How to make my drums much larger than life when producing more minimal dnb

shaunlee0

New Member
Joined
Nov 28, 2011
Hi there wondered if anyone had any tips to make my drums a bit bigger and heavier. Using logic but any general production advice would be appreciated.
 
Can you post up an example?

I like minimal because you can really get obsessive over the timbres and movement of reverb. I'll often bus my delays and reverbs to separate channels to have more control on panning, eq or even resample and crossfade between two reverbs eq'd or filtered differently.
 
Add a dash of distortion to the midrange freqs. Short reverb can help them sound 'bigger' also.
 
Seperate compression of individual hits can bring stuff to life, then send to bus with small parallel compression to glue them. Also stereo spread the high end of the bus to give extra fullness. Careful Sample delay can be used on hats too with minimal tunes to make it sound 'larger'
 
Check the phase correlation when using stereo effects. Especially with sample delay. Stick a phase correlation meter on your master to monitor it. Poor correlation will cause cancellations when played in mono.

I use a combination of compression, limiting and subtle distortion. Is tick a short reverb on sends as well and apply it to various hits
 
Whenever I layer drum hits on top of eachother I pick out samples with different attributes and EQ out whatever overlap there might be to minimize cancellations.

Then I usually add a little distortion to each hit, bus them together and add a little distortion to them all together, maybe a hint of reverb depending on the kind of instrument, sometimes one layer in the hit is given a little added processing; a subtle flanger or something for added movement.
 
distortion is the one, also there's some sample packs that have been put through tape, they're quite nicely saturated.

layering drums with "real drum" samples is good too, sometimes i have some shitty live snares under quite processed ones.

parallel compression.

old hardcore records
 
Don't neglect the rest of the track or muddiness will have it sounding crap. sidechain your bass if you want an impacting kick. EQ the lows out of the reverbs you use.

it really depends what you're after. I usually apply a little loudness using a multiband compressor, saturators etc tend to leave it sounding crap. and leave out anything that sounds generally light and fluffy like synth strings if you want it sounding deep and chunky - think about the track as a whole, not a single element.
 
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