Trick for making heavy drums

D

D@MO

New Member
Joined
Mar 26, 2013
Heres a trick I stumbled across a few years ago that I've used a couple of times to get really rough heavy gritty sounding drums when working at a lower tempo. Not sure if anyone else has tried this but its really simple and works a treat providing you pick the right sort of drum hits.

Pick your drum shots (kick, hat and snare - no other percussion needed) and compose a drum loop at double the tempo you are going to be working at. Bounce it down to audio and import back into the DAW.

Change the project tempo back down to the correct speed and time stretch your imported drum loop to match the new slower tempo. Now layer the original drum hits you used on top of your new timestretched break. Add any extra percussion elements you want and process as usual.

As long as you mix the drum break well with the other one shots you should get really heavy thumping sounding drums. Cheers.
 
isnt that just doubling your drums?
i mean in effect you have the same drums but twice? or maybe ive not understood it properly
my trick for heavy drums is double yer drums but have a <50ms delay on one set - pan one set hard left one hard right.
 
Nah man - it's more like layering over an old break. You're right it's the same drums but it's the timestretching thing gives it a real heavy crunching sounding quality. Not sure you'd be able replicate that by doubling.
 
Texture change. Interesting idea anyway, I might give it a go and see what results I get.

I recently did something with a kick drum I made where I rebounced it down as a single audio one shot and reimported it back, pitched the kick up an octave before layering it back with the original. It was also off-centred as this seemed to give a better sound.

With the panning technique you'd definitely wanna watch those phase issues though. Check it out in mono first, especially if it's creeping into midrange or lower frequencies.
 
I'll try it when I get back home, I'm quite possibly wrong, but doesn't writing something on a sped up tempo and stretching it back to the tempo you want it to be on the song, make it normal again? As if you had just written it in the tempo of the song the whole time? How does it change the sound?

(Edit) Something I do with heavier range DNB is timestrech the snare samples the tiniest bit, specially with metal snares, and you get a ridiculous ammount of sounds from it.
 
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Time stretching does make good textures and makes for some unpredictable outcomes. I saw something posted on another forum (IDMf) where someone uses ultra time stretched sounds and duplicates the channels then automates a faling pitch while adding a rising pitch on the other layer to create some interesting rises and falls. It really did make for some cool sounding fx.
 
or there is that "new york compression"
Where you duplicate your drums - but compress the shit out of one set and mix them together.
i think thats what it is
 
You can dirty them up with some distortion or overdrive. Whack something like NI's Driver on them and the result is some crunchy heaviness.
 
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