Perhaps you’re not sure what I mean under the “tight” word. Well, I’m not really sure about the word as well, but generally I mean natural and catchy sounding. Some of magazines and celebrities use the “tight” word to describe the music they promote, so let’s use the word to promote this post

I always wonder why there are loads of tight live beats and very few truly electronic ones. The most of hip-hop producers used to sample live drums, no matter what’s the quality of the record they sample. There are a lot of examples where bad quality gives more catchy feelings to the drums. Sometimes you have to enforce mono to get this tight live feeling. Well, no experience can be written down within one post. Let’s start with the basics which I’ve experienced intuitively. I surely won’t tell you something really new, but I’ll try to start something that could grow up to useful after a couple of posts.

There is no certain trick that makes drums sound tight, except one - you’ve got live drums. What can we say about live drums? It’s loud, fat, noisy and it’s hard to record them. Well, I don’t need live drums in every track I make, but I do need these strong and catchy feelings of live drums. The general tricks I use to get similar feelings are:

• Use drums samples with similar/same nature (live to live, electronic to electronic, etc to etc)
• Be creative within few sounds (no need to put dozens of samples per beat)
• Multi-layered percussion: cymbals/jingles/bells/shakers do good job at low volume
• Use unique_per_bar sounds: it could be a quiet clap or some kind of tick, and it’s important to put it in most imperceptible and syncopated beat place
• Don’t let listener to catch up a separate percussion line: use timing base similar to main drums, be wise while adjusting the volume

If you listen some of classic breaks carefully you can notice that the secondary percussion gets faded or muted being at the same beat with the main drums. There are generally three reasons for that in my opinion:

• Human ear hear most loud sound (due to psycho-acoustics)
• Peculiar microphone properties (в„– of mics, positions, frequency response)
• Drummer/programmer/sound_engineer’s trick

There are classic drum loops that illustrate that:

• A Certain Ratio - Shack Up
• Blowfly - Sesame Street
• Hardnoise - Untitled
• Skull Snaps - Its A New Day

Before I noticed this quite interesting fading I did typical volume/delay randomization (humanization) to put more life into my beats. Then I got used to program the trick by lowering the volume or skiping the hat/cymbal beat, and that turned to be more effective than any randomization. Last year I decided to build a simple drum machine in Reaktor which could do this trick by it self. I didn’t need any big drum workstation, I came for simple and groovy beat loops that could be used later with simple beat slicing (which is fast as hell to program, at least in trackers). As you might noticed this fading is very similar to side-chain compression, but I never was the guy who knows much about side-chain compression as trackers never had such things. So, I made up “Dynamic Self-Regulation” term to call the process inside my drum machine. After all, “compression” isn’t very right word for the case, the drum machine manipulates not only the volumes, but also frequencies and the panning, and that’s just beginning of my tight beats research I suspect. The future versions of the drum machine will get more advanced features of the mixing.

Let’s take a closer look at Breakshade v0.1 - drum machine with the Dynamic Self-Regulation:

Short overview of Breakshade v0.1:

• 6 channels
• DSR affects volume, frequency (LP|HP shelf), panning (simple, surround delay)
• DSR pressure equalizer
• Clock Swing: global, detune per channel
• master equalizer

Not a big list, but it’s generally experimental prototype of the future versions which will get the best of it. You might think it’s not impressive, well, I’m quite surprised with the results - that simple trick I used to program definitely ruins that “robotic” feeling. And the advantage of Reaktor’s realization of the trick is that once you’ve setup channels DSR affecting you can play with the pattern matrix without loosing this *tight* feeling.

The heart of the DSR is the pressure mixer:

I’ve faded meter/compensation modules at the screenshot to show how simple main principle of the trick. Inputs 1-6 get volume relief (channel DSR pressure) of the same number channels, then the pressure levels get separately mixed (pressure for ch. 1 = p2+p3+p4+p5+p6, pressure for ch.2 = p1+p3+p4+p5+p6, etc), then the mixed pressure levels go through the equalizer and get scaled with amount knob.

The control panel of the DSR mixer:

Some description:

• Amount: zero value will produce regular channel mixing without any affecting
• Pressure equalizer: makes possible to redure/amplify low/high frequencies
  in the DSR pressure oscillations
• Volume compensation: amplify output volume for high amounts of DSR volume
  affecting
• DSR affecting boost: generally designed to make DSR affecting audible, but
  could be used for beat extra-tweaking

Typical DSR pressure oscillations looks this way:

Most important in the tuning of such drum machine is right values of DSR Power and DSR affecting:

Basic rules of the tuning are:

• Main drums (Bassdrum, Share, Tom) should have big amounts of DSR Power (to affect other drums), and small amount of DSR affecting (to be independent from secondary drums)
• Secondary drums (Hats, Ride, Perc) should have small amount of DSR Power and big amounts of DSR affecting (Vol, Freq)
• Keep the release time near middle values, big amounts provide smooth DSR pressure relief, small ones provide harsh DSR pressure relief
• It’s useful to turn on surround panning mode for secondary drums

Let’s take a look at channel sequencer:

Well, it’s a classic one. 16 beats, optional start offset and little extra - own clock swing detune. The swing detune allows to improve general humanization for secondary drums. But it’s one of experimental things in the drum machine.

Last note..

This drum machine is not supposed to be a magic tool, but it doesn’t mean it’s useless or pointless. I’ve got my own experience on drum programming, and it’s not a bunch of dusty tricks, it’s everyday process. There are dozens of plugins around which squeeze beats dymanics up and down, which make *boom* and *daam*, but I think it’s important to keep the basics alive. Your skills gotta to be deeper than a few sliders.

Downloads:

Breakshade V0.1 (drumkit 1)
Breakshade V0.1 (drumkit 2)

Snapshots sounds:

kit1: Loop1 - boosted DSR
kit1: Loop1 - normal DSR
kit1: Loop1 - regular mixing
kit1: Loop2 - boosted DSR
kit1: Loop2 - normal DSR
kit1: Loop2 - regular mixing
kit1: Loop3 - boosted DSR
kit1: Loop3 - normal DSR
kit1: Loop3 - regular mixing
kit1: Loop4 - boosted DSR
kit1: Loop4 - normal DSR
kit1: Loop4 - regular mixing
kit2: Loop1 - boosted DSR
kit2: Loop1 - normal DSR
kit2: Loop1 - regular mixing
kit2: Loop2 - boosted DSR
kit2: Loop2 - normal DSR
kit2: Loop2 - regular mixing
kit2: Loop3 - boosted DSR
kit2: Loop3 - normal DSR
kit2: Loop3 - regular mixing
kit2: Loop3 - boosted DSR
kit2: Loop3 - normal DSR
kit2: Loop3 - regular mixing

Bonus macros (used in the drum machine): Equalizer

Hope it was an useful post. Feel free to leave comments.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 5:08 am and is filed under Best of, Drums & Beats, Mixing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.