Effectively Layering Drum Sounds

Hey Hey

So the original kick I used in the track I'm working on started off with quite a bit of low end but after I bounced it down I realised it's lost it's thud and isn't sticking out as much in the mix so I've decided to layer it with another kick to beef it out. This is probably a dumb approach but I'm learning so just stick with it!

How do you guys/gals go about doing that effectively?

Do you do it with snares too? I wanted to try that to get some weird sounds.

Regarding kicks, Is it a case of pitching to the same then using low/high pass filters till the point of them sort of merging and then doing some buss compression to get them to merge more seamlessly as a single entity? EQ too?

What settings would you use for the compressor in that case? I kinda like techno kick drums - long decay sort of thing. Still don't completely know what I'm doing with compressors really for this function though.

I double track my kicks and snares using different patches for each very often. Makes a more interesting sound.

they way i think about layering drum samples

is that each sample does one job

so like, a kick drum has a transient, a sort of 'click' (e.g. the beater sound on an acoustic kick drum)

and then it has the sustained 'thud'

and below all that, a bit of sub-bass information (if wanted/needed)

and that goes for all drums, not just kick drums

a snare has a transient 'smack' and then the sustained body

all that is the sort of horizontal/time-domain aspect

there's also the vertical/frequency-domain stuff

layering for EQ reasons, essentially

so a kick drum 'needs' a fundamental 'thump' (e.g. 60-80hz)

and then it needs some 1-4hz information or else it sounds like dull mush

so in that case you'd layer two kicks, one for each job

and so when looking for kick samples,

you should find ones that would do its respective job well

(i'll come back later and post some more thoughts if anyone wants)

What I usually do is just put a resonant LPF on the kick with maybe a slight decay on the cutoff frequency. But that only really works if you have all the frequencies already there.

I probably shouldn't provide any advice cos I'm pretty shit at mixing, but my ears tell me it's all about context. You can do big boomy kicks but you won't hear them if there's another bass sound or whatever. You gotta give some space for those boom booms.

Something I like to do instead of fancy compression, etc. is just have the main drums (besides like hi hats or little ticky rimshots whatever) be monophonic. This is super easy on something like an MPC where you just slice up a loop and play the slices, which often already have all the hi hats and twiddly bits built in. Then you don't even have to think about clearing up that space, you get it "for free", unless you clutter up the mix with a bunch of other junk. Even if you do that, you can clear space using time instead of spectrum, i.e. just move the other events earlier or later instead of using EQ and shit.

I guess that is not at all what you're looking for because you're talking about layering, but working that way might help you think about or get a feel for what layers are appropriate.

What I ended up doing was lpf/hpf on each of the two samples (the low/high kicks) to isolate the low end 'boom' and the intial 'thwack' and then sort of adjust the cut off so that they audibly blend. I then grouped those and put glue compressor with a nice preset that sounded nice and tightened it up and fucked with that endlessely till I was happy with the settings and then I add some overdrive to kind off fuzz it out a bit and that kind of made it blend in a way too. Oh I messed with the volume of the low end kick too so that it's kinda in the background of the other more prominent 'high' kick too. I don't think I eq'd it.

Resampled that and that's what I'm using now - instead of two channels. It's probably a load of shit but there you go...i kinda embrace not really knowing what I'm doing and just trust my ears nowadays.

Oh yeah, always trust your ears in these situations. Limpy's explanation was pretty spot on. Also, for those clicky transient kicks, make sure that the attack isn't being affected too much by an automatic fade. Most programs add them to the start of each sample --they prevent unwanted clicking, but if a sample has a very fast attack, a fade greater than a few milliseconds can deaden it quite a bit. I only recently discovered this in Ableton. To be clear, the fade should still be there (in most cases), but try reducing it by half if you want more attack from your kicks.

atm I'm layering, coloring most of the drum sounds using convolution, not using traditional IR's, but samples, whatever sounds good to my ears.

Like in this track I layered the snares with a squishy airy sweep, gradually increasing in intensity over time;

http://soundcloud.com/plugexpert/10-jaar-mgcomp001

What I like about convolution is that only frequencies inside the used 'IR', are being multiplied, which can be filtered.

In the more hiphop'ish tracks I often use mda subsynth set to key osc in type on the kick track layering a sub sine, like in here;

  On 8/1/2015 at 8:53 PM, Zephyr_Nova said:

Oh yeah, always trust your ears in these situations. Limpy's explanation was pretty spot on. Also, for those clicky transient kicks, make sure that the attack isn't being affected too much by an automatic fade. Most programs add them to the start of each sample --they prevent unwanted clicking, but if a sample has a very fast attack, a fade greater than a few milliseconds can deaden it quite a bit. I only recently discovered this in Ableton. To be clear, the fade should still be there (in most cases), but try reducing it by half if you want more attack from your kicks.

Really? That's a thing?

I know that you can enable zero crossing in most DAWs but it's really impractical if it does it all by itself

Yep, it's a thing. You can disable the automatic fades completely, though in past programs I've used that's created problems... I haven't actually tested it out in Ableton. In Acid doing that creates clicks and basically makes the whole program spazz out, so my instinct is to keep the automatic fades on.

This is what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9YNDmFJSY

  On 8/1/2015 at 2:08 AM, LimpyLoo said:

they way i think about layering drum samples

is that each sample does one job

 

so like, a kick drum has a transient, a sort of 'click' (e.g. the beater sound on an acoustic kick drum)

and then it has the sustained 'thud'

and below all that, a bit of sub-bass information (if wanted/needed)

 

and that goes for all drums, not just kick drums

a snare has a transient 'smack' and then the sustained body

 

 

all that is the sort of horizontal/time-domain aspect

there's also the vertical/frequency-domain stuff

layering for EQ reasons, essentially

so a kick drum 'needs' a fundamental 'thump' (e.g. 60-80hz)

and then it needs some 1-4hz information or else it sounds like dull mush

so in that case you'd layer two kicks, one for each job

and so when looking for kick samples,

you should find ones that would do its respective job well

 

(i'll come back later and post some more thoughts if anyone wants)

This is about as concrete of an answer as you're going to get

  On 8/3/2015 at 9:31 PM, Zephyr_Nova said:

Yep, it's a thing. You can disable the automatic fades completely, though in past programs I've used that's created problems... I haven't actually tested it out in Ableton. In Acid doing that creates clicks and basically makes the whole program spazz out, so my instinct is to keep the automatic fades on.

 

This is what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4g9YNDmFJSY

Weeeeird...

A weird thing I've noticed in Audition is that when you add tracks to the multitrack view it'll boost the volume on each track and make everything clip. I have NO idea why this is?