Here I would like to discuss all the different kicks and snares out there and how to make them. Personally I am looking to make drums similar to Barely Alive (I will put examples below). All the drums I have ever made have lacked a certain quality that i just can’t quite put my finger on. I know how to make a snare but it is always missing something and a good kick is a downright mystery to me any help is welcome! I hope we can use this thread to learn and grow off of eachother.
Try getting your samples in key. Meaning that the peek around in the same frequency area such as 200hz for G. Make sure that they aren’t phasing either. If you can, inverse the polarity on some samples to get a bigger, more impactful sound. Also, don’t work too much on the drums. Hear how they work in the tune your making and then process the drums to better suit the tune.
I have heard something about inverting the phase of kicks so they don’t clash with sub…curious if anyone could expand on that or show an A/B example…does it make a difference?
It won’t stop them clashing bit it could cause the kick and sub to cancel each other out and it will sound weak. Or it could cause them to get louder. Tbh it depends how similar the initial wave forms are
I usually start off by having my kicks low end based around my x0x drum samples all of which I have a tuned version of. It definitely helps and u can kind of make ur kick part of the bass line melody
but only very rarely when the bass has some kick properties
then again a kick can be made from almost all sources and kind of work - in that it’s basicly punctuation…
imo a snare needs some body (not that you need need a snare) and it could be that a snare is just a response to that punctuation, like leading up to the next stop or like a bit of wiggling to get the blood running (as opposed to a fat 4x4 beast just lying on the floor breathing heavily)
in some ways the sound is unimportant and its just the roles they take on, that need to be figured out
yo got this kick, 2 layers mucho effects and resampled, and now the tracks finished and i’m adding extra bits its giving man bare grief, tried taking off effects on the resampled one turning down velocity and it’ still giving this nasty crackle that i can’t entirely filter out, it’s nowhere near clipping on any of the little meters and it seems to happen at random but more likely when there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the tune
Could be your buffer size. Like ur comp can’t handle the pressure. Try increasing it slightly til the cracks stop. If they don’t then idk.
Buffer size will be in preferences/audio or something. Maybe in hardware
If it’s an incredibly busy tune it can be worth even bouncing down fx so it doesn’t have to go on in real time. like for example if there’s a cycle to the effect or if it seemingly plays different when you go through the sequences.
(it should be the end goal to try to take your own computer down with each new tune. Like a katana ssslicing it’s own sheath )
I’m still figuring out making my own snares, so for now, I just load a sample and put a Trash2 filter on it. For kicks, I layer sine wave hits with fast decay, then saturate and compress the shit out of all of it, and add a click to it to increase it’s presence.
i like my snares to sound natural as i used to play drums, but i like to add a bit of reverb from time to time, maybe use a dub sounding snare sometimes, or i use multiple snares, so it adds a bit of variety to the track, i can sometimes layer as much as 10 snares together to get a very nice, sometimes only as low as 2.
I hate the vengeance pack snares with a passion, very picky with snares, If I can’t find or make the snare sound I want, I will leave the track unfinished.
I cant find a good tutorial on how to make that natural sounding snare, specially when you’re working with a Rock genre sounding track. I recorded some of my friend’s snare drum and it sounded so authentic. That would be a lot more easier but I still want to know how to make any snare sample to sound authentic and natural.
That would be hard with some snare samples, you might as well start with a sample closer to what you want - I use Toontrack’s Superior Drummer for ‘real’ sounding drums, great instrument.
