Drums

Shanderick

New member
I've been producing music for a couple of years and I want to make more professional beats. Using a lot of drum breaks has been the norm but I want to start making my own grooves. How do I get my kick, snare and hi hat to corporate with each other? I'm no musician so I don't know much about theory. Help me.
 
Hi!

Making your drums sound polished and tight has a lot to do with the drum samples as well as how they're mixed. The samples themselves depend on the style of music, but you can always use layering to your advantage. For example, say you're making a rock song. Using a rock drum kit is the obvious answer, but try layering the snare or the kick with some electronic samples and EQ them out so that they're not so prominent. This adds texture and weight to your drums. Same goes with other genres of music. Having a clap sound need not necessarily mean that it's just one clap sample. Layering the right samples will automatically make your kit start sounding homogeneous.

That's as far a sample selection goes. The rest depends on how you mix them together, and a lot can be done in this stage as well. Running your drums through bus compression with the right settings will automatically glue them together. Adding saturation and other harmonic distortion effects also helps.


For more detail, you can check this out: Mystic Alankar | Music Production


All the best!
 
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Thanks! Should I be worried about what key my drum samples are in? To my understanding some drum samples have fundamental notes. If so, what do you recommend for finding the key?
 
Should I be worried about what key my drum samples are in?

Yes and no. Depends on the style of music. A lot of big room house music has tuned kicks. Drum and bass tracks sometimes have tuned snares. There are also a lot of examples where the samples don't really exhibit pitch and key. It's not always necessary to have samples in key, but it definitely helps in mixing, and even musically (sometimes). An easy way to make a tuned hit would be to find a nice punchy sample, like say a snare, and layer it with a tonal sample. Make sure that these two samples don't clash on their own in terms of frequencies, and the result should be something like a tonal snare.

what do you recommend for finding the key?

There's no fixed way for doing this. Train your ears to listen to the pitch. You can keep looping the sample and try playing a sine tone in all the keys. See if there's a match somewhere. You can also try re-pitching the sample. In many cases, this makes the pitch more obvious if you push it many semi-tones up and down. You can then find out the original key of the sample.

Cheers!
 
Depending on your DAW you can probably do it with native plugins. Otherwise I think G-Tune is a free VST that will help you identify the pitch of your samples
 
Personally i always tune my drums. I don't know which daw you use - i use fl-studio and do all my pitching in edison (even thou there are thousand other ways to do it, i just got used to this). As far as routing goes, create a drum buss as a subgroup. Mixingwise its always a good idea to have a good compressor on the drum buss to make it sound more cohesive, but this must be handled with care - compressors can make or break your mix. You need to know, how to use them
 
I don't tune my drums.. unless something goes wildly out of tune. Or unless it's a drum that's more tone than inharmonic, like an 808 sub-kick though. Even there you often have a pitch bend going on, sooo..
I think it's mostly a thing because some EDM pretty boy producer talked about it once. I'm more of a 'if it sounds good, it's good' type of person.

As for getting individual drum sounds to gel together, you'll want to look into using bus or glue compression.
There's a whole topic of study there and about as many opinions as there are niche-sub-sub-subgenres in house music.

That won't make electronic drums sound organic though. Only a recorded real drumkit will do and recording drumkits well is an artform of it's own.
Your best bet there is to go with one of the 'live drums' softwares out there. Native Instruments has a bunch. Just saw a dude here is selling Addictive Drums, that's a popular one.
 
Im new to producing but ive learned a few things about hip hop beats. I EQ the kick so that its just the low end and then the hats to just the high end. gives each a bit more space in the mix. then ill drag the hats slightly off time to add a bit of swing. and if im making lofi Ill side chain the sample through the kick to bring it out more, makes it punch more. A bass like can make a beat aswell, 808's work for trap and then its about having good basses for other styles of hip hop. i think anyway
 
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