Serra wrote:Three, do you mean Drum Rack into battery as in Live's Drum Rack? What exactly are you doing here? tks
yeah, drag the samples out and dump them into battery. if there's one plugin in the world that simply has no competition, it's battery.
ableton's drum racks are the first thing that comes close, but their interface is microscopic. i feel like i should be using tweezers.
anyway, at the end of the day, a drum kit consists of:
- a pile of samples, between about 6 and 900 depending if you were using some exotic multi-sampled kit
- an envelope for each of those samples
- way more processing than the kit ever needed, because you were (or i was) tweaking it everytime the synth line or the bass line changed or whatever.
i mean ,who goes back every time they cut a synth line to check whether the drum envelope was changed to accomodate that part? exactly. but we tweak the drums all the time to fit with the rest. so, now we make the snare a bit snappier, oops, now it;s too snappy, dull it down again ... or just undo both and it probably sounds better.
so yeah, it's become sort of a ritual to move the kit from drum rack to battery. (i like drum racks cause they're fast, and you can organize them on the fly. i tend to drop big handfulls of possible hat or snare sound into my drum rack, while i'm working on a track i'll test out alternative sounds a lot, try and get the sound design to fit) so the transition to battery purges all the ballast from the drum kit and, most importantly:
it's a chance to retune the drums. by tune, i mean adjust the envelope. a/d/s/r is 99.9% of a good kit sound, and the other .1% is remembering not to over-compress it. (Protip: I have a yellow sticky note on my door that says "turn the damn compressor off" - in the early stages when a track is just coming together there's no reason to spend a lot of time tweaking level on drum sounds that might get kicked out 10 minutes later, but for a final track try to use the envelope to get your kit sounding how you want it. and THEN, you're using the compressor as a tool for sound design in places where a compressed sound is a good sound and not as a crutch to fix that overly agressive bass line or the odd too-punchy-and-yet-strangely-not-punchy-enough kick drum.
oh well, this is getting really long, so that was my extended theory on working effectively with drum sounds.
(btw: a lot of people tell me that's retarded, that they prefer to just get it right the first time, but at least for me a track changes so much in the course of production, that the original cut ends up as the "alternate take" or "remix material" or whatever only. ok, now i'm really done.)
YES!!
Can't wait to try this.