Drum madness!
 

Hey folks,

I want to poll all you infekted people out there on what you use (drumwise) to complement the madness that is the Virus in your tracks. I make breaks, and have had trouble getting the nice powerful, clear drum hits that I hear in other breaks tracks. I use redrum and operator in ableton. What do you use? Plugins, sample packs etc? Any tips and tricks you are willing to share with us all would be awesome!

Currently I am using Vengeance Electro House pack and arranging all the samples myself after I went to a Shock One masterclass - normally I use vst/midi combos like BFD, Battery etc and program the drums using midi. It's a different way of doing things for me, and quite enjoyable too. The track on my myspace is me programming using BFD for a rawer more natural sound, with some extra stuff played in on a vkit and then chopped and arranged again.

To get my unique 'like drinking bleach' sound - mostly to put down very simple rhythm tracks for demo songs - I just use the Halion kits in Cubase Studio 4 and program from scratch. Sometimes I mix in my own mic recordings of percussion instruments like shaker, block, cabasa. I find you can go a long way using these basic tools and the sound shaping plugins that come with Cubase. If I ever get 'serious' about drum sound quality, it's to threads like this that I'll be turning for ideas!

Use the best possible samples you can to start with for sure.

I like to use parallel compression to get a drum tone going, it can make drums sound loud, present and clear without squashing them to death as well as being an ideal way to sculpt the tone (along with EQ).

I send the various kit sounds out several aux sends to various compressors with different settings (subtle, squashed, loud transients, pumping, various ratios etc) then EQ each of these whilst blending to taste. this way you can shape the envelopes and transients of ur drums as well as the tone.
Once i get the balance right i route it all to a buss and add a subtle compressor and/or a saturation device to glue them all together with perhaps a fast limiter at the end of the chain just to catch any overshooting peaks.

If all has gone to plan, i should have a nice tight and clear drum sound.
This should only be attempted if ur DAW (assuming ur working In The Box) and the plug-ins ur using have delay compensation, otherwise u could end up with a phasey mess :-(

Ducking other elements of your tune with the kick and snare is also a very popular method to get drums sounding up front in break-led genres.

I use the vengence kits and rewire redrum to ableton.

MPC1000. Samples from battery, kits I've recorded acoustically or from other synths. The NordLead has some interesting percussion bits. Parallel compression, layering and tuning go a long way too. I've also found that for chopping loops to make them nice and tight like a gate closing really quickly. Then layer a kick and snare for more of the tone.