my drums fucking suck

st420

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i cant get the beats i want. looked around everywhere for help with writing breaks an cant find it..

having trouble writing just the standard sort of amen break. can someone recommend a good video or something. just dont know where to lay out all the percussive elements.

can anyone be fucked helping me out haha? pleease
 
find your self a break to work on. there is plenty in the breaks exhange thread on this forum (production page)

Make sure its the right bpm, like 170-180.

so load ur break up in your DAW (which are you using?)

find the elements of the break that you like, so eg, do you like the highs? lows? mids? all of it?
then you need to find some hits to layer over the top of it.
so you will need 2-3 kicks, 2-3 snares, hihats, random clicks (for a bit of variety) and anything else you wanna chuck in.

eg. So you have your break, and you are keeping the mids of it. this means will need to replace the low ends and the high ends (in theory). you will have to add in kicks, maybe some more snares. for the high ends add some shakers, hi hats, rides etc etc.

you could add some compression on certain parts, make it a bit more 'beefy'
add some reverb to your snares
put in some ghost notes to give it a bit more shuffle? (these are quiet notes on offbeats)

the list is endless...
 
I think you might have understood something wrong in "writing breaks". The amen is in fact a sampled part from a 1970's funk tune "amen brother" by The Winstons. It hasn't been created with drum machines or by combining samples to each other. There are tons of versions floating about, and most people also process the break to their own liking, adding a bit there or removing a part there like TongueFlap said. IMO there's nothing wrong in using sampled breaks in your tracks, as long as you process and layer it enough to make it your own. For example, using the snare from a classic break "Action" and then combining a flat kick with a distorted short decayed 909 kick instantly brings on that oldschool techstep sound. You could even use the hihats from "Scorpio" in there to give it more life. Just an example.
 
Listen to TongueFlap........the man speaks sense!

haha :D i do make some sense occasionally....

but yeh.. make a new beat, make it original. I 'borrow' breaks all the time and chop them up to death. tis all good..

I dont think i have ever made a break thinking i want it to sound like this & that. I just go with it and keep eq'ing and adding untill it sounds good. I do things really incorrect tho... like sending my drums to another channel (duplicating) then adding a compressor to that duplicated channel. and then turn it down, so you just get a bit of punch. seems odd but it works a treat
 
Tongue flap is correct, the only thing i would add is when im working on drums, i will find a decent break, then cut out the kick and snare and make your kick and snare work with the break.

Also as my tracks progress instead of finding new breaks every time, i just load up a previous track ive made, solo the drums, then delete the kick and snare from them and bounce it.

Now i have an original loop that i have created, then i high pass it to fill out the drums in the new track ive started.

There is sooooooo many different things you can do to make your drums "your drums" most important thing is be original.
 
I do things really incorrect tho... like sending my drums to another channel (duplicating) then adding a compressor to that duplicated channel. and then turn it down, so you just get a bit of punch. seems odd but it works a treat
Nah man, if it works and it sounds good it's not wrong.
Things are only 'wrong' when people want to sell you something anyway.
 
like sending my drums to another channel (duplicating) then adding a compressor to that duplicated channel. and then turn it down, so you just get a bit of punch. seems odd but it works a treat

This.

It's a surprisingly popular method, called parallel compression - You have a dry signal mixed with a compressed signal. This is why I like the PSP mixpressor plugin for drums, it has a built in mix level knob just for that purpose.
 
Really 3 kicks?

Snares i can understand, especially with longer songs/live sets.

-Andy

yeh man, i always use 3, i eq different parts of them to make a new one.

so i take the low of one, mid of one and the punch of another. makes a nice kick. but this is jus my ways of working.
 
This.

It's a surprisingly popular method, called parallel compression - You have a dry signal mixed with a compressed signal. This is why I like the PSP mixpressor plugin for drums, it has a built in mix level knob just for that purpose.

i knew that... hahah yeh rite. I should of known the name of that tho
 
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