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Crispy drums

Started by jv2612, November 20, 2012, 03:49:42 AM

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jv2612

Hey! Does anyone knows how to get that crispy drum sounds like Shellback, Martin and Blanco? Are there any sample packs with similar sounds? Thanks!! :)

Joshua

It might be worth checking out some of the XLN Audio Addictive Drums packs, seeings we now know Max is involved with the company. But aside from that, I definitely think a lot of those sounds are "bit crushed" to give them the crispy sound you're talking about. The drums in "Inside Out" by Britney are a good example.

Dominik

Hey! I think it's a mixture of good sounding samples and compression / eq / hallrooms...

Obviously the drums are mixed in a drum group that is also compressed together
so they glue and sound like one kit . You can also eq this group track to give it more bottom and
high frequencies. I do this also in my mixes. It really gives power to the drums.
Then there's another thing called parallel compression where you send amounts of
every kitpiece to another bus and smash them really heavy together with a compressor
and mix it to the original drum track a lot quieter of course. Gives it a sort of atmosphere and room
really subtle though!!!


Joshua

Good mix tips! I thought maybe jv2612 was talking about the overly popular digital distortion that's being used at the moment (thanks to dubstep's influence). Either way, you'll find plenty of samples around that are bit crushed, and there are even sampled acoustic drum kits that are already compressed and equalized if that's not your strong point.

jv2612

I'm talking about mainly drums like Drop Dead Beautiful or Dynamite, or something like Shellback's last works with martin (Your Body as example)


Thanks for the tips also!!

Joshua

Definitely check out something like the "Reel Machines" Adpak for Addictive Drums. Of course you have to have Addictive Drums to make use of the samples, but the site says they come bundled for $209 if that's in your ball park. If not there are plenty of other similar electro packs out there. But have a listen to some of the demos for this pack, and remember it's just a small taste of what will be available to you. Most of Max, Shellback and Luke's drums are layered beyond belief with snare hits, hand claps, finger clicks and what not. So if you start with a good electro kit and build up some layers, you will definitely be on your way.

http://www.xlnaudio.com/en/products/view/15

growapear

Drum sound is definitely an issue for me, but I can't see myself being able to buy Addictive Drums any (life)time soon.

In fact, being lucky enough to have an acoustic drum kit on hand, I'm thinking about trying to sample my own kit. Obviously the unaltered natural sound won't be acceptable for pop production, but with a heavy amount of compression, EQ, layering (eventually) and whatever else I can put it through, I'm very interested to see how my end result turns out.

I think my best chance of getting anything half-decent from the process is probably with kick drum samples, as an acoustic snare will probably always sound a bit natural* no matter what.

The big plus from this process, as I see it, is that it's *not* midi :D so hopefully the fact that they are audio samples means they'll be at least a bit fat sounding!




*pop music no-no! ;)

LG

I can pretty much get all drums sound the same like them  :)
That's what they use to get huge drum sounds:

Tons Layering
If you had one kick. They have 8 or nine. Each kick is there for a reason. Either to give the drums a more roomy sound, more bottom. Whatever is needed.

Same with layering for the snare hihats etc.

Panning
I've seen some productions of Max Martin and know they're panning things a lot to get a wider and bigger sound.

Parallel Compression
This has already been mentioned above. Simply strap a compressor over a duplicate of the drum tracks and compress things really hard. Fade in smoothly just to get a larger and tighter drum sound. Keep in mind, that they use outboard gear to process their drums which helps a lot to get a fatter sound.

Sounds
Start with quality and superb pre-mixed samples. I've heard some of Max Drum Samples and they're all already EQd and fit nicely together. As said each sound does add something. Whether it brings a bigger bottom or crispy attack sound. Sometimes I hear pretty old samples layered. Max by the way once said that he's lazy and uses the same drums over and over again and simply adds something new from time to time.

With these tips and hard work you should be able to get all drum sounds like them.

Joshua

Quote from: growapear on November 22, 2012, 03:42:34 PM
The big plus from this process, as I see it, is that it's *not* midi :D so hopefully the fact that they are audio samples means they'll be at least a bit fat sounding!

Remember though that MIDI is just the means of communicating between devices, so even to trigger your samples you're still using MIDI. :D I know what you're getting at though, it's better to use sampled real instruments rather than synth generated ones! If you're talking about acoustic drum sounds then I'd agree for sure. But as far as electro sounding stuff goes, it's pretty much all synth generated anyway. If you wanted to record a pop/rock track, you could do everything with samples and synths (except for guitars I'd say) and get amazing results. Studios can spend days just tuning and micing a kit to get what they're after, so I'm more than happy to use samples instead haha.

pete729

After a few hours of experimenting on drum sounds, all I can say is that it takes a combination of acoustic and electronic drums and serious amount of layering. I would use real drums but I lack the time to get to the studio. For my part I used Toontrack's Superior Drummer2 and specifically I used the Electronic EZX and Vintage & custom kit and had them multi out in separate aux tracks in Pro Tools. Also used some Boom for the snare sounds. After that I used heavy compression (bomb-factory and some limiters) on each kit and some EQ and additional comp. like iZotope Alloy2 and L2. I tried the same pattern with other acoustic kits afterwards and pretty much I made a pretty similar drum sound, I'd say closer to Shellback's drum sounds.

growapear

#10
@pete729

I finally got round to recording some samples from my acoustic kit today and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

I messed around with differing drum head/ reso head tightness, micing and room ambience (or lack of) to try and get a variety of sounds, and I tried to make them sound as good as possible before *anything* had been done from Plug-Ins as I am a firm believer in the necessity to start out with good sounds!

The kick samples I liked I then layered (only 3 or 4 for now) and managed to occupy a decent frequency range, but whether it sounds good sitting in a track remains to be seen. Very happy overall, and I was amazed at how electronic the samples sounded after just EQing.

I also tried recording snare samples, which I had less optimism about. These came out Ok but for now I can't shake the natural sound of an acoustic snare. I mic'd the bottom to really get the 'snares' and was pleased with that, which has given me some nice, trebly 'military' snare type samples which I'll try and throw in somewhere.

rhythmic5

"If you had one kick. They have 8 or nine. Each kick is there for a reason. Either to give the drums a more roomy sound, more bottom. Whatever is needed."

be careful though when layering kicks, lower frequencies are really easy to phase cancel and you could lose a lot of punch from layering the wrong sounds. sometimes it's better to use one kick for the bass layer, and then high pass all other layers to mitigate phase problems.

i think everyone in the kemosabe/maratone camp uses bit crushing on a lot of their drums/synths... I don't know why they like it so much :-P but it appears on their bass guitars, kick/snare samples, even vocals.

since addictive drums are being mentioned — i think most of the songs mentioned in this thread do not actually use addictive drums samples (don't quote me on this though hehe), it sounds mostly like single shots rather than library drums.

if you want to sound like benny/shellback/max/luke etc, single shot samples are the way to go. a cool tip: if you have a drum library like addictive drums, mute all of the 'mics' besides the room/overhead, and layer that behind your single shot samples (good for chorus sections, or any part that needs a more open drum sound).

LG

Quote from: rhythmic5 on February 23, 2013, 01:37:44 PM
"If you had one kick. They have 8 or nine. Each kick is there for a reason. Either to give the drums a more roomy sound, more bottom. Whatever is needed."

be careful though when layering kicks, lower frequencies are really easy to phase cancel and you could lose a lot of punch from layering the wrong sounds. sometimes it's better to use one kick for the bass layer, and then high pass all other layers to mitigate phase problems.

You sure should know what you do when playing with techniques the PROs do.


Quote from: rhythmic5 on February 23, 2013, 01:37:44 PM
i think everyone in the kemosabe/maratone camp uses bit crushing on a lot of their drums/synths... I don't know why they like it so much :-P but it appears on their bass guitars, kick/snare samples, even vocals.

Because distortion makes sounds more present in a mix. especially bass. on synths it adds a dirty sound which makes boring synths sound more interesting.

J_A24

#13
Compression EQ and subtle distortion (Overdrive), specially on the high frequency stuff.

You can make a sub channel filter out lows and keep everything above 1k and then add any distortion effect to it and play with the send knob to add the effect to any sound.

DSonthebeat

I used a Vengeance kick and a snareclap in the verse and layered with Addictive Drums to make it bigger in the chorus in this pop track I made

https://soundcloud.com/danielsilvestri/go-crazy

I'm not a huge fan of layering but it is really necessary, but, as Rhytmic5 said, be careful because it's easy to think it sounds more powerful only because you hear it louder or because it's hitting the master limiter harder than a single one... that's why they compress in parallel and CLIP the drum buss in mixing, not in mastering. But the low frequency mess you'll end up with will make your kick weaker in the end ;) make those subs clean as you can and filter anything else (layered kicks too). I filtered the subs of the acoustic drums in that track, wild filtering can make you lose the "glue" (and no, you won't have it back with a 2K$ hardware compressor) but you have to make some order, you can't just throw in a zillion drum hits hoping that it will eventually sound good, just find those 2-3 sounds that perfectly fit together and that's it, quantity doesn't replace quality.

my2cents
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."