Drum layering question (kicks)

[marra]

Hello!

I'm trying to create my own kicks. What I want to do is to take the attack from a kick I've sampled, and layer it with the decay, sustain and release of say a TR-808 kick. How do I do this with a Drum Rack?

Marra

[ARDJ]

what are you having trouble with?

[marra]

Don't know where to start.

[Tone Deft]

one thing I've always found fun with drums is to mash kits together.

take a few drum kits and assign them to your midi keyboard. put the kicks on one section of the keyboard, snares on another section, etc.

then start banging out drum patterns with your hands, hitting multiple drum sounds at once. as you get into it you can feel how hitting one area harder or softer affects the overall drum sounds. keep record on and you'll capture a good sound sooner or later.

motivate and play with Live, spend some time and happy accidents happen but you have to put some time in.

hth

[marra]

Interesting approach Tone Deft.

Anyhow I just found a rack for layering my kicks. What y'all think? Does it have any shortcomings?

http://www.quantizecourses.com/pages.php/?p=1342

[marra]

Basically I'm trying to do this:

Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - J DILLA DRUMS

Or like the SonicSpecialists - Urban Fire 6 demo.

So I took:

kick_1.mp3
kick_2.mp3

into their own Drum Rack chains on the same pad, and started playing around. It came out sounding like:

new_kick.mp3
new_kick_mixed.mp3

Here's the Live 8.1 set:

kick_layering Project.zip

Could you guys check it out and tell me whether I got it right or wrong? Or if you'd do it any different?

[2beats]

Here is my article on it: http://subaqueousmusic.com/production-a ... tter-sound

I would say don't do it in drum rack. open a new session in live and layer the drums. Eq them and jazz. Then bounce down the sample, or send both samples to another audio track and record / splice it. Then save that sample in your library.

I have a huge library I have built over time of samples I create to make it easy and fast when making music.

[Dr. Fluffenstein]

This isn't with drumracks, but hopefully you'll find it helpful anyways: I prefer crossfading between 2 different kicks using audio tracks. That way you can avoid phase alignment problems, and it achieves the same result as highpass/lowpassing the 2 kicks. The difference is that you can see how the waveforms interact. With kicks, changing the crossfade length achieves the same result as changing filter slope. Don't use too long a crossfade though.

Also play around with the pitch and volume of each one to make them blend well.

[marra]

To layer kicks you really need to do it on separate midi track and this way you can make the click, say, -3 ms delay so it sounds right. There are other ways but this is probably the easiest. Obviously roll off all the lower freqs on the click. A good one to try is Ableton's 606 with the click from a 707 at -3ms. Tip courtesy of Sebastien Leger.

Best tip ever! Thanks man!