Share your drum tactics in this thread.

[Rabalder]

[anybody human]

FFS people, the lounge. Use the lounge.

Although that does make me think that if we wait long enough, Lars will unironically rock the holy hi hat house beat in an attempt at a belated dance punk hit. Probably already happened and I missed it.

[steffensen]

Does anyone notice that a lot of samples (hats, snares etc.) are a little (half step maybe) flat in the left channel and a little sharp in the right channel? Ive noticed it with Wave Alchemy samples and among others. This makes keeping things in tune while panning difficult, while panning hi hats for example. How do you guys deal with this?

(Ok, a bit late in the game, but just noticed this topic.)
And yes, ive noticed this as well, regarding WA. Been trying hard to replicate this, but cant figure out how and what they did to achieve this. The only tool i can use for such width is creates, is the old Pan & Delay trick, but id rather use what they are doing tbh!

Ive tried Saturating the Left and mildly lowpassing the Right, and all kind of trix, but nothing gets there. Its like they are raising the core-spikes on the sound on one channel, and lowering them on the other. The closest i got, was to Compress the R/L channels differently, letting spikes thru on one of the channels, and squashing the other one a bit harder.

My guess its some HW box, with some secret spices inside, which probly would be easy enough to replicate in Live if i knew the inside!

[3dot...]

layers
envelopes
phase alignment
subtle distortion
subtle panning
subtle stereo widening
gating
gated reverb
using gates to quickly isolate hits in old sampled drum loops
recording percussive vocal sounds
layering bits of crackle and noise from old vinyl/tape
compression
grouping kick and snare channels and compressing them together
multiband processing
bus compression with a compressor that has an HPF in the detector circuit
switching off the grid and creating groove manually by nudging midi notes
automating/modulating envelope parameters - eg: the attack of a hat, the decay of a snare
bouncing a drum patterns, keeping the original pattern, mangling the fuck out of the bounced pattern, slicing it and layering the slices back over the original
duplicating clips in the session view, setting a different start point for each clip, setting quantize to 1/16 or 1/8, using Launchpad to jam out new rhythms

spot on !
let me add :
record them through (colorful) speakers back in and blend..

flangers/phasers on cymbals..or snare..

I find that some compressors are better than others for drums..

about compression.. if you want to "emphasize" certain samples..
slightly compress each drum individually..and route them to the same bus and treat them together
then treat the other stuff to taste..(individually)
....route that back all the parts together to a "drum bus"
this is good for the "core"(Kick+Snare)

sidechaining..
usually there is also an eq of sorts for the sidechain.. you can use it to adjust the "response" of the comp...

sidechain the reverb or other stuff to respond to certain drums..also known round these parts as 'punching holes'..

good volume balance is key.. but not so much if everything gets squashed..be gentle.. you can easily make a mess with compressors..

tuning is key also..

figure out if there are "offensive" freqs..especially in the cymbals and snare "rings"..eq them out

oh..and balance..emphasis of certain parts makes a groove come alive..

record with pads with no r.quantize...play for a bit and record a while get into it...
keep only what sounds good to you..doesn't need to be on the grid..
"rip" the 'groove'..and use it on other parts of the song..

use the 'groove pool' .. it's awesome..

that's it ..gotta go I'll see if I can think of anything else...

[Warrior Bob]

How do you go about phase alignment in Live?

When I layer drums I tend to do it in an instrument rack inside a drum rack pad, since the triggering is really convenient. But there's no way to put the waveforms up side-by-side, and I haven't figured out how to hear it in drums yet, unless the phasing is REALLY bad.

[steffensen]

Awesome thread, not many of this caliber around anymore.

@Warrior Bob, if you visually want to see the waveform, u could use the Smexoscope on each channel. I personally use this device to look at the end result of the master, to spot any phase issues/problems. If you know what to look for, its pretty easy to find them.

[abletony84]

Fascinating stuff!!

Y'all mind attaching some demos of how this stuff actually sounds like though?

[Warrior Bob]

@Warrior Bob, if you visually want to see the waveform, u could use the Smexoscope on each channel. I personally use this device to look at the end result of the master, to spot any phase issues/problems. If you know what to look for, its pretty easy to find them.

Oh, you can do it with a scope? I suppose that makes sense, although I've not tried it. What should I be looking for, if it's easy to summarize?

And if it isn't, where can I go to start learning?

[jorgealarcon]

Those are great tips for the drums. I hope to learn more here at http://www.ableton.com

[mholloway]

one thing about drums that I think is widely misunderstood is that you dont' necessarily need compression. like, at all. Now, I'm not mic'ing live drums or anything, just talking electronic drums here; but people seem to think that if you have a kick and snare playing a dance beat, you are now required to put a compressor on all drum channels and squash. and uh....I'm guessing they dont' even know why they should do this (not people here; but you see this kind of advice in numerous other forums, those damn comp pushers!).

I use live's drum racks and load samples in, then create individualized FX chains for each pad (that need it) thanks to the beauty of racks.....the chain is usually just EQ (almost always) and maybe a reverb (though never on kicks) and anything else fun like redux or dynamic tube, etc, things done to taste but not across the board, obviously. I also like creating sends (anybody notice that drum racks allow -their OWN- send/return channels? yeehaw) for the NYC compression trick, which I often use on kicks, sometimes on snares, and usually never anywhere else. it's a basic 'fattener' and used delicately....

that's about it. and other than the parallel trick, no other compression anywhere in there.

-M