Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker

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MikeTSH
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2008/09/29 16:49:04 (permalink)

Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker

I want DFH to sound lots thicker, the snare sounds very papery at the moment, how do I make it sound thicker? I would like to get Superior Drummer 2.0, does that have a thicker out of the box, tight sounding snare? It would just be great to make the snare sound fat and make the drum kit sound tons more real until I can afford SD 2, any solutions?
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    Bonzos Ghost
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/09/29 17:57:10 (permalink)
    If you're talking about the original DFH kit from several years back, it's a pre-processed kit aimed primarily for metal. I picked it up long ago and ended up using the hi-hat and cymbals only as I didn't care for the drum samples. I know what you mean with the snare. Adding the room samples in accentuate the snappy/frappy sound even more. Not so bad if you time align them. Never bothered to try all the usual tricks you might try when processing real drums. I used other samples instead.

    Anything newer like BFD2 or Superior2 will offer MUCH MUCH more. If you want flexibility and realism, check those out. They have factory presets of kits included, so if you're not overly familiar with all the work that goes into making a mic'd kit sound big, fat and punchy, then they will help get you there faster.
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    MikeTSH
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/09/29 18:10:33 (permalink)
    Thanks, I'm going to be buying Superior Drumer 2 shortly.
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    MikeTSH
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/09/30 11:11:11 (permalink)
    Any other ideas anyone? Just for the time being? The snare sounds so thin and papery and the cymbals have no punch
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    SteveStrummerUK
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/09/30 11:31:15 (permalink)

    Hi Mike

    You don't say which version of DFH you're using - are you able to route each mic on the kit to a separate track as in Toontracks EZ Drummer?

    If so, you should be able to work on the snare separately to beef up the sound.

    Steve

     Music:     The Coffee House BandVeRy MeTaL

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    MikeTSH
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/09/30 14:06:14 (permalink)
    it's the EZDrummer expansion pack
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    SteveStrummerUK
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/09/30 14:35:44 (permalink)

    Exactly what I've got here Mike!

    First off, have you tried changing the snare drums in your kit? Click on the small arrow at the bottom of the snare in the drum-kit view - there are 10 different snares available to choose from.

    Assuming you still want to be able to treat your snare separately, when you open EZ Drummer from the Insert>Softsynth dialogue, select the All Synth Audio Outputs: Stereo option.

    This will insert the EZ Drummer Track folder into your Tracks View, you'll notice that inside this folder, 8 assignable tracks plus the MIDI track have been inserted.

    Now, open up the EZ Drummer mixer and right click on one of the Trk 1 settings in the Output row and from the options, select Multichannel - EZ Drummer will now assign a new default Track Number, corresponding to the 8 tracks in the Track Folder routing the instruments to these tracks.

    You can manually change the track number but the defaults are ok for most uses.

    You can now independently adjust the volume and pan of the snare drum in the EZ Drummer mixer but, much more usefully, you can treat it independently in SONAR; by default EZ Drummer assigns track 2 to the snare drum - in SONAR, the snare will be found in track 2 inside the main track folder.

    Here you can add effects and processing as if it was a single track.

    Hope that helps a bit Mike - if I'm preaching to the converted and you already knew this stuff, I apologise - if not and you want a few screen shots to help out, that's no problem.

    Steve

     Music:     The Coffee House BandVeRy MeTaL

    #7
    bitflipper
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/10/01 01:24:23 (permalink)
    Steve's advice is good for any drum sampler/synth. You generally want to treat the kick, snare, toms and cymbals as four separate entities (although this philosophy is by no means universally accepted!) so that they can be effected in different ways.

    You probably only want a little EQ on the kick and nothing else, so it goes to its own audio track and is left dry.

    Toms will want some EQ, too, usually to take out some 400Hz. If you want a big sound from the toms, you may want to add some reverb, anything from just a hint of ambiance to dramatic 80's style thunder. Compression also works well on toms, to bring out the attack. Gating can be used to keep them from ringing too long.

    Cymbals usually don't need much treatment when it's a sampler (as opposed to real drums), although for certain types of songs some reverb and/or compression can give a nice effect. But whatever you put on cymbals will probably be different than what you put on other instruments in the kit, so rides and crashes should be grouped onto a common audio track. Whether or not hats go with them is a matter of taste; sometimes you'll put hats on their own track and keep them dryer than the other cymbals.

    Finally, the snare lends itself to extensive effects: compression or parallel compression, delays, lots of EQ (tune in some lows to give it more whump, boost some 5Khz to add more snare), gates or gated reverb. All these things have been used, lightly or with a heavy hand, to make the snare more interesting. Since you used the term "thicker", I'd suggest trying a gated reverb, which can make the snare ridiculously thick.

    Another cool effect on drums in general and the snare in particular is a plugin the modifies the amplitude envelope, such as the free Dominion. Use it as an alternative to compression for increasing the snare's attack. I'm looking forward to the new Transient Designer in SONAR 8, hoping it'll be good for this.

    You might even experiment with cloning the drum MIDI track, delete everything except snare hits from the clone, and then route the clone to another drum synth. It could be another instance of EZ, or a soft synth such as the TTS-1 or Dimension Pro. And the patch you double with doesn't necessarily need to be a snare patch!

    Jeez, now that I'm thinking about it, there is almost no end to ways to fatten a snare. Insert a synth with a white noise patch and add a gate to it. Then use the snare track to key the gate's sidechain so that the white noise burps with every snare hit. It creates an effect somewhat like a gated reverb, except that you can modify the white noise with EQ to get a wide range of sounds.

    And don't forget delays. Experiment with both very short delays and delays the length of a quarter note.

    And panning. Pan the reverb return, pan the delays. These can make the snare seem really wide.

    One more: try a chorus effect on snare reverb. Works on cymbals, too. The idea is to have the chorus kick in after the initial transient so that it just adds shimmer to the tail without softening the attack. You do that by using a fairly long predelay on the reverb.

    Lots and lots of cool tricks to do with snares, but the key, as Steve said, is to separate the drums into multiple audio tracks.


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    #8
    MikeTSH
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    RE: Getting Drumkit from Hell to sound thicker 2008/10/02 17:08:16 (permalink)
    I already knew about the ability to add effects on top, I was asking for the specific effects to use, which Bit here has done =) thanks. I bought the Nashville kit for now and the snare sounds much nicer for the styles of music I do (pop/rock), and it's turning out good. Gonna buy Calaustraphobic soon, my cousin wants to sing one of her RnB tracks we recorded the instrumentals for last time she was down here.
    #9
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