Dubstepforum.com

Lately i've been finding it difficult to create unique percussion tracks.

Does anyone have any interesting/unusual techniques they would be willing to share?

I mentioned this elsewhere, but a lot of my percussion sounds come from me using the Import Raw Data function in Audacity and opening up large spreadsheets/powerpoint presentations then fucking around with the resulting soundwave.

I bought a bongo, record said bongo using my phone, sample and resample

Take hits out of tunes, clap, click and hit things into a mic, go outside and hit wood together etc. Basically make your own samples.

Pitch things up and down

High Passed Kick + Rimshot = Snare
Low Pass 808 Kick + High Pass Bongo + Compression = Weird Kick

Stuff Like That.

If you were talking about sequencing and not sound, then try flipping things around
instead of Kick on 1/Snare on 3, try snare on 1/ kick on 3 every once in a while
OR
Do some finger drumming and see if you come across a cool fill.
OR
Use a Midi Keyboard and play chord progressions or arrangements with percussive instruments.

Just things to try, it all depends on how you do it.

Pans.
Forks.

JTMMusicuk wrote:I bought a bongo, record said bongo using my phone, sample and resample

+1 For this, even if you don't have your own real drums, just tap your hands on something solid and you'll eventually come up with an arrangement you'll really like and want to record

field recorder, go bang on stuff.

wood blocks, balls bouncing, steel drums, paper tearing can be a snare.

try hitting surfaces with different things and just sample them in.

take any sample
apply pitch envelope
like 20 ms or so, have it start waay up and go down to the bottom quickly

there you go, turns everything into percussion

Take a camera film case, fill with beans, shake rhythmically... and take a bigger box, fill woth more beans and have a different shaker.

izotope vinyl

I like to use non-drum samples as drums. For example in my latest tune I use a shower door as part of the kick, a wood block and a kitchen cabinet as part of the snare/clap, pill bottles rattling as shakers, and a light switch on/off as most of the hihats. It adds variation to otherwise boring (imo) sounds, and it keeps me entertained.

I built a contact Mic the other day. (literally a couple quids materials maximum, well as long as you already have a soldering iron and wire cutters/strippers). you can find a lot of weird sounds sticking it to things then hitting them. it's quite a raw not really high quality sound though but that's cool.

sampling film and video game sounds and layering them with stuff can be fun too.

make shit like hats and percs in 170 bpm, bounce it, open new project and set to 140 bpm stretch, and chop it up make fit...bpm's were examples. i get some nice grooves and textures (sometimes). theres something about a stretched reverb tail that has been abruptly chopped. makes it sound different i guess

try creating a duplicate of your perc track, sidechaining it with everything in your track or distorting it, warping it, hipassing it, chopping it again or anything really and then layer it onto your percussion really quietly with loads of reverb.

Drum sounds need proper transients so when setting up a track with sounds that have been resampled and compressed more than a few times, just layering them with your own recorded sounds (literally like just banging a lighter on a cup or another equally unimpressive sound) will give it some wanted/needed natural dynamics. I've been recording shitty random bits like this and its proving to be much easier than working with numerous high quality recorded commercial samples. Try it out for yourself. I use a shitty mic btw.

Think of it in this way, that nice sounding commercial or sampled drum sound from a record or sample cd is compressed within a certain context, that context is what's essential to that transient and how it behaves. So a very easy way of getting clean transients is just recording random bits and pick out the ones you think might be appropriate to use as a layer in a layered drum sound. The alternative could be having a properly recorded studio drum sound and give it some outboard compression, gain through a certain unit or the like. Most of the time that wont give AS unique a sound in my experience. And compression and the like is difficult in itself.

In Ableton,

I've been mucking around with working on a faced paced hat/perc pattern in 140. Run some variant of camelspace, and then on top of that I'll modify an auto-pan to act as a psuedo compressor (sans ghost track) to get a small "pumping" sound from the hits. It works really well when the pulse is at it's highest somewhere between the 1.2-1.3 of the beat, but this is just where I like it, you can really accent anywhere in the beat with this function.

Get some drum machines, software or whatever, and load up like 20 or 30 samples of hi hats, kicks, bongos etc, the more variety the better. Bash away on a keyboard/drum pad coming up with Rhythm. The key is to zone out and go a bit mental.

I bought myself a nice big frame drum which is capable of producing both low and high notes and can also be tuned to a particular key. It's a Meinl Deep Shell Tar, great drum. Record that into whatever mic you have and process in your DAW to get interesting realistic percussion samples. Also I bought myself a TASCAM DR-2D portable recorder, go out in the field and record whatever you can find.

Use breaks.