Ever feel like your drums sound static and boring? This technique is used heavily by pro’s to give their drums that extra bit of interest and enhance the groove of their tracks. It’s very fast to implement and you can add this in at any stage of the production process. Give it a go!

Transcript

So this is gonna be a really quick one for you for adding more groove and interest here to my drums.

So I’ve been listening back to my track here and the collapse of feeling a touch robotic a bit stagnant to me which is of course easily done when you draw in the ring via the mouse and I’ve got no kind of life to them so I’m gonna be using a technique that’s gonna add a bit more bounce to them so that they work against one another and create a rhythm in themselves.
Have a listen before we get started.

So there’s nothing wrong with them I really like the sound but every single here is the same. So the idea here is I’m going to make each clamp different from the other. And as I said we’re going to kind of create a rhythm inside of the claps and the basic pattern that they’re playing now you can do this via a whole variety of techniques you can automate parameters in the sampler or synth parameters you can add effects you can use layering you can use velocity anything you’ll like with this. I’m actually going to be using a synth layout I’m gonna be using a plugin called micro tonic.

Let me just play the sound that it’s that I’ve put into it. And together. She can hear it’s faint really nicely on the top of it but I want to add some automation now to bring these collapse to life and the way I’m gonna do it is with a particular parameter that you find in a lot of drums since when it comes to synthesizing claps its effect that I really like it’s just increase in the attack. Have a listen.
So it’s going a bit different compared to the normal thing that you hear and I’m gonna try and add that into the track.

So first thing I want to do is just configure this so I’ve got it available for automation and then we can get busy drawing this scene so the way I’m going to do this is I’m gonna have a B A.

In fact let’s do this differently. I’m gonna have A B C B so I’m going to do is have this one and this one remaining the same. And they will bounce off of these two but I’m gonna make these a little bit different as well so they’re kind of bouncing off each other. Let me draw this in and you’ll hear what I mean.

OK so that’s cool. Let’s go a little bit more on this one I’m just gonna slice this.

And now let’s lay these up. Now this is way too loud so let’s bring it down.
So you can hear how they’ve now got their own kind of groove and rhythm. I’m gonna bring this down quite a bit more because it’s way too loud. I just want this to be subtle.

But let’s zoom out now and we’ll duplicate this across loop the section up and let’s have a listen to how this is sounding many other elements.

Cool

So it’s working really really nicely for me. And this is such an easy technique for you to do is one of the reasons I love it adds a human touch to your drums and you can use anything like I mentioned since samples automation velocity whatever works for you and it’s instantly going to add more groove to your drums. So I hope you found this tutorial useful.

Please do let me know how you get on in the comments until next time.

Have fun. Happy music making

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