nerd alert
ah yes, what a good topic. I think this is my favorite thing to talk/think about/spend time doing.
same here
nice thread, just had a read and thought i might as well add in my own 2 cents albeit 2 years late. scuse me if i'm stating the obvious
Qn to the massive: are there any 2step compression secrets? I know that you can get an awesome garagey woodblock sound by mucking around with this...
*more often than not this is a side stick rather than a woodblock and is used a lot in 2step. the snare is played with the stick lying flat across the head and the shoulder hitting the metal rim of the drum. this produces that dense click which can really cut through a mix. woodblocks tend to have a more obvious 'note' to them and can also be put to good use.
check out erykah badu's 'on & on' and 'rimshot' from baduizm, ?uestlove's drumming on d'angelo's voodoo and almost every bossa nova record [with drums in it] ever for examples of sidesticks in action.
funnily enough i was always taught that a rimshot is what you call it when you hit the snare on the head, but off centre, closer to the rim, giving you that ringing sound thats so popular in funk and other musics requiring a more raucous snare sound. years after learning to play i started to notice more and more people calling what i call a side stick a rimshot... i'm still not sure who's right on that one.
you can definitely use compression make a sidestick more attack heavy. try pulling the threshold down low and the ratio up high. then mess around with very short attack and release settings until it clicks nicely... also make sure you turn the compressors output or the snare channels fader down as this kind of compression can result in some pretty harsh shit for your ears. sometimes it's nicer to do this on a buss so you can blend the compressed, extra clicky one with the natural sample.
the spl transient designer was a popular piece of gear with dnb producers for emphasizing attack and or deemphasizing release. there's quite a few plugins that do the same job.
i'm going to repeat a few things already said in the thread now;
cutting the tails off of your drums is standard. it just brings them as forward in the mix as possible and gives them that irresistible snappiness that kicks you in the ear hole and thus makes you want to dance.
applying swing is also defacto. i really miss having that simple swing bar in logic where you could tell it what sub division [ie 8ths or 16ths] to swing and then just slide the bar backwards or forwards until it sounded right. in ableton 8 its gone all fancy and i dont have the patience to work it out. i'm sure its good but why can't they have a simplified version too? for now i'm sticking with fxpansion's guru because it has a swing bar ala logic and some other really nice features that make beat programming pretty painless.
re: triplets, they can sound great but they're still aligned to a grid. better to swing 'em a bit just to loosen up. you can reach a triplet feel if you turn your swung 16ths up high enough anyway.
another thing to think about with swing is that if your beat has say a swing of 66% then it more often than not pays to have that same 66% on any other rhythmic elements in your track. just makes it flow that bit smoother. obviously mess around with other swing settings on other tracks too. you might come up with stuff that sounds more interesting, this is just an idea based on common practice.
*re: the 1 being implied on another beat until it kicks in and youre like 'whaa?'... really good to read it put into much better words than i could manage.
one of
my favorite tracks of all time uses this trick. i've always loved this kind of rhythmic manipulation, a track i'm working on right now uses it. the bass part is polyrhythmic and until the kick starts you're totally expecting it an 8th note later. i'm currently trying to work out a nice way to bring it in so it isn't quite so jarring. the best i've come up with is a subtle reversed cymbal to add a little light distraction. one track that gets me every time with displacing the 1 is fuck the pain away by peaches.
one more thing for this post... if you're an ableton user, set off one of your clips, and then while it's playing mess around with the start point for the clip. that's the little arrow pointing to the right underneath the left loop marker (if the loop marker starts at the beginning of the bar). you can find some really interesting rhythmic variations this way that you might not have thought about otherwise. whats more, you can record your live jamming in midi or audio into the arrange view. i haven't really seen this trick mentioned much in production forums but damn does it make shit sound good. afaik this is possible in other progs like logic but it's just not quite as flexible. say you have a loop that repeats itself, while the tune is playing, manually drag and drop the loop so that the 1 of the loop starts somewhere other than a '1' on the arrange page