Techno & House Production Thread (Not for Feedback)

[q-t]

Another tip on making metallic noises:
The size of your reverb matters a lot.
Try using a very, very small sized room setting on your reverb send. This while make the reverb a lot dirtier and rougher. The reverb will be more dense and the sound you send the reverb to will appear to be very upfront, not distant at all, even on very high reverb levels. That smooth, lush, distant sound you get from big reverbs is totally gone.
I've found that these reverb settings work best when your wanna have a synthetic sound, like metallic percussion. It usually doesn't sound good on vocals.

Listen to the SCB-overlay tune posted above. At 1:33 there's a stab which is a perfect example of metallic stab/percussion with small sized reverb.

[AxeD]

Yeah that's also what I meant with a little bit of reverb. Just looking through a few
projects and the reverb size on drums is usually way lower than on the average synth. While
it might be just as wet.

[skwiggo]

offbeat 909 hats/rides/cymbals ftw

depends on the style of course. 909 stuff is more for harder stuff, if youre going minimal i'd synthesize my own percussion or sample weird stuff.

idk dude, post some examples. what do you mean by messy?

aye, ive been using 909 open hats on offbeats but they do go a bit too hard so ive been trying to eq out all of the mids to try and get a kind of open hihat noise like in this (@3:00)


by messy i mean when the offbeat open hat kind of takes over, yet if i mess too much with the asdr it just soubnds quite unnatural

Anyway- the main point, I think, is to try out other samples rather than rely on the 909 oh too much!

I might be wrong but that hihat in the floating points track sounds like a synthesized white noise hihat more than a 909 hihat. That might be why your not getting the sound. Try a minimal techno sample pack cause they usually have lots of those softer noise hihats.

If your using a drum sampler set the kick and the hihat to the same choke group. That means they won't be getting in each others way and should sound less messy but you can still get the full sound of the open hihat. If your using audio samples rather than MIDI I would shorten the hihat waveform so it doesn't get in the kicks way.

[OllieScott]

anyone got any tips for making these kinda scratchy noise hits like in moscas jager. Most noticeable in the drop
been playing around with some white noise and modulating the amp env but cant seem to get sounding nice

[FMX]

anyone got any tips for making these kinda scratchy noise hits like in moscas jager. Most noticeable in the drop
been playing around with some white noise and modulating the amp env but cant seem to get sounding nice

Sounds like reversed percussion to me.

[OllieScott]

Sounds like reversed percussion to me.[/quote]

yeah getting closer with a reversed 909 and some ring modulation and distortion. Still not getting how i want it to sound

[BYTEME]

I'd say 808 drums are the most sinplistic sounds imaginable. Almost every producer has them.
Let's start with what a 4x4 pattern is:

Kick
Hat
Snare/Clap
Hat

Over 4 measures. Sometimes the 2nd and 4th measure may be changed by an added kick towards the end, on either where the 2nd hat is, or on the very last space after the hat, so the kicks are very close together.

But now this drum pattern sounds pretty dry, doesn't it?
You have to do tweaking for some production reasons.

Starting with volume. (decibals.)

The kick should be the loudest thing, but below -6 db AT LEAST. I prefer mine at -8 db however. But put it to -6 db.
Now the hat should be about 2 or 8 decibals less than the kick. Let's put it at -10 db.
The snare or clap should generally either be the same volume as the kick or 2 decibals less. Put it at -8 db.

So now it should all sound good at good levels.

(Remember though; music isn't all math and standards/limits. It can be whatever the f*** you want it to be. Do it for yourself, and for the love of sound! Hell my favorite sound is a loud broken guitar playing out of tone yet in harmony, muh like you hear from "Joseph Anthony Camerlengo" most noticably because he's Freakpop/Acid Punk. )

Now back to 4x4 drum basics.

Sometime you can have a kick on top of ever snare as well. This makes the snare more punchy. (For example: hardstyle.)
So lets do that!

Hey if your kick sounds too long, shorten it by either cutting out some of the end of the sound sample via chopping, or you can silence the volume towards the end with automation/internal envelope on whatever DAW your using. I use FL Studio.
So do that if you'd like. It's all whatever you like it to be. I like my drums VERY short and minimal.

I honestly don't know where to continue from here. Anyone wanna take over from here?
I'll explain more about EQing properly whenever I learn more about it myself lol...
There's also compressing but, the hell if I know how that s*** works honestly.

[Sonika]

Nice

I prefer to have my percussion hitting quite a bit lower than that, just to be safe and maintain a lot of headroom to work with. More like kick and claps/snares at -10 or -11 and hats and shit pushing beyond -15 or -20

[BYTEME]

I'm still quite new to producing. The structure of my songs are usually, kick pattern for 2 measures, add the hats on the 3rd and add the snare/claps on the 4th measure. Then let this whole 4x4 drum pattern continue for 4 or 8 measures depending how good I like the drums. Then I stop everything, slap a custom synth of mine, playing a very automated melody for 2 measures, then have the hats come in, then it all continues together, 4x4 drums and the melody. Then a breakdown with just a simple sound of lasers or abstract samples. But I REALLY like lasers!
Then let it end with jus the drums again, but going in reverse: 4x4 drum pattern for 2 measures, take out the snare/clap for 1 measure, then take out the hats. And let the kick pattern go 2 measures with a volume automation silencing it all to an end.

I'm VERY minimal House.

[Sonika]

Haha cool man I've never done any minimal house or any 4x4 for that matter....my attempts always end up horribly boring

[BYTEME]

I started making music at 8, and my first music 'instrument' was LSDJ on my Gameboy Original. That's right. My first gere ever was Chiptune. And I swear I will always love Chiptune, with it's minimalness and beautiful melodies happening at the speed of Sonic the hedgehog on Speed, Pixie Sticks, Absynth, LSD, and 100 cups of coffee. Then put him in Doctor Who's T.A.R.D.I.S.

If you never experienced Chiptune or even attempted at Minimal sound music, then you should give up on drum patterns, and drum sound sequencing.

[laurend]

Guys, the dB you use to express loudness are irrelevant because they come from a dBFS meter. Only RMS values are related to volume.

[hudson]

Unquantize everything, swing your kicks, throw a few snares off beat every once in a while, and don't be afraid to leave the k-h-s-h-k-h-s-h- pattern behind and try something new. The bpm in 4x4 is pretty important too imo, i like 100, 112, and 120, but it really depends on the pattern and the feel your going for. Don't fall into a tempo trap or all your shit might sound the same. Also, velocity is super important.
Here's a few tips I posted in the production bible drum thread a while ago, might not be anything mindblowing, but I do all these things regularly and they work for me:

"Variation! You'll never hear a real drummer play the same beat for the whole song, most won't even play the same fill twice, so don't just make a four bar loop and copy/past it over the rest of your track. Little switch ups every few bars can add more energy, keep the beat interesting and make it sound like there's someone behind the drums playing by feeling.

Don't quantize anything! If you've got the time and patience, make an 8 or 16 bar loop by just placing the samples by hand. No quantize, copying, or zooming super far into the grid, just throw everything down as best as you can. You can copy that loop after, make some changes, etc. That'll loosen things up a whole bunch. I like this on 4x4 kick patterns especially.

One little trick I use a lot in Reaper to add additional timing variations/humanization on my hi-hats without doing too much work is to throw the au sample delay plug-in on my hi-hat track, go into the automation options and select "in/out delay" in the sample delay plug-in, then select the modulate option in the automation lane and check "lfo". Once you're in the lfo section, choose the random waveform, set the base value to the very bottom, the speed to taste (I usually sync it to 64ths) and the strength fairly low (unless you want the effect to be extremely noticeable). This delays the sample by random amounts (milliseconds... subtle but still very effective) and loosens up your drums even more.

One last thing, do all the swinging/shuffling yourself. It's much more fun than just clicking a preset, and you can get some really neat sounding patterns if you experiment."

[hasezwei]

there is music that needs quantizing...



depending on what style youre going for of course.
i'm all for interesting rhythms and theres a lot of tracks that suffer from lack of variation but it would be foolish to think that you HAVE to unquantize everything. some styles of music only work because they are inhuman and unnatural.

[hudson]

Well obviously... Why would somebody take that advice if they wanted to make something ridged? Like I said, this is just shit that I do, take it or leave it.

[dickman69]

where do all these numbers even come from i just make it so it sounds good wtf

[BYTEME]

where do all these numbers even come from i just make it so it sounds good wtf

THEIR IMPORTANT. ESPECIALLY TO OCD PRODUCERS.... 0___0"....

[SKIN E]

where do all these numbers even come from i just make it so it sounds good wtf

This is probably the best advice here Just listen and use your ears properly and you'll be fine, I wouldn't worry too much about all this in the beginning as you still develop your ears and you slowly start to realize what frequencies a sound needs in your track.

[ehbes]

where do all these numbers even come from i just make it so it sounds good wtf

This is probably the best advice here Just listen and use your ears properly and you'll be fine, I wouldn't worry too much about all this in the beginning as you still develop your ears and you slowly start to realize what frequencies a sound needs in your track.

yup one of the worst things you can do is mix by numbers

[laurend]

After reading the initial post many times, I still don't see any relevant info in it.
Changing the drum set is enough to make the specified levels just wrong because it's based on peak values.
I don't see any info related to mastering either.
Where the info?