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Originally posted by Derivative yea you got the claps on the wrong beats plus they are too quiet in the mix. the kicks in the new loop are kind of weird. it sounds like they are cutting off or distorting or something cuz it just sounds like a short fuzz sound. what sequencer are you using? cuz the kicks that come with fruity are fairly good. the dance kicks are quite suitable for house although they are a bit sub heavy. reason drums are fairly decent out of the box. check out that doru malaia super percussions pack cuz that has quite alot of quality perc samples and good kick samples.

I layered 3 kicks together, with a more "punchy" kick delayed 1 tick from the other two. I'm using all samples from the Doru Malaia's Superdrums 8000. The dance kicks, to me, don't really sound quite appropriate for house -- especially deep house. Regarding the claps and such, I have claps on 1&3 and snare on 2&4. Did you think the congas were ok? Thanks man.

if you are gonna use congas you will probably want to use more than 1 pattern. as in, layer several different patterns over each other at different velocities and/or pitches. either put the claps on the 2nd or 4th beat or the snares. having both playing across all 4 beats sounds weird.

the thing with layering kicks. it sounds as if your kicks are now distorting. basically every sound you have got in that loop has a frequency range. the human ear can hear from about 20hz to about 20,000hz where 20hz is sub bass frequency and where 20,000hz is ultra high frequency. kick drums typically reside between 50hz and 1,500hz. the sub part of the kick is between 50hz and 150hz. most of the presence of the kick is typically around 500 to 800hz and the initial 'slap' is around 1,500hz.

now, this is where it gets a little more technical. if you put a kick drum that is mostly 500hz down and then stack another kick drum on top of it that also resides mostly around 500hz then the volume around that frequency doubles. when writing dance music you NEVER want to go above 0 dB because you will hear things distort beyond that point. you can use any dB meter to see if you are going over.

those 3 kicks you used seem to be clashing cuz they all occupy roughly the same frequencies.

there is a way you can get around this though. theres several actually. one is EQ. lets say your first kick is quite thumpy and you wanna keep that thump. leave it as it is. layer the second kick on top of it. you dont want that kick to have the thump part as well so add an EQ to an FX channel assigned to kick 2 and make a notch (about 2 or 3 dB) around 500hz. what that will do is to cut the volume of kick 2 around 500hz so it doesnt interfere with kick one. when you do this you should notice that you get a bit of both kicks and it doesnt cut off. you may also find that if you EQ it cleverly, you can make your kick sound louder than you could before. once you have your 3 kicks layered and not distorting (going over 0 dB) then you can add compression to some or all of them.

Ok ok, another new version. I ditched the other kicks and replaced it with one kick I think I have filtered and compressed decently, or not. What do you think?

CLICK ME

EDIT: For some reason the hi-fi version was taking a LONG time to clear so I've just uploaded it to where I have the others.

Last edited by RungeKutta on Oct-21-2004 at 18:55

Heres a lil tribal type loop i just did....

http://www.frozen-web.com/samples/triballyyours.mp3

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yea basically you want your kick a bit more like frosts which is cleaner, louder and prominent in the mix. i still think both of ya need more percs! more congas cuz it still sounds like its just a tapped rhythym with conga samples whereas you want a constant rhythym going with them. i ave some dnb songs with lots of congas, lots of snares, lots of hats. there is no silence in between beats. even slower tempo, percussion driven music uses percs to fill up all that empty silence between down beats. layo and bushwhacka! - love story has good use of congas getting into a nice flow.

Oh yea I know I need much much more. I'm just trying to get a very basic beat at a good state. I'd like to try to make one decent track instead of just fiddling around with everything. So I'm trying to start at the bottom and now continue until I got something half-way decent at each step...

version 4 of your drumloop is taking ages to clear...

Since it doesn't seem to update the last post when you edit a post, I'll just kind of re-post my last message that I edited...

Here's version 4 of my 2 measure basic house-beat loop.

CLICK ME

hmmm. you've but an open cymbal on each kick beat? thats what it sounds like. its covering up alot of your kick though. kick needs to be much louder (watch out for the cutoff). there also needs to be more of a bass punch. too much of it is mid/treble. the 8th hats and off hats need EQing because they are already sounding a bit murkey.

Version 5.

I previously had a cymbal "pedal" delayed from the kick. I've moved it to the off-beats and ditched the more rhythmic shaker and added a shaker that does straight 8th notes with the "off beats" of that accented. I've also removed the previous ohh and chh... They're there, but I removed them from this version. I can put them back in with the click of a button.

Since soundclick takes 9 years to validate my song, I'll just put it on my old server for now.

CLICK ME

Since I'm a househead let me jump in...
Think fundamentals even if they are cliche for the simple reason being if you can get your head around this portion you can get around the rest.
Get a decent set of samples from 808 or 909 drum sets. If you can't sample off of old house records.
You got the basic tips all done but now you have to adjust your ears to listening for the right sound and feel.

Bass Drum/Kick - Should be felt.
Hats/Cymbals/Ride - Should be surrounding you with an airy feeling.
Snare/Claps/Percs - Should fill in the gaps between the aural picture.

Frequency-wise the EQing should be divided into 3: Bass, Mid, Treble.
What you want in one element you don't want it to be prominent in another. So you'll filter out small portions of frequency so you don't have the clashing of frequencies.

BD: Low Frequencies
Hats : High Frequencies
Percs: Mid Frequencies...This can be broken down further.

Low-Mid, Mid, and Hi-Mid Frequencies - Play around with the freqs so you can accentuate the characteristic of the perc that your playing with. Your job is to make the person hear the choice of sound. The only time this changes is when you are layering sounds. When you layer sounds listen to the sound seperately so you can make sure that you only hear just that sound!

Ok the overall sound of the drum track with these tips should be as follows...
Four to the Floor...
Bass Drum on each beat
Snare and/or Clap on 2nd & 4th (or with variation)
Open Hat in between the beats
Closed Hats on the beat (or with variation)

Length can vary as far as 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16 bars.
When including ethnic percussions work in a 2 bar form. But have variations of the percussions. Because the Drum track is your hangar of where your going to place the rest of your track.

Look in between the beats for you percuusions to be placed. Use more than 1 percussion. Think less is more. Also vary the levels of the hits. And try this put a multi-delay or a delay on the each single percussion track to give a simple line more depth and character.

Lastly you can change all this by adding little snippets of vocals or stabs or hits to accent your track.

Remember this you still have a bassline to throw in.

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