The snare that will punch shit out of you

Meiosis said:
is it me or does camelcrusher have a tendency to sound ultra distorted really fast ?
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For snares, yeah. You've got to be really gentle with it.
I think saturation is a bit better for drums, rather than full on distortion.
 
If you hold one key (I think shift) you can make finer adjustments to controls, which is very useful sometimes.
 
I agree about using saturation over distortion. The only time I seem to use distortion is on the top end when using multi band. When I make my own drums I use either Massive or Operator to get an initial snare sound, render it to audio, then mess with the transient a little bit (by hand for now, until I get a quality transient shaper). I generally layer up two or three instances of the same sound with two manipulated ones for lows and punch and then one I don't touch. Lastly, I sometimes layer up an acoustic snare sample and throw the whole thing through return channels that compress the lows, mids, and highs.
 
Well saturation is a form of distortion, but not as extreme. From my understanding it compresses the "clipping" audio source as to where distortion just "overloads" the audio signal. I am still learning a lot so I wouldn't quote me on that though haha. But I'm pretty sure everyone is referring to plugins rather than the type of effect though.
 
Meiosis said:
is it me or does camelcrusher have a tendency to sound ultra distorted really fast ?
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When you load it up it's already loaded with an extreme preset. A lot of Plugins do it, probably to create that 'wow' factor for people who are just getting into music production.

Just set all the controls to zero, save the preset as 'Blank' or whatever and go from there. I do this with any plug in that doesn't have a blank setting as I'm not a fan of using pre sets
 
Multiband processing is your friend, and chopping the snare up into the attack part and sustain part also is your friend. you don't need to layer many things for the attack of the snare, just make sure it's very full and it cracks (3k to 6k is where it really needs to shine). for the sustain you can get real creative and layer all sorts of percussion and whatnot, you can get really great "hollow" sounding stuff like portis head or noisia with multiband distortion and eq
 
I don't know if it has been mentioned yet but sometimes you can really enhance percussion by using enveloped filters.

Try layering a band passed copy that sweeps down the sample and hits the fundamental. Add resonance to taste, or even envelope that as well.


Especially important with drums is making sure all layers and parallel chains are in phase. As soon as you start paralleling things you run into phase problems like you wouldn't believe, especially in something like Ableton with piss poor PDC.

Personally, I bounce down things as soon as I can so they can be put in phase by hand aligning the waveforms.

There are some handy plugins that will tell you the phase difference in samples or ms between two different audio sources. Using this info you can then adjust the phase manually using either a delay plugin like this or something like Ableton's track delay feature.
 
Snares may be really hard, but claps are stupidly easy...

1. Record yourself clapping

2. Add distortion.

:D
 
Russla-DJ said:
ha what a retard, I only use audio these days. safety
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I used to just use audio but I find using the esx24 is useful for pitching drums. I'll have two snares playing and I'll adjust the pitch on one until it is in key or until it sounds good.

Then I'll bounce it after.
 
Don't get me wrong I pitch stuff using Waves Soundshifter then bounce out, just never modulated the pitch within the sample itself.
 
I use both, find the sampler great for getting breaks etc in key.

Beware of the waves sound shifter, despite being a "small" plugin it's quite cpu hungry. So bounce dat Shieeet.
 
Is it advised to use distortion on snare´s punch?(in terms of layers it would be the lowest layer in 200-400Hz region) For me it sounds like it is enhancing the punch but at the same time it may sound weird?
 
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