Layering Sounds in Battery 🔋

May 06, 2020

Hello! It's Josh Doyle from Triple Threat Artists!

Today we are going to be talking about Battery, which is a drum sampling plugin from Native Instruments. We are just going to be covering some of the features that I use the most. These are going to be basic and beginner features like layering sounds.

So, you'll see here that we've got a bunch of kits to choose from. And I've got two funk kits loaded up right here and I have a beat that I had programmed. So we'll just listen to that really quick.

(Beat Plays).

Nice and simple. And you see which sounds are being triggered when they light up here when the beat plays. So you see I've got the kick and then a rim shot for kind of an offbeat and then a snare drum sound, right? So that's cool and everything. But what if you wanted to layer a sound? That's what we're going to be talking about today.

So let's say that this snare drum is a bit too skinny, too skinny for my taste, and I wanted to layer it with this.

(Beat Plays).

All right? I didn't like either one of them by themselves, but together I really like how it sounds so I could just play them at the same time on the keyboard, you know, or I could just layer them together so that they both trigger when I just hit one key, and you'll see right down here. Right now I've got this open hi-hat funk sample selected and it triggers with the key range of C sharp one to C sharp one. So anytime that I hit C sharp one, it's going to trigger that sound. And then over here, this snare funk one gets triggered by key D one. So if I wanted to layer those, I could take either one of these and change it so that this D one, if I'm just dragging down now gets triggered by anything between C sharp one and D one. So now when I hit, see how they both light up and you can hear.

So let's suppose that this one right here is just a bit too loud. When I hit these together, I can just lower the level of just that one by dragging this down. Now let's listen.

(Beat plays).

That's a little bit better. Let me bring it back up just for a reference really quick.

(Beat plays).

Actually, I was selecting the wrong one here, so let's bring this back up. You need to make sure that you're selecting the right one and we'll bring this back up.

(Beat plays).

All right, and let's say a that I like it, but I'd like it just to be a little bit more high pitch. We can actually tune it up a little bit.

(Beat plays).

And now that's what those two sound like together when with this yellow snare funk one pitched up.

(Beat plays).

All right, so that's how you layer sounds. You basically pick one and another and you just make sure that at least one of those has the same key range. So this one has E two and this one has D sharp too. So I can just take this one and just drag it down to D sharp too. And now they'll both trick.

(Beat plays).

There you go. And you can do that for as many samples as you like. You can get them all to trigger at the same time. Have fun!

Cheers!

Josh

https://www.thetriplethreatartist.com/

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