How I Get Those Nasty, Dirty Drum Sounds 💩🥁

So yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine about what I do to get drums to sound a little bit more nasty, a little bit more gritty. That's what we're going to be talking about today.

As I was preparing for this video, I was going through a couple of the things that I thought that I did - that I ended up not doing - and it kind of surprised me. But before we get to those things, let's just start with just a few of the elements that help create the type of nasty and gritty drum sounds that I like to hear.

I'm going to play a section of the song so you can kind of hear it in context and then we'll break down some of the things that I did for this. So here we go.

[Music Playing]

Okay. So one of the first things that I did is I put a trigger on my bass drum. So here's what the bass drum sounded like before I did any sound replacement. And that's what trigger is - trigger is a sound replacer for drums. So this is what the bass drum sounds like before.

[Music Playing]

So what I did, just to make things easy, I pulled up trigger, so I'm making it active now. And then what it does is it just reads the "wave form" of whatever you are feeding into it and then it replaces it with whatever sound that you want. So I just go to my browser and I just picked, (I don't even know where I got this), this one specific library from, this is from "That Sound" (https://www.iwantthatsound.com/) is the name of the library. But yeah, this one's called bottoms kick and then fuzzy kick and Subi kicks. I feel like I picked and choose from different places to create this one. And so this is what it sounds like now.

[Music Playing]

So it's definitely a bass drum with more grit and and more room to it. The next thing - this is what my snare drum sounded like.

[Music Playing]

And so what I did is I just duplicated it. I only recorded it on the top, so I just duplicated it. And I also put an incidence of Trigger on it. These are big beauty, big and dry and room. This is a Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum.

So this is what it sounds like. Oh - and what I did is, unlike the bass drum, I didn't completely replace the sound. I still kept my original snare, but I brought in this extra kind of Trigger sound-replaced snare. So now there's kind of two going at the same time - I just blended them together.

[Music Playing]

Because I still liked a bit of the attack that I had from my original snare. Sometimes when you sound replace drums that you've got, they can almost sound too perfect. A lot of times these samples have been recorded in really nice studios with great gear and they've been dialed in super perfect. You know? But I don't necessarily like that on every song that I do, so I'll still keep my original drums in there sometimes.

So that's what I do to get my kick and snare happening. So here it is, the kick and snare.

[Music Playing]

And what I was surprised about is I actually thought that I had put a little bit of distortion on my kicks and snares, but really I just used the sound replaced samples to bring in a bit of that grit. I just looked for the drums that already had a bit of that distortion, a bit of that dirtiness already built into it. But what I do sometimes here - is I will create an aux track, which is what I did right down here. I called this 'distortion effects' or 'dist FX' and I put a "Devil-Loc" plugin from Soundtoys (https://www.soundtoys.com/) and this is where I can blend in some of the distortion into the overall drum sound. I've got it sitting here on my drum sub and so all of my drums are feeding into this drum sub right here. And then I'm able to use this as an effects bus to just blend in a bit of the distortion that I have here on this track. So without it, this is what the entire drum set sounds like. Actually, let me just solo the drums so we can hear what we're dealing with. So these are the drums without any of the distortion.

[Music Playing]

And then with this distortion plug in, I'll unmute that. I've just put it a little bit right here. This is what it sounds like now:

[Music Playing].

It's probably not a huge difference. I'll keep it going, but I'll toggle the mute on and off. It's not a big difference, but for what I needed for this song, I just wanted just a little bit more. So here's with it off and then I'll put it back on.

[Music Playing].

So here I'm going to increase the level of distortion so you can really hear the drastic difference it can make. So here it is - just a little bit.

[Music Playing]

So as it got more and more, you could totally hear why I didn't keep it up there all the time because they can really get out of control with this Soundtoys Devil-Loc plugin. It's a nasty little booger! But it is one of my favorite little boogers! Do people have favorite boogers, I don't know. I do!

So that's it! That's, the quick and dirty of what I reach for when I'm going for quick and dirty drums.

xxx - Josh

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Don't Rush for Feedback on Your Music 🧘🏽‍♀️


I was recently reading this book from Stephen King called "On Writing". And in the book he talks about the importance of waiting for feedback on anything that you've created.

He talks about the value of getting feedback, all that that entails, who you should ask for feedback from, and things like that.

He said that if you let your creative process be influenced too early on by feedback from others, then you'll never really get a chance to see where your intention could go.

He uses the analogy of "create your first draft with the door closed, and then your second draft with the door open".

And what I think he means is, don't let anybody influence what you're doing when you're very first creating your idea. Give yourself the chance to explore and make some mistakes, back-step, and then take some steps forward.

And, and then when you feel like you've gotten a chance to do what you wanted to do, say what you wanted to say... then, and only then open up your door and let some feedback in.

I believe this is something us musicians, producers, and writers need to strongly consider.

Don't let your creative vision be influenced too early on by what other people say.

xxx - Josh

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The Most Overlooked Vocal Production Tool

 

Do you ever wish that you could change the timbre of a voice, make it sound a little bit younger or maybe a little bit older?

Or make it sound like maybe the singer is smoked too many cigarettes, maybe inhaled a little bit of helium?

There's a tool in Melodyne that gets overlooked in a lot of tutorials, and it's the formant tool. And I'm going to jump right into this and play a bit of this vocal. And this is just a scratch a song that just a scratch vocal and track that we're working on. So it's not fully produced or anything, but just pay attention to the vocal here.

[Plays music]

So this thing has got a really cool tamper tour voice already and she's kind of got this like, I feel like a low end kind of grittiness to her voice, which is really cool. So normally I wouldn't use this on her voice unless I was going for something that was really interesting and different, which is what I'm going to try and do in this pre-chorus section right here. So this busier section that happens right here,

[Plays music]

I'm going to pull up the formant tool, which is this little tab right here. And all you've got to do is just hover over it, click, go in, click, drag up or down. I'm going to put it back and I'm going to manipulate it as it's playing so you can hear what it does.

[Plays music]

So I'm sure you've heard this kind of voice manipulation a lot in pop songs, especially on the echoes of phrases. So they'll have a phrase like in the normal vocal timbre and then they'll, they'll have it like echo with the formant kind of way up or way down. It's a really cool technique. And I feel like if you, if you go extreme, you know, it can sound like you're, you've got helium in your voice or the other way.

But what I have liked to do when I'm not trying to go for something extreme is just manipulate it just a little bit. Especially like if you've got a voice that sounds a little bit younger and you want it to sound more mature or vice versa, you've got a voice that sounds a little bit too mature, too old, and you want to bring some youthful elements back. I just bring the formant up just a little bit and you can make it sound like a more youthful voice.

So listen here. So this is gonna start a regular, non-affected.

[Plays music]

So I would find the sweet spot in there, but you can, you can get just a little bit of more useful sound in there. And then here, if I wanted to make her sound a little bit more mature. She's already got a low end kind of great, like I said to her voice. So this might not illustrate it the best, but you could bring it down..

[Plays music]

So those are the ways that I like to play around with this formant tool.

Experiment. See what you can do with it.

xxx - Josh

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How I Took a Car Horn and Made It Into An Instrument (using Ableton Live Simpler) 🚙 → 🎹

What's going on guys!

Today I want to show you how to make an instrument with a sample.

And this is a monophonic sample. I'll get into what that means, but today I did it with a car horn and it's pretty cool. It's a lot of fun.

I'm working at an office right now downtown in Phoenix and my ac went out on my car and had to take it to the shop. It's a 110 outside and Phoenix, so I used my godfather's car. He's got this beautiful old Buick.

When I went to arm the car and locked the door with this key fob it made this amazing sound throughout the parking garage. I'm like, "this is cool. I want to record this". So I grabbed my phone and recorded a couple of samples of it, brought it into my laptop and started clicking away.

Let me show you what I did.

Okay, so I want to make an instrument out of this car horn. What do I do? Well, right off the bat, we're going to open a mini track and I'm using Ableton live.

- Open simpler. Simpler as a built in instrument in Ableton that's purposely for monophonic instruments. So instruments that you're just going to hit one note at a time, like a bass or synth lead, something like that. But not like a pad. If you wanted a pad or piano or something you'd need "sampler."

- Put in the file that contains your sample sound.

- Go in and “dial it down” to put in beginning and end points to select the specific parts of the sound you recorded and want to use.

- Indicate the “C” note - C is just where it starts,

- In this example, I’m going to use the one shot mode.

- Adjust the length and the pitch envelope.

- Simpler automatically transposes notes across the keyboard.

- A car horn has a lot of frequency in it and it's actually like a cord. You're actually hearing multiple notes that are playing at once.

- Add some pads and some, some drums and other items to the mix. My example is just a looped chord progression for 16 bars.

- The original sound I used is the wrong key. If that happens, transpose to the right key.

- Adjust the synths up or down, and add other effects.

- I added some portamento glide to it.

- I also used some Neutron, a mixing tool by isotope and I've added an equalizer, cutting out a lot of the low end.

- I’ve also added some transient shaper to it and I lowered the attack on this so that it gives the appearance that it is a little further away.

- Adjust the various settings as you prefer for the sound you’re working with. This example also includes some compression.

- Next I added some reverb.

- Lastly I dropped on an auto filter. I used Ableton's auto filter.

- Adjust the filter as needed to get the sound you prefer.

- Boom, bob's your uncle! To hear it, hit play in the video above.

 

All right guys, that's it for this week. We will see you on the next video. If you'd like to learn more about how to produce your own music, please consider joining the Producer Course here: https://www.thetriplethreatartist.com

xxx - Zion

All music is copyrighted by Zion Brock. For licensing information please contact [email protected]

 

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Choosing the Right Beat for Your Song 🥁

Hey guys!
 
I want to do a video just talking about drums today. This is something that I'm really passionate about. Drums are my main instrument. I've studied them for more years than I care to mention. And I want to talk about choosing the right beat for your song. 
 
Check out the video. :) 
 
xxx - Josh
 
 
<Transcription>
… one of the reasons that your song misses the mark. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play a piano chord progression and it's just going to be on a loop and I'm going to play a variety of different beats over that chord progression. And it's all gonna be the exact same tempo. Nothing's going to change. And you're going to hear how these different beats over the same piano, a progression change the entire feeling of it. It'll make it sound like it's all of a sudden a dance song or one might make it feel like it's a ballad.
One is going, we're going to explore some Latin fields like reggaeton. Maybe that kind of like gives it like a, that kind of like island flavor. I'm even going to change the time signature. Like right now I hear this piano in a four, four times signature. We're going to see what happens if we change it to a six, eight or 12 eight a time feel all within the exact same tempo. So here we go. I'm going to play a little bit of the piano progression and then I'm going to start playing some ideas and I'll talk to you in between
Right now in your, this one, two, three, three, one, two is it right there in the snare is on B3 and the kick is on me, but we could switch it. So the snare drums are two and four, the scenarios on two and four. We could also do, we could also do like a Motown feel where the scenarios are on every downbeat or we can do the scenarios and on me. So
I also look at some Latin flavors. So one of the traditional Latin fields is Samba, which has a double bass drum repeating pattern like this
That could lend itself going into like a Boston Nova field. Or we can go into like a reggae feel, which is like this. We could also look at switching it from an eight four, four to a six eight by four, four I mean there's four county, four beats per measure. One, two, three, four one, two, three. We get switch that accounting to me like one, two, three, four, five, six one, two, three, five, six
Going back to four, four. We could also do something like what they use in Ed Sheeran's photograph where the snare drum just hits on beat four and the rest are accented on the toms. This kind of gives it like a tribal feel or we can take those accents that were split between the Tom and the snare and put them all on this snare, which is going to give it a more driving tribal field.
And then just to show you where we'll kind of run through a bunch of these seamlessly using kind of hear how it changes. So this is where we began.
So yeah, that's just a, just a handful. Those are just the ones that I could think of off the top of my head. And you can hear how drastically that changes the exact same chord progression without changing the tempo at all. So put some serious consideration into what rhythm you want to be the foundation of your song. And you know, you don't have to pick one cause you can see that, you know, I could switch between a bunch of those so you could have one for your verse, one for your chorus. But just be thinking about that. It makes a big a big difference on how your song is felt.
 
 
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Blending Synth and Sampled Horns

In this video I show how I blended real sounding horns with a not-so-real sounding synth horn patch to create something new and interesting.

I think it was Martin Scorsese who said to an actor something like "Don't give me real, give me interesting. Interesting is better." And that's what we're doing in the studio today. 
 
So I I like to take that approach when I'm using virtual instruments where I can't get the real thing.  And again, I'm not trying to go for real, but instead I'm trying to go for interesting. I'm trying to make it something that you might not have heard exactly in this way before.
 
So I'm gonna play a little bit and then I'll show you what I what I've done with it. (playing example)
 
I've got these horn parts here that are just kind of playing this line right here. And those sound cool. But what I did is I panned those to one side and on the other side I doubled it with a synth that kind of has a little bit more dirt to it. And by itself the synth doesn't sound very cool but it blends really well with the horn. So here's the synth by itself. (plays music)
 
It doesn't sound doesn't sound very cool. It doesn't sound much like a horn. But when you blend it with this it sounds much better… (plays music)
 
So originally I tried actually just doubling the horn parts. You know and just putting one to one side and one to the other. But it didn't really add anything, it just sounded like the same horns on both sides. eIf I had like trombones I'm one and tuba on the other... I just found that it sounded more interesting to have that synth in there just to kind of like make it a little unusual. 
 
The other thing that I did too created an interesting part is I took this little section and I reversed it and that's what creates this swell at the beginning of the phrase here ..(plays music)
 
So instead of always trying to make your instrument sound more realistic, try to make them sound more interesting. 
 
You're gonna find more success in trying to make your virtual instruments sound more interesting than trying to make them sound more real, and trying to fool the masses.
 
- Josh
 
 
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Quick Tip - Vocal Mix Levels

Quick tip for how to check if your vocals are balanced at the right level within a mix. If you turn it almost all the way down and the last thing you hear is ONLY the vocal then your vocal MIGHT be too loud. However if you turn it almost all the way down and the last thing you hear is something louder than the vocal, then your vocal MIGHT be too quiet in the mix.

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Quick Tip - Listen Like a Teenager, Analyze Like a Scientist

Many teenager's listen to music with a passion that most of us lose as we get older. Let's see if we can get some of that back but also take time to analyze what is making us have physical reactions to certain music. Music is magic! Let's figure out how the tricks are done!

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Quick Tip - Creating Within Your Limitations (Part 2)

In Part 1 I talked about ways to play and record an instrument that you might not know very well. In this video I'll show you how I took that approach and used it to create a fresh sounding guitar part (without using much actual guitar playing at all)! The point of this is to inspire you to try recording other instruments in simple ways that can result in sounds which not many others would ever think to try.

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Quick Tip - Creating Within Your Limitations (Part 1)

Not every self-producing artist is a multi-instrumentalist and you don't need to be! Here is one way you can approach playing an instrument that can result in fresh sounding ideas on your next recording. (In Part 2 I'll show you how this one-note-at-a-time technique can sound in a song.)

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