What is YOUR key to laying down "good drums"? -- This has been hardest for me as I am to hard on this process. What are some techniques to get them more organic and warm sounding?

I've been adding a bit of tail delay on my snare to give it that slight roll..any other tips? In your daily process how do YOU go about picking drums..I know i'm gon hear "son, i like my drums dirty"...lol....explain.


tbg

this is where i like usin the VCR to add character..

also i tend to eq the samples thru my mixer pretty harshly (basic 3band), and overdrive a bit on some sounds

Use good sounds! It took me a while to learn this. Same for every part of the beat. Yes you can make a kick out of any sound by filtering and chopping. You have to be really picky and if you have like 100 sample pick your favorite 25 and just use those and get rid of your crap sounds.

I agree, use good sounds, but remember that you're drums won't sound better if you use snappier snares and big kicks.
Be creative with your drum structure, don't always do the kick, snare, kick kick, snare over 1/16 hihats, try to give your drums some swing.

my trick (gather round kids!) is to take two kicks, two snares and two hats that sound similar but not identical and lay them out with different volumes.

most drummers, when they do double kicks, will go: duh-DUH. or DUH-duh. very seldom are both hits at the same volume. same thing for snares - i use the louder / clearer snare on the 2 and 4 (or whatever) and drop the quieter / more rolled one at different places in the beat, mostly to supplement the main snare.

AAAAAAAND - same thing with hats. most drummers will lay into the rhythm on the hats by emphasizing certain hits. that's the louder hat hit, and the other is there to offset the louder hat hit.

obviously, this ALL goes out the window if yr using an sp- with velocity sensitivity. but that's basically what you are looking for.

Layer snares with claps. You can layer two versions of he same sample, one pitched down and one pitched up to get much fatter sounds.

apply mfx-16, turn all knobs down, and resample with lo-fi on.

the drums i pick are really dependent on the other sounds i'm using the beat. when i first started beat making the drums were ALWAYS the most important part for me, they still are, but because of that i tended to use drums that dominated the mix and kind of stole emphasis away from everything else. now i try to make everything fit well together.


but there are some things i always tend to return to. for example i always layer one of the kicks from the amen break with a compressed 808. i have the amen kick at the start and then let the 808 take over and be the main body of the kick. for snares, again i use one of the amen snares and sometimes i will layer them with another organic snare (not a drum machine snare) that has more "umph" if i'm looking for something a bit more powerful. sometimes i add a tiny bit of reverb on my snare as well to make it sound bigger but i rarely use delay on my snares, or any of my drums, unless i'm working on something slower.

as for hats and other bits of percussion, well i tend to use glitchy noises for my hi-hats and i tend to use alternate volumes and different samples to create a type of shuffly feel. i also tend to use the crash from the amen break a lot (yes i'm a fan of the amen break ).

I've got thousands of drums, not just factory, but also drums I've chopped myself.
I cover 24-48 pads with any random drums, really, and resample them so that the ones I choose fit to my samples.

i'm lazy. i typically sample kick, snare, hi-hat from a kit, apply fx, compression, etc. resample. then just bash 'em. no quantize. i've got to achieve some kind of variety.

this

don't let the "dubstep" part scare you, there is some crazy knowledge dropped in the production bible

theres also some crazy assholes haha..

"how do you make this sound?"

"fuck off and stop trying to sound like burial!!"

im too used to sp forums were everyone gives constructive and friendly advice..

meh, that doesnt mean anything about the bible, all the good info is stickied and or "threaded" (theres a "how do i make this sound thread" and Q/A on individual programs and synths) and purely technical questions get answered insanely quick.

they get 1000 wobble questions a day....its just sad. "how do i wobble" "how do i sound like caspa"
after a while it just becomes annoying when theres already 1000 threads on the subject.
but it would be the same as if someone came on here 10 times a day and asked "how do i sound lyk madlib??" without reading the thread right below it "how to sound like madlib" or taking patience and practice into account

yeah man i know haha just having a giggle....

i actually read alot of stuff on there, its a good forum....

i actually read that ikonika got signed to hyperdub because she pm'd kode 9 some tracks on there....

thats pretty cool, get sending some of the big names on there music hd!!!