In this week’s tutorial we’ll be looking at some easy and powerful ways to
bring your drums up a notch through layering. Whether you’re looking to freshen
up your kicks, add power to your snares, or create more interesting percussion,
we've got you covered.
Kick Attacks
The first tip is that you can change a kick’s attack by
layering a small bit of a percussion sound with it. In the following example,
the kick plays alone for the first two bars, then with a conga and foley sound from the Urban Heat drum kit. Only the very first part of the extra percussion sound is added so it
sounds like it’s part of the kick. This is a good trick when you want the attack
of the kick to cut through the mix. The image below shows a short volume envelope.
Beefier Snares
For beefier snare and percussion sounds, a quick technique is to
layer a pitched-up kick under the sound. The kick will give the snare a bigger
body and it’s a creative path to those overcompressed dance and dnb snares. In
the audio example, the first bar is a snare on its own, and the second bar is
the snare with a pitched up kick playing at the same time. Finally, the last
bar shows what the pitched-up kick sounds like on its own, to give you an idea
of what sorts of sounds work well for this technique. The image shows that the
kick was pitched up an octave and a half.
Here’s a very different example that features a pitched up kick added to a percussion sound, again the pitched-up kick is played without the snare at the end:
Interesting Snares
You can layer just about anything with a snare to make it more interesting. In this example, I layered a shaker with an 808 snare to give it a longer tail with a different texture. A good rule of thumb is that with smaller snares you can get away with adding more snares to the pattern. The extra early snare in this pattern wouldn’t work with big blasting dubstep snare.
Space for an Instrument
As a bonus composition tip, whenever you don’t have a snare on the traditional 2 and 4 beat, you could put something cool in the space where the traditional snare would be. It could a be a shout, a guitar chord, or an effects sound. Since it’s on that beat, the audience will notice it.
Author Bio: Sean Duncan is
an electronic music producer and freelance writer from Seattle, WA.
Banner Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigdrumthump/3213706780/
1 comment