Percussion Techniques

E

Equilizyme

Member
Joined
Jan 23, 2012
Hello,

I am basically new to the forum, and I usually produce psytrance, but I have been surfing your guys forum for a few days looking for tips on percussion processing. Drum n' bass has bad ass percs and is basically all about the percs and the beat (and bass too i guess but lets lesave that alone for the moment :) )

anyway, I am wondering if you guys have any good tips for me relevant to percussion processing and/or mixing percussion with the rest of the sounds in the mix.

hope this leads to some good discussion.
 
Welcome to the forum mate!

Basically EQ and layer , use funk breaks to add some nice shuffles etc, bit of compression and maybe some verb on the high end.

icicle makes a pretty cool drum loop in his masterclass tut http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhffW5rlbUA&feature=related the drum parts starts towards the end of this vid

Also there are some other threads on this topic which will prob give you more info, have a search around.
 
recording your own is loads of fun and gives you your own unique sound imo

one thing which can lead to some really good results is making a percussion loop/ track independent of the rest of the track, that way you are less likely to fall into the same traps you might normally do and come up with something really cool

also using "found" sounds instead of specific percussion sounds clinks and donks and stuff
 
yogi - thanks for the link! i wil continue searching the threads

oversight - good call about the independent loops i will try that. and the donks :) for sure all electronic music can benefit from some good bonks and clicks!

How about placing the sounds in the mix? Especially for things like bongos where there are multiple drum sounds that can easily be masked, I was thinking to route the masking sounds through a buss and then use a multiband compressor with a side chain to duck just the freqs of the masks where the bongos are present on each bongo hit. Do you guys do things like this? or just eq the stuff together and call it good? maybe i am overthinking this....
 
tbh mate i dont really use bongos that much, i know what youre saying they are quite frequency rich, so they could clash, id say eq rather than sidechaining, and i think you might be overthinking it a bit :D just try some stuff out and see what works/ what sounds good
 
Welcome to the forum man! Since I've been playing drum set 10 years now I find myself using a lot of tricks real drummers use. For instance ghost noting certain sounds, but sliding the ghost note just a touch out of time to make it more "human". Also don't be afraid of layering kicks and if you want to ghost note a kick only use part of the full kick layer =) As people have already stated recording your own is also mad fun and just takes you down a whole other creative path so I recommend experimenting with as many different ways as you can.
 
yeah what red raven said, one technique that i use especially when making garage or dubstep is to loop a bar or a couple of bars then turn of the grid then slide the perc/ hihat hits around until you get a nice "realistic" groove, also altering velocity, if you were hitting a hihat cymbal with a drum stick you wouldnt hit it exactly as hard with each hit, vary it and it will sound more natural
 
High Passed breaks/loops can give some interesting effects, just make sure you find the right ones
 
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