Best Effects for layered drum samples?

H

Heated

New member
Anybody, what do you use on your kick or snare drums to give em a nice thick, normal sound? What settings do you have your compressor at and do you use any other effects? Thanks
 
Kicks often can be high pass filtered at 40 hz, high shelf cut around 10 khz, and some sharp cut in the unnecessary low mids around 250-500 hz. Wherever it sounds bad.

Follow that up with a compressor that has >45 ms atk time, and short release around 5-10ms to avoid compression artifacts.

Snares I'll often high pass filter a bit higher, around 100 hz, also typically with some cut in the low mids.

Then a compressor with a short atk and long release to allow the transient of the hit through, while compressing the body to bring it up.

Also be sure to high pass filter your other tracks so they're not muddying up the mix and clouding your drums in the crucial low frequency ranges.

Hope that helps!
 
Try putting on a sort of "Drum Loop" gate. Then just mess with the gate volume, to get a more "real" sound.
 
Free Spirit said:
Kicks often can be high pass filtered at 40 hz, high shelf cut around 10 khz, and some sharp cut in the unnecessary low mids around 250-500 hz. Wherever it sounds bad.

Follow that up with a compressor that has >45 ms atk time, and short release around 5-10ms to avoid compression artifacts.

Snares I'll often high pass filter a bit higher, around 100 hz, also typically with some cut in the low mids.

Then a compressor with a short atk and long release to allow the transient of the hit through, while compressing the body to bring it up.

Also be sure to high pass filter your other tracks so they're not muddying up the mix and clouding your drums in the crucial low frequency ranges.

Hope that helps!
Click to expand...

Yo man, one question for you, im doing EQ just like you (like it need to be) but i have a trouble about compression, except attack...you said more than 45ms :S Im using First mono compressor in Waves (something which starts with A250 dunno) I have there an analog for attack...from -something to +20 i think....for attack im taking almost in 100% cases 10 ms......so i wanna ask you, is the more attacking better than my (for example) ? becouse im new, and possibly you know better than me
 
I like to use the fatso on a aux buss with the sidechain on the low frequencies.

Then I send the drums to the aux via the sends. This give a really phat punchy sound.

I also like the sonaklis tb compressor in pop mode. This give the drums a lot of snap.
 
Sometimes I like to find the fundamental frequency of the kick, insert the RBass plugin by Waves and set the frequency accordingly. Then send the kick to a highpassed distortion FX and blend to taste.
 
I'm not big on compressing drum samples. They are usually pretty compressed as it is, and depending on how they are programed might not have much dynamic range anyway. What I do do when mixing hip-hop, EDM or anything with programed drums is duplicate the whole drums sub mix and parallel compress the piss out of it. That will help push it out of the mix a bit more. Also like some other said Fatso is great as well as the Decapitator to give it a little warmth and balls if you will. SPL transient designer is great when they aren't cutting through the mix enough.
 
Yo one suggestion is learn what compressors are actually doing behind the scenes so you understand the effect it has on your sounds. The "attack" basically describes how late the compressor starts after the threshold value has been achieved. The ratio describes how much compression is done. If your ratio is 4:1, and your threshold is -10 and you have a peak at -2, this is 8 db above the threshold and so it'll compress it to 1/4 (the ratio) the scale (2 db above the threshold) and so your output is -8 db instead of -2. (This description ignores a lot of the more subtle features, but is a good overview of what's going on.)
 
My current kick sound is made up of 2 kicks and a ride cymbal... I compress one of the kicks but it's lower in volume than the other... The both have a smidgen of reverb. The ride has a bit more reverb...

3 snares in my snare sound... One compressed heavily - low in mix
one lightly compressed, the last no compression but a bit of delay. Reverb on first 2.

Hats. I like real sounding hats... I don't mess with them much... 3 sounds. Open, openish, closed.
I don't let a hat play under a kick or a snare (I'm just weird like that) and that seems to bring out the beef of the big 2.

Ive recently started using an 808 kick as well but like the hats; its played (or programmed) independently of my main kick/snare pattern... I don't mess with it much... Bit of reverb. Sometimes a delay.

ill add (edit) I don't do much (and often; any) EQ on my drums... I've built a kit that I like the sound of; I will EQ the drum-group a bit but instead I tend to EQ everything else in the track to fit around them... Probably the 'wrong' way of doing it...
 
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