Live Drum Sampling & Slight Aggression

I’ve always been obsessed with drum recordings that sound like they’re going to hit you in the face with a bag of gravel. I remember first listening to the staple drum character of Unknown Mortal Orchestra and being overwhelmed with how a tone that sharp and aggressive can be used so casually in an R’n’B setting. Using natural phase and experimental mic placements is a huge part of how they get their sound and is something I’ve been taking inspiration from ever since I started recording live kits. In this blog I will be delving into some of my methods for creating an aggressive sounding drum kit, mainly through the use of pre-tape dynamics processing and sampling techniques.

We recorded the drums for our major project this tri (Pastel Palace) in the C75 room, in order to use some of the more aggressive analog compressors. We used all dynamics microphones for this recording (and most recordings) so that we could close mic the kit for as little room noise as possible. The OH and beater mic were going through a pair of smashed Warm Audio FET compressors, while all snare and tom mics were being fed through the Drawmer Six Pack. Using a fairly high ratio, low threshold and high output, we were able to make this 4 piece beginner’s jazz kit sound like how a jar of honey might look to a bee. Once we were content with how bombastic the kit sounded, we hit record and playlisted about 4 takes for each track. I recommend one take for the whole kit without fills, one for just snare and kick without fills, one for whole kit with fills, and 3 minutes of just fills (whole kit). Be sure to also record samples of each individual piece of the kit, ensuring you capture a clear transient and decay. For a couple of the songs in Pastel Palace, our drummer hadn’t had the chance to form a drumbeat for many of the sections. Although this was somewhat of a drawback, we used it to our advantage and had him perform many fills and simple rhythms that we could then splice up and manipulate in post. This technique proved significantly more fun in sections where the time signature changed multiple times, where splicing the beats and fills allowed more room to play with unexpected accents.

Once the bounced clips from each recording were on my personal computer, it was time to sit down for a while (preparing a multiple course meal beforehand is highly recommended) and listen to all the takes. After choosing the best takes, I will often take one of two processing routes. One is to import the clips directly into the session and splice the audio files. The other is to cut short samples from the recordings in order to trigger them with midi notes and write in drum sequences. For the song ‘Veins’, I attempted the first route. I only ended up using two mic recordings for this track, as the overhead bleed in the snare mic provided more than enough high end for the intended aesthetic. The kick processing started with a multiband dynamics plugin to boost around 80Hz as the kick drum used is TINY and sounds like a cardboard box. Followed by that, additive EQ with a rather large gain reduction around 370 Hz. This reduction was mainly to reduce a trouble frequency created by the snare resonance. A simple gate and light compressor were then added to the end of the effects chain for noise mic bleed elimination and volume control. This chain was mainly to accentuate the low end to greater replicate a sampled sound.

Most of the kits aggression and character was captured by the snare mic. Because we compressed this so much pre-tape, a lot of the resonant frequencies of the snare drum were quite loud, making the kit sound quite ‘roomy’ through this mic. The major trouble frequency was around 374 Hz and was the first harmonic of the snare’s resonance, thus appearing the loudest. Room noise often works quite well when the kit is tuned to the key of the song, but unfortunately this kit wasn’t, and the resonance sounded like a wet marble with no agenda. After using simple EQ to reduce the gain of 374 Hz, the kit instantly started sounding more impactful. The next EQ in the chain is where most of the grit came from. Between 150-250 Hz is where the snare drums most valuable character lies (in my opinion). Boosting this frequency range a little over 6db was just enough to cause the breakup and low-mid distortion I had been looking for. Ending the chain was a relatively subtle compressor, primarily used for volume control. This particular example is from the track 'Veins', here's a little snippet.

https://soundcloud.com/brady_nolan/veinsspliced

The other way of processing the recordings is to treat them as you would normal samples. To do this in ableton, I simply loaded the ‘Drum Rack’ instrument into a new midi track and clicked on the ‘Add Folder’ button under the categories tab. From here, you can add the folder in which your samples are located, and then drag and drop them into different notes in the ‘Drum Rack’ instrument. This method allows you to write in your own midi sequences, if you so desire. Here’s a track I wrote in my spare time showing off how effective this method can be.

https://soundcloud.com/brady_nolan/tempre-midi-samples

Sampled kits and midi drum sequences are used a lot in pop, electronic music and R’n’b, usually due to how clean a mix can become when resonant frequencies are microphone bleed are limited and/or eliminated entirely. Samples can give a producer the exact sound they are after without having to even touch a microphone. Herein lies a huge positive for many producers, yet also a flaw. Without the knowledge of how to produce the sound you want from an actual instrument, many people settle for popular kit samples and drum machines, often rendering their tracks with a lack of personal character. For this trimesters drum recordings, we took a really shitty live kit and produced our own unique samples from it, resulting in a unique tone and a butt tonne of personality. In the future, I aim to record ALL of the samples that I use for percussion and experiment further with mic placement and naturally occuring sound distortion.