Super special, ultra awesome TUTORIAL on processing drums

Performance & Techniques Music Production
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Super special, ultra awesome TUTORIAL on processing drums

catchy title right :slight_smile:

http://calgarc.com/drum-processing/

Been working on a new project and figured I would go through the process on how i create my drums. This tutorial is based around ableton, but it can be done in any DAW, or hardware if you still mix that way haha…

First off I like to start with my idea, which happens to be all those things over to the right before I even start working on the drums let alone production.

When it comes to my drums I use Ableton’s Simpler.

Alot of Simplers…I group all my sections together when producing. This allows for 2 things. 1. it keeps everything organized. 2. It allows me to name my tracks after the patch/sound/sample/synth etc I used. You have no idea how much of a blessing it is to know exactly what patch was used when your files get corrupted (when windows doesn’t do the win part).

Now we can program some drums. Anything goes here, i guess just make it musical… I like to double up my samples. For instance I like to use a low kick as well as a high kick, I will explain that below.


Now we can process each track. a quick little cheat I have is solo the track I am Processing and then add a spectrum to the group channel as well as my EQ’s/Compressors. Once I have processed the soloed track I can move those Effects over to the track. This way I only use one instance of spectrum and it just makes things a tad bit quicker (It too me longer to write this tutorial).

For my kicks I tend to have a sample with the low end oomph i want, as shown below. I then have a high end kick, with that hammer sound I love. I use both snares and claps. The Claps are EQed to remove all the low end as well as most of the mids. I then use the snare to give the clap some body. I have 3 tracks for my hats, One is on the beat, the other off the beat and one is a 16th close hat with the decay/sustain shortened a bit. I also created a simple bongo loop to give it a little groove

Now we have Beautifully Processed drums, Terrible sounding drums.

https://soundcloud.com/calgar_c/d1-1/s-EFelK

What we need to do now is mute all of the tracks and bring them up one by one until they sit nicely. I personally bring the kicks up first get those mixed together. followed by my hats and so on. After that is done, I like to make a duplicate of my high kick and use that for side chaining. I generally only side chain the 16th hat when it comes to drums.

https://soundcloud.com/calgar_c/d3-1/s-Ptvoa

Now we have beautiful sounding drums. All we have to change the levels on the group channel so the drums sit nicely in the mix. We can now create buckets of sections for our Bass, Leads, Pads, Vocals, and anything else you want.

This is what a final track could potentially sound like :slight_smile:

https://soundcloud.com/calgar_c/samurai-original-mix/s-zmWTo

Did i miss anything??

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and the tracks are not playing 0_0

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‘Track currently not available’.

But they play fine on your website…

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i think DJTT has a feature that blocks private tracks… what did you think of the tutorial

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Really good stuff man :thumbsup:

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It’s good! I am very much a beginner when it comes to creating tracks, just doing bits and bobs here and there, but your tutorial will help me out a lot!

I notice you’re using fabfilter Pro-Q for EQing… any advantages to it over Live’s built in EQ8?? I’ve heard loads of good things about it on the web, not sure if I want to splash out for it just yet though…

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You can solo in on a specific band and search for shit frequencies properly. Watch some Youtube videos you’ll see what I mean

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a quick trick is to take your EQ and create a pointy needl and scroll through the fequencies… you find a bad area, kill it with fire :slight_smile:

also the way i programmed the drums goes for the whole song, so repeat the process when creating your leads and your bass. although there are trick and tools to get specific sounds, this will at least get the mix to sound half decent

for fab filter, is simply functions lol… i find lives EQ to be too subtle. I also have the t-racks eq which is okish and my own EQ plugin i programmed. if you use windows i can send you the vst :slight_smile:

anything else i can write about… I have over 10 years of ableton to share lol

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I would ask you for your EQ but I have so many already -____-

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That’s pretty cool man was it tough to make that

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nah… I used graphical programming. I also know a number of languages. it was fun though, I remember i released this freebie around here a while back http://calgarc.com/saturn-v/

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Wow impressive dude! How’s it fair when sculpting low end sub basses?

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i find its terrible with chords, average pad wise, but for leads and those dirty gritty bass lines its beautiful. I have not fully tested with sub basses but it should do just fine.

the 2 oscillators at the bottom are wired to the LFO which is kind of cool. they are basically run an octave lower then the main 4 uptop. in the fx section you can route almost anything to the XY pad on the corner and control it from midi for live performance

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Do you have a new DL link for that one? It doesn’t seem to work for me on your website.

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weird… it works for me http://www.calgarc.com/Saturn_V.zip

maybe try it with/without caps??

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Ah sorry I meant the EQ.

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i dunno why, but the link has 2 Q’s in it for some reason lol calgarc.com/FourQ.dll