Anyone seen this thread...?

On 2009-05-06 22:17, X3doZ wrote:
I have it saved as a .txt document if you want me to repost it.

Hey all

Seeing as I got so much good feedback from you guys, and seeing that I'm still on tour in Brazil, sitting in a hotel room with nothing to do... I thought I'd sit down and write part two, how I work with percussion.

Firstly, this is dance music, its got to make people move, and percussion is how you do that. For me, a dance track with poor and sparse percussion is usually a poor dance track, this even applies to minimal stuff. If you listen carefully to the more minimal deadmau5 stuff, his percussion is freaking huge, and guys like Trentamoller, while sonically not as big, is super detailed and groovy.

As I mentioned before with the basslines, the trick to getting big percussion is layering and layering and more layering. I sometimes end up with up to 30 or 40 channels of percussion before bouncing down and narrowing it down to somewhere around 10 to 15 channels. I like to keep them all organized on the arrange page to groups of kick, snares, hats, loops, and programmed percussion (usually tracks of well placed hits and small perc sounds to add a bit of extra groove) Just be careful of overloading your tune with too much though, and spend a bit of time making sure everything sits with relation to the other stuff in the tune.

I'll just go from here and run through a bunch of handy tips I have for mixing and programming percussion. Think some of these tips will probably apply to a lot of other stuff as well. Apologies if its a little disjointed as there is a hell of a lot to talk about here...

0. Audio or Sampler?

Sorry, started numbering with zero cause I added this at the end
I used to use samplers like Kontakt and Battery extensively for drum programming. Nowadays however, I don't bother all that much any more. I just loads samples straight on to audio channels and chop stuff up from there. Samplers are still useful, they seem to make it easier to get more dynamics when you're programming stuff with different velocities, and they can be great for mangling stuff. I often use Stylus RMX as well. With audio though, its just much easier to mess with things like reversing or adding fx directly on to a single audio hit for example.

1. My Beloved Quadrafuzz

As I mentioned previously, I turn to this time and time again. Its great on snares and can really bring out a bit a lot of punch in your sounds. I use it on kicks from time to time as well, but watch the drive that you don't end up with a mess. Also try soloing one of the distortion bands to get that telephone effect. It works nicely on loops.

2. Compression

I tend to use the Sonalksis stuff again here quite often, on kick and snares. I'll also use heavy compression on loops sometimes if I'm trying to get a sort of "texture bed" in the background of the percussion loops. Try playing around with the attack of your compressor to get just that right amount of click. I am also quite selective with compression as well, I like to leave some of the dynamics untouched when Im layering stuff, as its nice to have a contrast between super "tight" sounds and more "floppy" sounds with say, a bigger stereo image as the tight stuff.

3. Sidechain Compression

I use side chaining sometimes on loops to pump the groove a bit. I use the powercore cl and sidechainer for this, but for those of you who dont have the powercore, cubase 4 now has a side chain input for there compressors. Logic users won't have a problem with this. Another option is Beatpuncher (think the full name is Compadre Beat Puncher - correct me if Im wrong) Nowadays, I tend to "cheat" quite a bit as well, when Im too lazy to set up a sidechain channel. Cut your loops in to segments of 1/4 bars (set quantize to one quarter bar, select your audio file, using the cut tool, hold down alt and cut at the end of the first bar, the rest of the file will be cut in to equal segments) then you can select all the quarter bar segments, and drag the volume envelope from the left corner of each file. Then double click just above the envelope line, and you can just draw a volume curve which would be reminiscent of a sidechaining effect.

4. Envelope generators

Cubase has a great new plugin called envelope generator that works a bit like a compressor. Basically its a volume envelope thats triggered by a threshold on peaks of audio, say, the beginning of a snare hit. You can then adjust the attack volume, decay and release of the audio. Great for adding some snap to your snares.

5. Panning

Its amazing how many people seem to have this idea that you need to mix everything symmetrically. You don't have to, all you have to do is maintain a relative balance ie: you want to have a similar range of frequencies and volumes on the left and right, not necessarily the same sounds playing out of both speakers. Its essential that you play with the panning when you're working with a lot of channels so that you can find a space in the mix for everything. I often have a couple of hat loops, some panned hard right, other panned hard left, some in between and maybe just a bit in the middle. Think of micing up a drum kit, you don't have all the drums sitting on top of each other with one mic in the middle do you? There are some old Beetles records where the engineers panned all the drums to one side, all the guitars to the other, and just left the vocals and bass in the middle. Sounds weird but it actually does work wonderfully. I wouldn't be that extreme with dance music, but play around until it works for you.

6. More tips for stereo

Refer back to the bass line tutorial, most of those tips apply here too. Auto panners and modulation effect are great, also delays and stereo widening tools. I often use a few snare on top of each other, one that's really snappy and dry after using the envelope generator and quadrafuzz, then others that I've either panned, added reverb, or split in to left and right so I can delay one side by a few milliseconds to get a widening effect.

7. Reverb

Don't be shy of wettening stuff up a bit. Short percussive reverbs are great for opening up your stereo image, or for pushing stuff into the background a bit. I really dig the Sony Oxford Reverb for this. I've got the plugins for the powercore, but they are available now as native plugins as well.

8. Eq's and levels

Again, you really need to sit down and listen here until you get a happy medium with everything sitting in place. Don't go overkill on the on the lo cut filters, many times I hear guys cutting everything out below 3 and 4 khz, even snares, and all you end up with is a mess of "tssst tssst tssst" noises and not much punch (or "perceived" volume) in your tracks. The mid range and particularly lower mid range is where a lot of action and dynamics happen so don't lose them completely. If you want nice meaty snares you need to leave, or sometimes push stuff between 500 to 1000, but just make sure you dont go overboard or the sound will be too overbearing and probably start to mess with the kick. Which brings me to kick eq, I like to normally mix that similarly to my basslines with just a little bit of variation, so head back and check it out on the previous tutorial. With hi hats, you obviously want more tops than mids. I often scroll through the VST Channel presets for hi hats, then modify them for my sounds from there. Its just a quick and easy way to get an idea of what you want. Be careful about pushing stuff too much around 8 khz though as you end up with too muching "essing" (sound you get particularly with vocals at 8khz, on words that have the letter s, it can end up sounding horribly distorted and is pretty unpleasant, specially on a big rig)

9. Tuning drums

I know a lot of people feel quite strongly about tuning drums, but when it comes to electronic stuff I usually couldn't give a shit. I have thousands and thousands of drum samples in my library so I'd rather just pick another one if one isn't working. I do however play around with the kick quite often. A good trick to get a nice lo sound is to add a pitch envelope to the kick. Right click on the kick sound, and choose process>pitchshift then look and the of the window and choose the "pitch bend" page. I usually start with the max pitch set to about 3 semi tones, then, leaving the initial pitch in the middle at the start, add one node to the envelope and drag it down to the bottom, shortly after the start of the kick. This will leave a nice click in the beginning and will drop most of the sub energy lower for a nice deep kick sound.

10. Beat Slicing

There is a number of ways to do this, including recycle, using cubase's hitpoint detection and other bits of software which I'll get to later. My favorite way of doing it is rather to set my project tempo to the loop Im chopping up, then, like I mentioned before, use the alt click cutting method except this time I normally use a 16th quantize setting. I always create a blank section in the arrangement over the cut up pieces and paste them together into one block, then set the tempo back to normal and everything should be in time. You will probably have to do a small bit of editing after, like trimming the edges to avoid clicks.

11. Cool Tools for Percussion

I use battery quite often, its got some great features for fine tuning drums. Recently I just discovered some a new toy, and subsequently ordered myself a copy. Its from FXPansion and called Guru. Its an awesome way of slicing up sounds, and its got some mad tools for mangling and ripping sounds apart. Check it out here...
http://www.fxpansion.com/index.php?page=4&tab=27
Also check out Sugarbytes Effectrix... its kinda like dBlue Glitch only quite a bit more advanced and you can layer multiple effects on top of each other.

12. Working with Groove

If a loop is not sitting properly, you can try shifting it slightly out of time by using the delay setting in the inspector. It often helps to either add just a little bit of negative delay to tighten things up, or positive to drag things a bit. With regards to layering again, I particularly like percussion which has that "wall of sound" quality to it, but be careful you dont end up destroying the groove of the percussion. You can have everything playing loud and at the same volume, but then create groove elements buy having some things stand out by playing with eq, or creative use of fx. This is personal taste, but I like to make sure I've always got a good big snare. Sounds silly but a lot of people forget about this. It just moves a track better. Same goes for an open hat, but complement it with some running closed hat patterns. That kind of "oomph tsss oomph tsss" groove is a bit naff and uninteresting.

13. Final Tips

I've mentioned this before, but again, I like to keep all the percussion assigned to a group. Once you've got a good mix for your percussion, you don't want to mess it up by changing levels and stuff. On a group you can change everything at once. Its all nice to be able to add a little extra compression after on the group or some other fx like filter sweeps etc.
Get some good sample sources for percussion. Its cool to go make or record your own sounds, but to be honest, I really don't have time for that, so get some good sample cd's and get your library organized. I've got all the Vengeance stuff which fantastic. Mutekki Drum Codes is also nice, and I've got piles of loop libraries as well. There are some good internet sites that have free stuff as well, and some where you can buy only the single samples you that want from libraries. Cubase's media browser is a great way to stay organized, and when you've got a 300 Gig sample library, its essential. You can add tags to audio once the drive has been scanned, its a lengthy process, but something you can do bit by bit in your spare time.

Anyways, running out of ideas now. So once again, let know if you guys have questions and what other tutorials you'd like to see.
Enjoy
Nate