Important Drum Techniques Part 3

Back again with part 3 of my most important drum techniques. I've got one more part to this where I will compile all of these PDF's into one master notes page for everyone who's not kept up with these so far! 📝

Make sure to check out SoundToys Phase Mistress which is free till November 15th! https://www.soundtoys.com/product/phasemistress/ 

Change Pitch & Decay Live (Gate to Tempo Technique)

This is without doubt my favourite way to manipulate breaks. This technique essentially involves chopping a break up at all the individual hits & then using a groove template to warp it to your project BPM. Once this is all setup, you can then play with the tuning & ADSR decay of the break and it will still roll around perfectly at your BPM. It’s amazing for doing Live FX, layering multiple breaks & fine tuning your breaks to fit with the other ingredients in your tracks. 

I’m pretty sure it originated in the early days of jungle through the use of Recycle. You could slice a break & send the chops via SCSI into your hardware sampler & then load the midi groove file into your DAW. Much Like resampling, it’s a technique that has been somewhat lost to time but is incredibly powerful and useful once you get your head around it!

Me explaining the technique here - https://youtu.be/JQj8JGloIlM?t=199  (Time-Stretching & Layering DnB Drum Breaks)

Layering Percussion

A classic Photek style technique that is great for giving dimension to your tunes. Metal Hits, gongs, bongos, congas, timpani’s, daiko’s etc. The trick here is often to layer these percussion hits directly on top of your kicks, snares & bass hits. Also with a good deal of mono reverb or delay and sometimes quite far back and quiet in the mix. It’s often about adding emphasis or accenting certain beats but with layers rather than velocities.

Layering Kung Fu Hits

Similarly to layering percussion, adding vocal hits, kung fu whips, chops, sticks, ahah samples under your drums can ultimately just make them sound more badass. It’s easy to go over the top with this and for it to sound gimmicky but a little can go a long way in the right styles. 

Here are a selection of kung fu chops available to everyone from one of my first posts on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/posts/82280374/edit 

James Brown Uhh Vox

This can often be one of those tiny additions that brings a whole drum groove together. It usually hits best on the last 1/8th or 1/16th note of a 4 bar section. James Brown is the king for these! There is a great sample in Funky Drummer as well as Cold Sweat. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-WrGGOaHTSYa1IYFDnxXGs4EcLcNqIoT?usp=sharing 

Drum Rolls

Drum rolls are fairly simple to implement but are a great way to build energy towards a drop. Velocity is the primary thing to focus on here. Both ramping velocity and also subtle random velocity between the hits can make things sound less robotic. Changes in pitch, ADSR decay, distortion & filtering are all great ways to enhance a drum roll.

Drum Fills

Where rolls are often done with a repeating kick or snare sample, fills usually use a mix of different drum hits. A common technique in DnB/Jungle is too swap to a different break entirely for the fill section. Another cool techniques it to use different processing on the original break to give it some variation for the fill section. i.e a filtered & distorted version of the original break. 

Phase FXs (Old school Delay Style)

This is another technique that seems to have originated from the old Akai hardware samplers. From my understanding if you sent two identical midi passages to the same break program on the Akai, they would play slightly out of time due to the two midi signals being subtly different between the two midi channels. This would cause a phasing style effect which you commonly hear in old jungle tracks. A simple way to achieve a similar result today is to duplicate a track and then slightly delay the waveform in the DAW.

Phase FX https://youtu.be/RVfbg0fUg7Q?t=1458  (My Favourite Old School Jungle Techniques) 

Phasey Hits - Phase Mistress by Soundtoys is free till November 15th! its amazing grab it while you can - https://www.soundtoys.com/product/phasemistress/ 

I love messing with phasers especially on FX & crashes. Phase mistress is the best for this & is so simple and fun to play with. Get the free download asap :) 

Filter Break FXs

Filters are one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal and there is so much you can do with filtering even if we just focus on drum breaks:

• Layering different breaks with high pass vs low pass filters. 
• Smashing break segments with low pass filters + distortion. 
• Slowly building or reducing energy with low pass filters.
• High pass filtering breaks to make space for a separate kick drum layer.
• Sweeping break FX with resonant bandpass filters. 

One technique I think is really important to understand with low-pass filters is when you reduce the frequency content, you also reduce the perceived loudness of the breaks. Balancing out low-pass filters with a simple increase in volume is really important for retaining impact here.