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Hey all,
been racking my brains the past few days trying to understand the guys drum sounds, mainly the kick-snare/clap from his electro tracks.
The kicks and snares are really snappy and short but retain their punch and i cant figure out how.
I've always been a bit scared of layering kick samples because i've never had much success with it but at the moment i'm open to anything.
Any help would be much appreciated!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2LPADIu28A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAgJFGmg ... ure=relmfu

I'm on my laptop speakers but to get punchy drums you need:
1) Good samples (obviously). Goldbaby have very punchy snares.
2) A very good compressor with a release around 50ms (tweak it, I'm not sure of the value) OR a transient shaper.
3) Everything sidechained to the kick & snare.

Depends on the samples tho, my last tune called Goodie bag I didnt compress or put a transient shaper on any of the samples and they turned out the way I wanted them! I just slapped an eq on them and boosted certain freqs till I got the punch I wanted...

So basically I think the most important is your samples

Try pitching up some of your snares, You will get the shortness and roundness similar to Feed Me, still all depends what snare you start with though, but you can hear they sound higher in pitch than most of the snares other producers are using!

I've had some luck using a 909 hit for the 200 hz punch (low pass) and then layering that with a snappy acoustic snare that I've high passed. I shorten the samples to 200 ms or so (making sure to cut it at the zero crossing of the wave to keep it from getting a click). After that I layer it with a short burst of white noise and then compress everything together with a super light compression that just barely moves the needle. Using a transient designer to bring out the punch at this point is what I do next. This will give you a nice blood redish snare depending on the acoustic snare you've used. Search for Erkan's drum pack on the ultimate metal forums for some decent sounding acoustic snares for free.

x

Thanks for the help guys.
Yeah i guess it just comes down to samples and eq at the end of the day, in that mau5hax stream Feed Me mentions he never compresses his kicks.
I guess i'm just sick of digging through 300 kicks in Vengeance packs to find i'm left with 3 that sound good.

jakewilson wrote:Thanks for the help guys.
Yeah i guess it just comes down to samples and eq at the end of the day, in that mau5hax stream Feed Me mentions he never compresses his kicks.
I guess i'm just sick of digging through 300 kicks in Vengeance packs to find i'm left with 3 that sound good.

Check out the sample packs by High Rankin - some nice drums, I'm not a fan of Vengeance samples myself unless I'm making a house track.

Also: http://www.freesound.org/people/crispydinner/ some good samples here.

jakewilson wrote:Thanks for the help guys.
Yeah i guess it just comes down to samples and eq at the end of the day, in that mau5hax stream Feed Me mentions he never compresses his kicks.
I guess i'm just sick of digging through 300 kicks in Vengeance packs to find i'm left with 3 that sound good.

Well, that's better than me lol. I don't like any of them. But I do like the click in some kicks and the lowend in others. That's why I always layer 2, one for the click and other for the lowend.

compressor settings.

50ms attack
~150-200ms release.
15:1 ratio
threshold squashed.


then cut tails of samples.
boost between 100-200hz for both snare and kick. you have to pick where to freq boost each samples for the best results.

theedman wrote:

you need to turn the drive up a bit more bro, what i've found is that when you turn the attack all the way up you have to turn the drive up roughly half way to bring the db level back to what it was

Trainrek wrote:

theedman wrote:

you need to turn the drive up a bit more bro, what i've found is that when you turn the attack all the way up you have to turn the drive up roughly half way to bring the db level back to what it was

that said, i should add that you should do what works best for you, if you think i'm chatting utter shit then i probably am

theedman wrote:

Is this transient shaper loads better than the NI one for guitar rig?

Killamike49 wrote:

theedman wrote:

Is this transient shaper loads better than the NI one for guitar rig?

80% of the time, it works every time.

nah its fucking amazing. I use it in pretty much every track, on pretty much everything.

Yeah, i use the one that came with komplete on alot of shit. Is this one way better though, that's the question.

most of the time, "better" is merely subjective.

bassinine wrote:most of the time, "better" is merely subjective.

Good point.

Probably shouldn't bring this thread up again, but I'm listening to Feed Me's new EP, and some of the drum work is absolutely insane. Clicky little kicks in the 4/4 tracks and huge epic ones in the more dubsteppy tracks, perfect snares...
people keep saying it's about sample choice, but I've never heard a sample sounding anything close to any of this and my drum processing knowledge isn't great enough for me to be able to make this kind of stuff from a 'rawer' unprocessed sample (or an overprocessed vengeance one for that matter).
Would appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction, especially on how to make/where to find/or at least how to begin trying to make those kicks.

bouncingfish wrote:Probably shouldn't bring this thread up again, but I'm listening to Feed Me's new EP, and some of the drum work is absolutely insane. Clicky little kicks in the 4/4 tracks and huge epic ones in the more dubsteppy tracks, perfect snares...
people keep saying it's about sample choice, but I've never heard a sample sounding anything close to any of this and my drum processing knowledge isn't great enough for me to be able to make this kind of stuff from a 'rawer' unprocessed sample (or an overprocessed vengeance one for that matter).
Would appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction, especially on how to make/where to find/or at least how to begin trying to make those kicks.

Agreed, in some of the tracks the drums are insanely nice and clean but still pack a punch - I was actually listening to his album in the car the other day and then switched to some other peoples tracks and the first thing I thought was "damn why do their drums sound so shit". To me it sounds like a lot of the kicks may have been made from scratch - they've got that slappy punch you can achieve from synthesising a kick in something like Bazzism and in a lot of the 4x4 tracks they seem to lack real low end that some other hosue tracks use and instead pack a higher frequency punch because he's using a sub bass to fill out the low end area. Another area to focus on is the mixdown's - he's clearly left a good amount of room for the drums so even though they're punchy they stand out even more in the mix.