Drums

Use the wrong preset for a better sound - Musical Creativity 44

Alan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:04:36 +0100

Opinion is divided as to whether presets in plug-ins are useful. From my perspective, they can be useful short-cuts to a starting point, but I'll usually need to tweak the parameters, sometimes quite extremely. I'm usually happy just starting from scratch, knowing what result I want to achieve.

However, I love putting an ordinary audio track through a plug-in and working through the presets, especially those presets that it's not designed for.

The Concept

Calling it a concept is too way too grandiose really. Basically, take an instrument channel, e.g. guitar and apply presets for other instruments, e.g. piano, drums, etc. Some work, some don't. Either way, they'll get you thinking about the sound differently.

Work Through the List

With the signal-processing power at our fingertips and the flexibility provided by the plug-in architectures of Logic, Cubase, etc, it's easy to apply a processor, change it, remove it, try another and so on. Rather than reaching straight for the standards of eq, compressor or reverb with their respective expected settings for the instruments I'm processing, I'll sometimes put a different effect on, just to hear what it sounds like. If I don't like the result, I can undo the changes and be back where I was.

Waste of Time?

It's worked often enough that 5 minutes or so spent assessing the impact of different plug-ins can be useful, especially if I've hit a block. The more I play with the effects, the more I can predict the sound I'd get. So this tends to be for the effects I don't use as often (e.g. various auto-filters) or more extreme parameters of effects that I do use.

BlockFish

The best example of this I've ever come across is to insert a compressor on a vocal preset onto a drum mix signal chain.

Digitalfishphone.com's BlockFish provides a great example of this. Choose the "Close-up Vocal" preset - I'm doing this from memory so I may have the name wrong, but it should be obvious which preset I'm referring to. I used to use this when using Windows as my DAW's operating system. I remember there were some issues with no OS X version, but it looks like there may now be. Will have to give it a try, not sure if it's Universal Binary though.

Applying this preset immediately provides more energy and bite to the drums. If I wanted it a little more restrained, I'd patch the effect as a send and mix the return in to the required level. I remember slightly tweaking a few parameters to make it more suitable for drums, or at least the sound I was looking for. I think it was the Air Frequency and Air Level that were of most use. And of course, making it stereo since I'd be running a stereo drum-track through it.

OS X

In Logic 8, the Compressor effect can produce very similar results to the BlockFish effect. It doesn't have the same presets for the plug-in itself, so you'll have to play a bit more with it. In this case, changing the compressor type to Opto makes a drastic difference to drum-tracks. I'm not so sure I like it, I can hear the high-end clearer, but I can also hear too much compression, bordering on distortion with the optical variant, even after tweaking threshold and make-up gain for it to be more subtle.

Logic 8

Logic 8 has more emphasis on presets for channels rather than presets for plug-ins. On one hand, it makes the process of adding a preset chain of plug-in presets (yes, presets of presets) easier and it's a good way for learning how effects chain together. On the other hand, it's about chains of effects rather than a particular effect. In the end though, it's whatever works for you. There are still presets for plug-ins, the above image is the Compressor with a setting of Drum Kit Compression with the circuit type to Opto.

Part of a series by Award Sounds offering a selection of creative ideas to kick-start or rejuvenate a composition.

Move the focus of the rhythm from on to off the beat - Musical Creativity 39

Alan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:25:43 +0100

I guess most drummers will know this, but if you program your own drums or use loops, think about using a different groove for your song.

The basic pattern

Standard drum pattern that most of us learn is a 4 beat combination of bass, drum and hihat. Hihat every beat, bass on the first, snare on the 3rd. And repeat ad nauseum.

Then we get to add more bass, use 8th notes and so on.

What's the focus?

I was collaborating on a track a couple of months ago and as we we browsing the library of drum loops, we just couldn't find anything that suited. We ended up creating one ourselves and it was interesting to see the differences in how the two of us approached it.

I approached it very much from the basic, rock drumming angle, laying down the main beats first. My collaborator took a different approach and focussed on the choked hi-hat pattern. I then had to place the other beats around that.

Which was better?

It all fairness, neither. But here's the crunch, they drastically changed the feel of the music. It changed the feel so much that when I recorded a new part (say a guitar melody over the top), I played that differently.

So we recorded both sets.

One became the music for the opening credits, the other became the closing credits. We were also able to switch between the two main rhythms in the middle of track to change the feeling yet again.

Live Drummer

It's a common trick. Drummers will regularly change the rhythm pattern, if not you may as well use a drum machine! Using a live drummer means they can respond to the way the music's going. Moreover, they can change the rhythm, turn that around to drive it in a different direction. The difference for us was that we'd applied it more excessively than usual, but it still worked.

Ahead or behind?

Is this the same as playing ahead or behind the beat? No, it's neither. It's just syncopated, we were still playing at a regular syncopated interval. The choked hi-hats were on the "ands" of "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and" for most bars/measures instead of on the beats of "1 2 3 4".

Part of a series by Award Sounds offering a selection of creative ideas to kick-start or rejuvenate a composition.

Changing some tracks - Musical Creativity 36

Alan — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:39:32 +0100

I wrote the bulk of this text a couple of months ago after a day of not producing as much as I'd liked to. There are no real suggestions of how to improve or learn, but I thought I'd describe my thought processes so others may learn from my experiences.

Yesterday

I had one of those days yesterday where inspiration was lacking. Partly it may have been the brief I'd been given since it didn't have the depth of information I'd have liked. Mainly, though I think it was just me, I couldn't really find much to do, not that sounded right anyway. But I still managed to deliver something of sufficient standard.

How?

I tried creating music for the part from scratch. I wrote some interesting ideas. But they didn't really fit the brief as far as I was concerned. They're now exported to mp3 and the relevant project files archived for future reference. You never know what may be useful later on - I revisit unfinished files on a regular basis and often manage to complete them another time.

I then reviewed my collection of part-finished works hoping there was something nearly finished in there. Unfortunately there wasn't anything near finished. So I took two that really needed a lot of work and moved them forwards. One was almost finished from a composition point of view, but required a lot of mixing and processing, the other required more composition and almost no mixing.

Both featured a repeating rhythmic phrase and some background drums; one had a few bits of melody as well. The originals were rough versions of ideas that I thought worth keeping but didn't have the inspiration to finish when I first recorded them. They were a mixture of midi-triggered samples and audio recordings.

First Track

The first track was a sad and slow bluesy-jazz and had the following tracks:

drum loops
electric rhythm guitar
electric bass
electric lead guitar

For this one, it was mainly a case of arranging and mixing rather than composing. The original idea was over 3 minutes, the brief was for 1 min 50 seconds. So I worked at taking the best bits and arranging them into something musically attractive.

Before Arranging

Before I could arrange the work, I had to sort out the audio. It just didn't sound right. The original was recorded in one take per track, i.e. place some drums out, record the rhythm guitar in one go, then record the bass, then the lead guitar. Any of the audio processing was done very roughly just to convey the idea.

Rather than tweak and tweak and tweak some more, I removed all the processing and started again. After having listened to the track a few times, I knew where I wanted to go with it.

Clear some space
Guitar tone and amp selection
Set up a delay for the lead guitar
Compression for the drums
Correct reverb for drums
Mixbuss reverb, eq and compression

Clear some space

First of all I had to clear some space, the instruments were overlapping way too much. This involved some careful eq mainly focussed around making room for the bass guitar to be heard. Rolling off the low-end on the guitars and nudging the drums down in the same area helped bring the bass through considerably.

Guitar Tone and Amp Placement

I actually liked the tone I'd originally recorded with but it didn't fit in my vision of the mix. I changed the speaker emulation for a more familiar British 2x12 and turned the gain down to reduce the distortion. I also removed the reverb from the plug-in so I could add a different one later to fit in with the rest of the instruments. I'd considered re-recording with guitar amp and microphones but decided against this since the tone was sufficient for the background rhythm guitar.

Delay for lead

The lead guitar sings and needs to be heard above and beyond its accompaniment. I used a stereo delay on a aux bus for this and set the send so that it was audible. I did think about backing it off as I would do for a reverb, but I liked the extra character the delay gave the guitar.

Compression for drums

The drum loops were from BetaMonkey. They're good quality loops and are usually very dry or, in the case of the early ones, in a good-sounding room. In this particular song, the drums didn't cut through as I'd like. I could hear the snare too loud in the mix compared to the other drums. So I used a multiband compression on the drums with the gain mainly in the lower two bands and stepped down in the higher two respectively. Although setting the compressor up in this way is probably the opposite of what I'm more used to (i.e. heavier treble, lighter bass), this changed the character nicely.

Reverb for drums

To make the snare and cymbals live more in the mix, I used a reverb on an aux channel with a high-end pass. This added a nice, but barely audible quality to the drum track. The compression used in the previous step had brought the other drums up to a good level so this action balanced that out.

Mixbuss

Although nicely balanced, the instruments almost sounded like they were recorded in different rooms and the overall recording was slightly flat. A small eq alteration helped. I added the slightest amount of reverb to bond it together. I'm usually happy with a convolution reverb of a nice-sounding studio to get the feel for a track and then choose from there when I've got an idea of where I want it to be. For this particular track, I used a jazz club reverb for a more live sound. It fitted the bluesy-jazz feel of the whole track.

The final element in the chain was a limiter. I usually have two exports, one with the compressor in the chain and one with out. Then I've got the flexibility to hear what it would sound like compressed like many other tracks but still give clients the more dynamically accurate version without the compression.

The second track

This was a lot simpler in scope, but I spent a lot more time on it due to having to compose more parts and phrases to glue it together. The original idea was 50 seconds long and consisted of a midi-triggered samples of a piano, acoustic double-bass and an acoustic drum-kit. That's not that long.

Timing

I'd originally played all the parts on a midi keyboard. So the first step was to ensure all the notes were on time. This was a combination of quantising and manually adjusting the placement of notes. Some of the notes were also wrong, just not fitting in with the key. I manually adjusted these as well, rather than relying on any logical processing.

Drums

Oddly for me, the drums were samples rather than loops. I tend to find that loops fit in a lot better than any samples ever can. For this song I'd only used 4 drum sounds. I'd envisaged a drummer with an older style kick, snare and hihat, rather than the mammoth rock kits of the 80s. This simplicity, specifically the lack of cymbals, helped make the sound more realistic.

To add further realism, I patched in a light drum room reverb, just light enough to hear.

Piano

The piano sample sounded too artificial when solo'ed. I auditioned a few other piano samples, including some that were sampled from much better pianos and with much better recording. Yet I decided on the original but with two major changes:

Decreased the low-end of the piano by about 6dB below 300 Hz. Although the piano is mainly providing a bass rhythm for this track, it still comes through with the low-end reduced.
Reduced the velocity of the piano notes. Most were in the upper quartile which had a harsh sample layer. By reducing the velocity, I got to use a combination of different layers.

Structure

The original was 50 seconds long. I needed an extra minute. By thinking through the structure I wanted to introduce, I was able to create the 1 minute 50 required. It was just on the edge of having to introduce a different chord progression, theme or motif. Any longer and I would have had to. As it is, the different instruments coming in and out make it interesting enough for the short time. I looped the piano, bass and drum parts. Cutting out a few loops to bring attention to other instruments. I then added the guitar over the top and then the jazz organ.

Guitar

The guitar was troublesome. I knew it needed another instrument or two to keep it going to 1 minutes 50 seconds, but every time I played along to the song, I was left short of ideas and just had a tangled mess. I also sat down with the chords and tried working out a melody. Again nothing worked. It was accurate harmonically, just not interesting. I tried changing guitar sounds a few times - I find the inspiration from that can help a lot, even from a totally inappropriate guitar tone. In the end, I switched on the cycle function and hit record. About 45 minutes, later I had enough pieces I could use. These were pasted into the arrangement and unused pieces deleted.

The tone was deliberately kept mellow.

Jazz Organ

Again another instrument to fill in the gap from the guitar and bring the listener out of the emptier phrase in which it starts. I played this, then quantised/shifted notes manually. I was careful to use the correct quantisation for each phrase (mainly 16ths and 24ths, i.e, triplet 16ths).

Finally

There was almost no eq of the individual tracks, they sat well enough together without much alteration. I added a simple jazz reverb on the mix buss and compression similar to the first track. That worked well.

Results

I'm happy that I finished two pieces both of the required length meeting the brief.

Was it a good day though?

Probably not.

I wouldn't call either piece usual for me. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It wasn't so much that it was a different type of music to what I'm used to (they're not, I'm quite happy with that style). Instead it was more than I felt uncomfortable with the end results. They're good enough for background music which is what they're intended to be, but don't have the same melodic focus I'd usually want.

I was nowhere near as creative in the whole day as I was in the first hour of the following day. On that day, I wrote three good ideas in less than an hour. I spent an hour tidying up one of the tracks, bear in mind it was 7 minutes long. Like the above tracks, they'll take longer to finish, but that can wait for another day when I need to progress them further.

Part of a series by Award Sounds offering a selection of creative ideas to kick-start or rejuvenate a composition.

Emulating Drums - Musical Creativity 24

Alan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:27:34 +0000

Following on from the previous article on emulating bass, this article is about emulating drums and mainly about emulating drummers.

I'm of two minds when I emulate drums. I'm either:

aiming for a realistic drum sound or
aiming for a drum sound that doesn't need to sound like a real drum

The first aim involves working with compromises. Ideally, I'd be better off recording a good drummer playing an acoustic kit in a nice-sounding room with great mics, preamps, etc. That's not always possible. And the aim maybe to have something ready very quickly, so I turn to emulating a drummer.

The second aim is more useful for generating percussive elements that fit tonally into the music but with a different impact to that which I could achieve with a normal drum-kit. I'll discuss those in a separate article.
In this article, I'll stick with (1) achieving a realistic drum sound.

Loops

My short piece of advice is to use drum loops. Use some decent quality loops with sufficient rhythm variation and inherent tonal consistency and many would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a drummer and a loop. If they can tell the difference, it's either a bad set of loops or user error, e.g. you've used the same loop too often in the song. After, how could they tell the difference since it would have been a real drummer who recorded the loop in the first place.

Midi

The long answer is for when you don't have any suitable loops, including if you don't have any loops. Then you'll probably be resorting to midi to trigger drum sounds in a sampler. There are some tricks to make it sound more realistic.

Play like a drummer

Drummers have a maximum of four limbs. That's an immediate restriction of 4 items being hit at any one time. Can be more than 4 note polyphony though due to layering and the release of certain instruments (e.g. cymbals). Actually the right hand can hit the rim and the head of the snare together, but that's a bit of an exception.
That's the first restriction. If you want it to sound like a drummer, then limit it to four hits at a time.

Layout

Also look at the layout of a traditional drumkit. For a right-handed drummer, the right-hand usually crosses the body and plays the hi-hat, while the left-hand plays the snare. Either hand is used for the toms and cymbals. And either hand can add to the other hand to double up on the snare or hi-hat. Different styles call for different arrangements. That's the traditional pop/rock layout and handling.

Watch the combinations

The short closed hi-hat sound is formed by the right-hand hitting the hihat while the left-foot holds the hi-hat closed. If the right-hand is hitting the snare, toms or cymbals, you can't get a closed hihat sound. If would be the gated half-open sound caused by the left foot lifting the top hi-hat and then pulling it down. It's a weaker sound than closed hi-hat. A rock drummer may have a much more ringing open hit-hat sound, especially for keeping up with doubletime kick and snare patterns.

Would a drummer alternate?

If the pattern relies on 16th beats on the hi-hat, then the drummer would most likely alternate hits between the right and the left hand. I know of four ways to implement this:

Look at each hihat hit and manually change alternate hits to use a different hi-hat sound
For using a sampler such as Kontakt 2 or Kontakt 3, you can write a script to alternate between the left and right sounds of the hi-hat with each hit. You could get even more serious and tie it into the snare hits (assuming that a snare hit would be left-hand and hi-hat would be left-hand). The more you think about it, the more you can write.
Use logical processing on the midi file so that it separates out alternate notes. Rather than processing every alternate note, it may be easier to divide your bar into two sets, those corresponding to the beat and those on the off-beat. Then alter the two sets separately.
Use a drum-specific software plug-in that will calculate which sound should be played. This is what the brain unit of most electronic drums should be doing, interpreting the received notes so that they sound more realistic.

It also applies for other drums as well, not just the hi-hat.

The Machine Gun

The bane of a lot of 1980s pop was the electronic snare that sounded the same no matter how hard you hit it. Hit it in a quick repetition and it sounded like a machine gun. There was just no flexibility. Drum synthesizers and samplers have come on a long way since then, but unfortunately some interfaces do not make it obvious to avoid. It's not specific to snares either; hi-hats, toms, anything hit rapidly and repeatedly risks introducing this effect.

Similar to the methods for alternating the hands, I can think of 4 ways of implementing this:

Look at each hihat hit and manually vary the velocity of nearby hits. If there are left and right sounds for the drum, then alternate them as a drummer would. Also vary the timing slightly, too regular and it may sound artificial.
For using a sampler such as Kontakt 2 or Kontakt 3, you can write a script to alternate between the left and right sounds of the hi-hat with each hit. You could get even more serious and tie it into the snare hits (assuming that a snare hit would be left-hand and hi-hat would be left-hand). The more you think about it, the more you can write.
Use logical processing on the midi file so that it separates out alternate notes. Not sure how effective this is for avoiding the machine gun effect. Largely depends on your the processing options offered by your DAW. Again, similar to the approach for alternates above, it may be worth dividing your bar into two sets, those corresponding to the beat and those on the off-beat. Then process the two sets separately.
Use drum-specific software plug-in that calculates the appropriate velocity or sample layer. This is what the brain unit of most electronic drums should be doing, interpreting the received notes so that they sound more realistic.

Ghost Notes

What makes a real drummer more interesting than a basic drum pattern is the presence of ghost notes. This is where the drummer would lightly hit a drum, e.g. the snare, but not as a focus of the rhythm. Often these pre-empt the main snare hit, almost leading into it. The ghost note would be short and lower in volume than the main hits. The ghost notes don't just have to pre-empt the main hits, a drummer will include them in to vary up the patterns and to add spice to the rhythm. If they're occurring in the same place in every beat, then they're probably not ghost notes but an integral part of the pattern. I've always seen ghost notes as being variable throughout a song. Due to the varying lower volume, if you're not listening carefully, some ghost notes would end up being imperceptible.

Try listening to a jazz drummer, especially if they're playing a simple blues rhythm. You'll notice the ghost notes more when the rhythm is simpler.

Accuracy

This is one I have issues with. How accurate does a human drummer need to be? If you look at recordings of a good real drummer, there's a lot of variation in how accurately they hit compared to the beat. But it will still sound in time. The issue I have is that it's against my understanding that being inaccurate is the right thing to do, just feels wrong to admit that, but it seems that being slightly inaccurate is the way to play. Goes to show that none of us are perfect. I tend to keep the main beat very close if not exact and vary other hits. And I always think about using groove features or humaniser functions.

In the Mix

The drums coming out of most samplers are still a raw instrument sound. There may be some reverb and compression but do they suit the music you're writing? If not, remove them and add the processing you want to add. More so, you may want to change the sound of a single drum, e.g. wanting to compress the kick drum more and add more of the click from the beater with eq. If so, then it's best to separate out the drums into separate outputs. You can then modify the sound of the individual drums to suit your tastes.

While you're at it, decide how you want the drums to sound in stereo. Are they all central? Or should it be set out from the drummer's or the audience's perspective. Then group them back together for drums for ease and so you have the option of processing the drums as a whole.

Other techniques

Harmony Central has some great suggestions for more advanced techniques. The concept of mute groups looks especially useful.

Reference CD

What should drums sound like? If you're aiming for realistic drums, then you'd do well to start with some reference files

There is some interesting information about the Led Zep sound over at Guitar Player

Learn to drum (even if only in theory)

Have a look round for lessons on the rudiments of drumming. Being armed with this information will help you create more realistic drum loops. I learnt by sitting in front of a kit twice a week and getting a few pieces of advice every month. No proper lessons. Even so this basic introduction helped me understand no end what it means to create a drum track. Understanding what constitutes a basic beat is the starting point. Try starting with these:

Shavano has an old but still useful article for anyone wanting to program drum midi patterns

Drum Plug-ins

I mentioned drum plug-ins above. I don't use the more advanced plug-ins so I can't really comment beyond that I've heard some very positive reviews including from some good drummers. From the demo samples I've heard, they introduce a level of realism that is difficult to achieve on your own with midi programming. There's a range of drum plugins offering different functionality.

The simplest are just sample triggers where you select the samples to be played and place them on a midi track. This is the basic type that you'll find with a lot of DAWs. If you're lucky, you can select from different drum sets, create your own, change the relative volume and/or pitch levels or even modify the envelope of the individual drums.

More advanced plug-ins allow you to select more authentic-sounding drumsets, designed to sound like specific Pearl or Ludwig sets and so on. They'll also give you the option of room sounds, microphone types and microphone placement. Extra features include the ability to blend the mic mixes. As they get more advanced, the plug-ins interpret the midi input into something more like what a drummer would play. This is the type that interest me more than others.

Some include drum patterns in a variety of styles, giving you the ability to compose the song's rhythm very quickly. They may even include intro and fill patterns. Remember the basic sampled drumkit on the old casio homekeyboards of the 80s? Well, this feature's a more advanced and flexible version of that. It's ok for using when keeping a beat, especially as a more interesting clicktrack, but I wouldn't use them in the end product.

Part of a series by Award Sounds offering a selection of creative ideas to kick-start or rejuvenate a composition.