DIversity / Flavour to House Drums

S

SimonT

Member
Hi!

Wanted to see what people would recommend here for a house track I'm working on, how I could add some flavour to the drums. I have a kick drum, just a steady 4/4 flow to begin with, then a snare and claps come in on every other kick, then on the chorus, hi hats come in.

What panning or effects would people recommend? they seem a bit plain at the moment. Any transient shaping? heard that's useful. I'm using Kong on Reason too, if anyone knows any good tricks on the drum effects section of that. There's noise, tone, a compressor, a parametric eq, a filter, rattler, tape echo, drum room reverb, ring modulator and transient shaper on that.

I've just read layering is what makes your drums really professional. 5 snares was mentioned. When I've doubled up drums before now though, they've got louder and sometimes too loud and a bit distorted, so I'm guessing, you need to eq them as well and/or compress?

I just seem to mess around with settings, and think that sounds nice, then listen again and think, nah, sounds naff. Do that with a lot of my sounds I create, the drum programmer on Kong, and with EQ and compression etc. How can get a better ear, or does it just come in time?

Thanks!
 
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Layering, transient shaping etc is what you use when you are making drums from scratch or nearly from scratch. If your kicks and snares are sample pack ones, you shouldn't need to layer them or process them very much at all, otherwise what would be the point in sample packs.


I've heard many different numbers for the number of snares to layer together. 5 is quite high, I normally use 2 or 3 and then do loads of processing, but I'm not sure my method is necessarily correct.

Keep your kick in mono, don't pan it. Probably the same with the snare, I guess you could add some stereo width to the high end but it doesn't need it.

Hi hats I might make slightly stereo for interest. Make sure you balance them so that you get an equal amount of left and right though. Even then, you don't have to, and it can sound a bit naff.

Can you post an example?
 
I think that when you have a steady drum pattern (like house or trance), the extra flavor comes from the percussion added to the beat. So, try messing around with percussion hits/patterns. Different sound sources are good as well.
 
SimonT said:
What exactly do you mean here? sorry, I am quite a novice.
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House music has this characteristic of having a steady 4-on-the-floor kick pattern, with snares hitting on beat 2 and 4, right? Then, it gets complemented by hats on the off-beat. What I'm saying is that you can use this "sparse" drum pattern and complement it further with a conga loop, for example.

When i said different sources, I meant different instruments, not only congas, but any ethnic instrument.
 
To make a real interesting drum beat you can use all kinds of effects and weird noises, reverse them, put reverb on them with a 50/50 dry/wet mix delay and transpose a carcrash down 4 octaves and slice it, apply some swing and automate a slight gating effect. The only end to the possibilities is your own imagination.

The basic idea of layering is that you'd take at least 2 samples or sounds that compliment each other, for example a snare that has that great thumping mid/low sound that you want, and one that has that slapping reverbed top. Eq these together so that they play more nicely with each other.

Your ear should get better with time.. but it may take a very long time indeed. If you start to regress or not see any progress at all you might want to consider doing something else with your life. But that's not very likely :P
 
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Some nice pointouts here!

I know I recently made the beat for one of my tracks, and yeah it sounded too plain.
My solution was to add a very heavy reverb send for the hihat submix and use light distortion to make it even more aggressive, and use a volume envelope plugin on the reverb send, and fade it in as quickly as possible before the kick, it really added an aggressive swing to the beat. That and sidechaining the hihats.
Of course this doesn't go for all cases, but it's a nice technique to know.
 
percussion is very important for house music... i wouldnt get too caught up in layering for now... concentrate on getting the groove right...

you dont need 5 snares.
 
DigitalKillaz said:
percussion is very important for house music... i wouldnt get too caught up in layering for now... concentrate on getting the groove right...

you dont need 5 snares.
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I agree with "you don't need 5 snares" but why he wouldn't concentrate on layering for now? Layering is a big part when making beats, whichever the genre you're doing. If he doesn't learn how to layer drum hits, and focus on "getting the groove right", he will end up with a weak beat, and possibly getting frustrated.
 
SimonT said:
Scrapheaper, go ahead, post an example please yeah.
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I meant for you to post an example of your house drums so we can see if we can offer any more specific advice.

Ddream said:
I agree with "you don't need 5 snares" but why he wouldn't concentrate on layering for now? Layering is a big part when making beats, whichever the genre you're doing. If he doesn't learn how to layer drum hits, and focus on "getting the groove right", he will end up with a weak beat, and possibly getting frustrated.
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I think get the pattern right using samples first, then making your own drums. Don't run before you can walk.
 
scrapheaper said:
I think get the pattern right using samples first, then making your own drums. Don't run before you can walk.
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Well, different ways of approaching. since I started, I focused more on doing my own drum hits than using sampled loops. It's kinda that feeling of "cheating" that was discussed on other thread.
 
a bad drummer (bad meaning good) can go to a street corner with kitchen utensils and make people dance... and its because he or she can play... its the groove...
 
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