Looking for a super fast way to tighten your drums and enhance the groove in your tracks? With just a few simple parameter tweaks on your drum buss you can add a killer groove and get your drums cutting straight through the mix. Interested? Watch this vid!

Transcript

Okay so we’re gonna be taking a look in this tutorial at a lightning-fast technique that will (a) tighten up your drums and (b) as a double whammy enhance the groove at the same time. So I want to dive right in and play this track for you and keep your mind focused on the top-end. So the hats, the shakers, the rides, and particularly how they sound quite washed out at this stage of the tune.

So this cool track that I’ve got here. I’ve grabbed off of hoopski’s. So we got a bit of progressive house to experiment and play around with a bit of a break from the techno. And at the moment we’ve got a whole bunch of these top sounds layered up. And that is perfectly normal. If I just zoom out you can see that this is a peak moment in the track and all these tops are layered up to provide this real high-energy. So we’ve got closed hats, open hats, shakers, rides and so on. But there is often a downside to this. And that is that with all these layers, there are a lot of tails there are a lot of sounds overlapping on top of the transients and we can lose that groove that articulation a sense of the rhythm. So we want to find a happy balance between them. And a really good way to do that is by using a transient shaper. So in this instance we’ve got all of these drums and they’re all grouped together going through this one channel, tops. And that is where I’ve got Ableton’s drum buss and this is super quick we’re just going to use this transient control. Now when I turn it to the left, it really brings out the transients and it brings down the sustain and the tail parts of the sounds. So let me play this to you I’ll go really extreme with it so you can hear it in action. So let’s find a happy medium now.

So can you hear the difference. It’s quite subtle but it is enough you immediately can get that sense of groove, the sense of those transients, the bite back instead of just that washed out vibe. Now the thing to realize with this is that no transient shapers are made of the same material. They’re all gonna behave in slightly different ways. So I’ve got another version here of a transient shaper. This one is by Schack audio and I just want to play this for you again it’s very subtle, the controls have got a little bit in on the release and a little bit up on the transient that’s all. And I’m gonna AB between these just so you can get a feel. So listen to the groove you’re gonna notice that they’ve both got this nice tight sound. Now we’ve got the control, we’ve got the articulation but the feel is different. So have a listen we’ll start with a drum buss. Keep your eye on these on buttons I’ve got these key mapped. And then again let’s just play this with a before and after.

See you hear as soon as I turn it off everything just feels washed out. It kind of feels like it’s falling apart a little bit. So that is a mega mega quick technique and you can just experiment fine which flavor you like best on your track or which your favorite designer is that you can use but it works an absolute treat every time and it treats all of the drums at once which has the advantage of also gluing them together making them nice and coherent an bringing that control. 

So super quick technique. I hope you found this tutorial useful. If you’ve got any tips, hacks, techniques around your drum processing, ping them up in the comments. I’d love to check them out. Until next time. Take care and happy music making.

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