a simple fact that by the nature of the software we use to sequence our music, we are trained to think in terms of patterns.  With the rise of loop-based software such as Ableton Live or Sony Acid, this mindset may have become even more prevalent.  And there's nothing wrong with that per se.  

The trouble is, it often restricts the way we think when we're programming drums.  Instead of seeing the 'big picture' of the song as a whole, we may see it as a series of shorter patterns.  The temptation can sometimes be to simply cut and paste these various patterns to the different parts of the song and call it a day.  This can lead to the dreaded Lazy Drum Programming Syndrome (or LDPS - we're planning a benefit telethon next year...).

A technique I have been using in recent years to avoid this is to instead think of the entire song as one linear piece and program my drums accordingly.  Here's what I mean...

When I am writing a track, I usually put a 'dummy' drum track in place to write the music around.  This is not, as the name might suggest, a mentally deficient rhythm track, it just means that it's just there to keep the beat while I write the song.  This can be a drum loop, a simple 4 on the floor pattern, or something similar.

Once I have the basic structure of the song laid out, it's time to get in and work out the details.  It's at this point that I begin to replace the dummy drum track.  But instead of doing this on a pattern per pattern basis, I'll take each part (such as the snare, for example) and play it live along with the track for the entire length of the track... essentially 'jamming' with the sequencer as a real drummer might.  (A set of drum pads can be really useful for this.)

This lets you 'feel' the music a bit and respond accordingly with your playing of fills and the like, but better yet, since you are human (presumably) you're not going to play every part exactly the same, so your track ends up having more variation and is a lot more interesting to listen to.  Now, that whole 'human' thing also means you're going to screw up and that some of your ideas will be completely crappy.  That's what editing is for. 

Go through your track, and figure out which parts work, and which just don't.  Cut out the bad stuff, and either play that part again, or replace it with something from elsewhere on your track.  In fact, it's not a bad idea to record several 'takes' of yourself playing the track the whole way through and using that to build a composite of the best bits.

Of course, you can take this idea too far.  You want your drum track to have some sort of consistency and logic to it as well (unless you're Aphex Twin or something, and if you can play THAT live, hats off to you!).  Start out just trying it with the snare part.  Keep in mind that some drum sounds, such as the kick & snare or the open & closed hihats work by interacting together, so consider, for example, recording your kick and snare part at the same time, so they make sense together.  Oftentimes all it takes is a more 'live' snare part, and perhaps hihat parts to make a HUGE difference in the energy and feel of your drum tracks.

So give it a try.  It might not be the right choice for everyone, but actually playing your beats instead of just programming them can lead to whole new ideas you might not have come up with otherwise, and that's never a bad thing.  Escape the tyranny of the grid!

Creating New Drum Sounds Using Battery's Pitch Envelope

Until I had actually used it, Native Instrument's Battery drum sampler was one of those things I thought wouldn't be all that useful to me (I had received it as part of the Native Instruments Komplete package). After all, I had been using regular old samplers for my drums for years. After giving it a try, however, I found it really did help my workflow and efficiency when working with drums. Because it is aimed at drum and percussion oriented sounds, it pares down the features to include just those that are useful to working with those types of sounds. Thus, screen clutter is cut down, and you spend less time sorting through stuff you don't need to get to the stuff you do.
One of the cool features of Battery is the pitch envelope. It's useful for turning raw synth waveforms into percussive sounds, but if you work with it enough, it can actually be useful for transforming existing drum samples into something quite different from the original material.
To try it out, do the the following (please note I am using Battery 2, so the layout in Battery 3, may be a bit different:
1.) Load a drum sound into one of the cells and make sure that cell is selected for editing.
2.) Find the pitch envelope in the lower right hand corner and hit the 'on/off' switch so it glows yellow.
3. ) Now use the D1, B, and D2 parameters to adjust the shape of the envelope as you trigger the cell to hear the changes you are making. Short, sharp envelope shapes will often 'punch up' the drum sound, while longer ones can stretch out sounds in strange, unnatural ways.
4.) If you have a basic envelope shape you like, but it seems too extreme, simply dial back the 'Amount' parameter.

Below is a quick and dirty example where I have taken a heavy, distorted 909 kick and used the pitch envelope to transform it into a tighter, more synthetic kick. The original sound is first, with the pitch envelope version afterwards...

Production Tip: Generating Rhythms With Tape Delay

I do a lot of remixing and as such, I am always looking for new ways to come up with loops and rhythms that can enhance a track's danceability. Last year I did a remix for the AFI side-project Blaqk Audio in which I used a tape delay effect to create a rhythmic loop in the intro. This technique is actually quite an easy way to create unique, textured loops to your music and could just as easily be applied to non-dance forms of music (for example, using slow note values to contribute to an ambient piece...). I'm using Logic in the example, but you should be able to recreate the results in just about any DAW with a tape delay effect.

1.) Select a snippet of audio. This can be literally anything, but for best results you want something that has some rhythmic content to it such as a drum loop or a vocal. You only need about 1 bar's worth of material.
2.) On your effects inserts, insert a Tape Delay.
3.) The only tweak here that is absolutely required is to boost your feedback level to around 56 or so. This ensures that the delays will repeat over and over. Also set the note value of the delays to whole or half notes. You can use smaller divisions as well, but they don't yield useful results as often. Additionally, I usually like to tweak the high cut or low cut values so that each repetition evolves a little bit. Finally, make sure your project's tempo is the BPM of the project you are creating the loops for.
4.) Now bounce the audio. If you've set your feedback level correctly, it should repeat for just about as long as you want it to, so you should bounce out about 20 seconds or so to give yourself a variety of potential loops to choose from.
5.) Import the audio to the project you are using the loop for and assign it to a track. The bar lines on your DAW's timeline will now mark start and end points for possible loops. Go through and listen until you find a section you think has potential. Once you have, make cuts at the start and end point, delete the extra, and work with the loop as always. If your loop evolves a lot, there is no reason you can't use the whole piece too. Whatever works!

Below are two really quick and dirty examples. The first features delays created from a drum loop. There is a bar of the loop by itself, followed by a few bars over a beat and with sidechain compression applied for the pumping effect. The second was created from a snippet of vocals. Again, it starts with the loop by itself, and then goes over a beat with sidechain pumping, and some light tremelo for the auto-pan effect. Towards the end I added a little rhythmic filtering. Remember... this loop can just be the starting point for something. Don't be afraid to mangle it further with more effects.

What Does a $5,000 Drum Machine Sound Like?

Meet the Drum Buddy, the creation of a New Orleans-based musician going by the name of Quintron. What makes it unique is that the drum sounds are triggered by light. I'm not sure the sounds it produces are all that useful (especially for the asking price), but apparently he has sold 44 of them, so hats off to him!

Free Drum Samples

You can never have too many drum sounds. Good thing then, that the fine folks over at Atom Splitter Audio are giving away 48 free drum and percussion sounds. And while you're there, check out their growing selection of other free sounds.

Useful Logic Tip: Demix by Note Pitch

One of the things I love about computer-based recording and sequencing is that for any one thing you want to do, there are probably 5 different ways of achieving it. This allows you to work in a way that suits you best, thus streamlining your workflow.
A good example of this is drum programming. Some people out there prefer to program drums the old-fashioned way using step/grid programming. I've always found this a bit restrictive, though, and find I get much better results from simply playing out the rhythms manually using my drum pads or a synth keyboard. This method can present a problem of its own, however. If you've programmed the entire beat all in one pass, you can't solo the individual drum sounds so they can each be quantized, recorded and processed separately (compression, EQ). Yes, you could play in one part at a time, but I find that playing the snare and kick in the same pass at the very least leads to much more natural sounding results, especially with fills. Luckily, Logic has a feature that solves this problem. Select the MIDI region that has your beat in it and select Region > Split/Demix > Demix by Note Pitch, and Logic will put each drum sound on its own track, thus allowing you to record and process each sound individually. By the way, this feature is cool to use on melodies as well. Play in a melody and demix by note pitch as above. Now, assign each of the newly created tracks to a different synth. You can use subtlely different sounds for a more complex/'alive' sounding riff, or you can go nuts and use drastically different sounds for a sort of Trentemøller effect.