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How can I make thick heavy complex Hard Trance drums?
EDIT: Changed the title. @BroCoast pointed out that what I'm looking at is Hard Trance!
So I'm reaching out to you fine folks here once again. I've been listening to early 2000s Brooklyn Bounce (the "Restart" album) and was wondering how the producers created those thick, heavy, pounding kickdrums, heavy toms, etc. Three examples...
I have a load of drum samples - all 4 volumes of Sounds of KSHMR, the KB6 drum packs, many drum samples from Image-Line, etc. But I don't have drums that sound exactly like this. Mainly the kicks and toms as the claps and hats are easy to figure out
Could you help me out with linking me to some sound design tutorials specifically in this style and other resources that may prove useful and beneficial to me (and everyone here)? Could I create something like this in FAC Drumkit?
(Right, I'm nostalgic for that era of Brooklyn Bounce and want to produce something like that either in Koala, NS2, etc.)
Comments
Bouncing this up. 😂 I got an answer in DMs, but I can't afford hardware. So how do I get the thick and meaty kick drums and toms with the apps I already have?
I actually reached out to Dennis "DJ Bonebreaker" Bohn. Since he produced these above tracks 20+ years ago he forgot how he made the kick drums. 😂 So if anyone has any knowledge, please share below.
Two things come to mind immediately:
1) Distortion
2) Short plate / room reverb
EDIT:
0) EQ before the distortion to adjust the sound
I’m only going by my ear on this but they all did sound 909ish which sound really awesome when you fatten them up with saturation and compressing them. My goto for 909 stuff is the samples from mars collection and then I’ll process those. The beef in the kick sounded almost like tape saturation maybe and I like using tube saturation as well. I’ll push the absolute shit out of it before going into the tube or tape saturation and then gain stage it back down afterwards so I’m not clipping. Going off the plate/room suggestion above my post, doing some slapback delay can add a lot of body to it as well, I usually stay around 75-90 ms and then just adjust the wet and feedback to my liking. Again, I could be totally wrong but that’s what I was hearing.
@SevenSystems @Fingolfinzz Excellent advice! I'll give this a shot in a few minutes.
Sounds like Saturn would be perfect for this sound design, but unfortunately can't get Saturn on my iPhone. I do have FAC Bandit and SquaShit as well as Knock, Beef, and many tape emulations, lol. Would TB Reverb work as a plate emulation, or is there another reverb app I'm overlooking? (I have pretty much all the reverb apps on iPhone, so just speculating at this point which has the best sounding plate emulation.)
I can't comment on the specific apps, but for the distortion, my el-cheapo Behringer MX8000 channel strips driven into saturation back in 1998 sounded grand for this 😜
Oh Christ, not hardware again, lol. 🤣
Useful stuff here
Saturn not needed. BYOD has tones of saturation, distortion, compression , tone options. It’ll take some time to explore all the possibilities. The journey will also hep you to possibilities for other uses.
That's a fantastic resource, and I've bookmarked it for future reference.
BYOD! Of course! I knew there was a distortion plugin I was overlooking. I have BYOD and definitely want to get the IAPs.
try this in drambo ..
Drambo to the rescue! ❤️
And now it's Benedryl to the rescue. 🤣 Drambo hurts my head. Need a simpler solution lol.
You ever mess around with it on a Mackie? I love the shitty preamps on those for wrecking stuff
No offense but that is not techno.
You’re looking for Hard Trance drums.
No offense taken lol! I'm not known for always getting my genres straight. 🤣 No wonder I couldn't find any YT tutorials that fit.
Okay, got any tips for creating Hard Trance drums from scratch?
I think the drums in question are acoustic in nature and NOT electronic drums. I’d start with acoustic drums you might find in
SF2’s, DrumJam, FAC Drumkit, Lumbeats Rock Drummer. Load them up and pipe them through “beefifiers” like Woot, WoodValvet, etc. and catch them in Koala.
I think with a few iterations of deep bass drum, snappy snares, bodacious hihats and boomy tom’s you’ll get there from scratch.
Can we share Koala “songs”. I’ve already started and have something I like but I need to study “standards” for drum pad layouts.
No, but apparently the MX8000 was an almost 1:1 clone of some Mackie, to the point that Behringer got sued or something if I remember correctly 😄 surely in a different price range though (24 channels, 8 groups, 6 auxes, low-shelf/mid/high-shelf EQ per channel, and tons of other features for EUR 1500 was pretty insane
)
Honestly and I'm not being critical but having a keen understanding of how to deftly use an Equalizer and Compressor with some saturation is the best way to get hard hitting drums. There are apps of course but taking an EQ and Compression course online (free on YouTube) will go a long way.
I personally didn't fully understand EQ and Compression very well and a few years back I hunkered down and learned how to correctly use them and honestly I rarely use any "do it all for you" plugins anymore. Fabfilter ProQ3 and Pro C2 are really all you need for dialing up hard kicks for up tempo dance music.
Just my opinion.
No they definitely aren’t :-)) They are mostly 909 drums or drums from boxes like Jomox Airbase 99, or Quasimididi Rave-o-lution, heavily processed through ovedrives and equalisers and compressors…
Especially this project (Brooklyn Bounce, i remember it from 90’s and early 00’s cause inhated it a LOT, i was literally alergic to this music 🤣) - if i good remember, it was well known that the just usind a lots of Vengeance sample CD’s (including whole melodies) - it was considered as cheap commercial crap by rest of trance scene back then 😂 At leat here in Europe, in trance / techno communities.
Definitely those drum didn’t even remotely saw acoustic drums :-) It’s all 100% heavily processed synth drum machines.
Well rhere is no simple solution .. those are almos harder to tune than psytrance kicks :-) If you want tom create one from scratch then be prepare for lots’s of processing (eq, ovedeive, complressors).
Or google for “Vengeance hard trance” sound packs, you may find even exactly same drums, basses and melodies used in those BrooklynBounce tracks :-))))
Cool.
Well I don't think the drums are acoustic, but it might be fun to try to produce an "EDM"-styled song with using acoustic drums instead of electronic drums. (Then again, would it end up sounding like Disco meets "Equinoxe"? 😂 )
Eh, it's my thread. Share away.
For me, I don't bother with "standards" for drum pad layouts to be honest. I'm a bit chaotic like that. Okay, so I try to put drums in bank A, basses in bank B, instruments in bank C, and vocals (if any) in bank D, but that's really about it. The (main) kick usually goes on pad A in bank A, but everything else is whatever the project calls for.
Good solid advice.
Well I know how to use EQ and Compression and Saturation to add the "secret sauce" to my drums. I was moreso looking for the proper types of drums or how to produce the proper types of drums for the genre I was targeting.
I also use an iPhone to produce, so FabFilters are a no-go on there (since they aren't universal). But, ToneBoosters have those equivalents that are universal.
@dendy Oh dear, not the Vengeance soundpacks, lol. 😂 Because they're too bloody expensive for the quality of the samples you receive, and also because the soundpacks I would've used are no longer available/discontinued. (Really, 1400€ for the entire collection?)
I'll have to peruse whatever MusicRadar have on their website, and then process the shit out of those. (Seems like the main takeaway I'm getting is "process the shit out of drums". 😂 Luckily I have Beef and my collection of reverbs.)
And yeah, Brooklyn Bounce could be considered "cheap, commercial crap", but honestly I miss those days of that cheesy type of Dance music. What's released these days just isn't the same as what was released back then. Back then, most commercial Dance music had attitude and flavour (except maybe for Basshunter, lol). Most of what's released these days is just milquetoast at best (with some notable exceptions like KSHMR, and the exceptions of most of the new music released by the old heads like Sash!, Brooklyn Bounce, Paffendorf, 666, etc).
Guess I'm just trying to relive my days at uni or something, I don't know. 😂
I’ll take Samples From Mars over Vengeance any day. Way more affordable and super easy to mix in with other stuff. I found the Vengeance stuff too processed
I get that the “samples” being rendered come from drum machines but the drum samples in question are probably recordings and not created by oscillators, filters and such.
After 1980 you can’t be sure if it’s real or if it’s Memorex. Any drummer can hear the difference between sampled drums and electronic sources being used. What I hear in the Brooklyn Bounce sounds like sampled drums to me. In this age of modeled instruments you can dial in towards one of the other extreme.
I love the KB6 samples myself.
All free, and all sound superb. The Roland ones were removed from the website, but I got 'em all backed up to Dropbox. I'll check out Samples from Mars.
And yeah the Vengeance ones are overprocessed I definitely agree. They don't sound punchy enough to my ears either.
This is true.
But I'm leaning towards the samples used in early 2000s Brooklyn Bounce as Vengeance samples as they do sound the same as in Manian's early-to-late 2000s productions.
Sounds like you’re getting close to solving your problem.
Yeah. Thing is, I'm not shelling out all that quid for subpar samples. 😂 So I'll have to figure out how Manian crafted those kicks, make my own better kicks, and go from there.
OK. I get it… there’s a product available but you can save the money if you deconstruct the product using freely available content and FX/Processing apps.
Exactly mate.
That's the idea.
And I just found this on the Vengeance YT channel! 😳
While it looks like a fun discontinued plugin, this actually shows how one of those "thick and heavy" kicks are built!
As a cheap start, I would “screen capture” some of that with the sounds you like and “import video” right into Koala and get to work using EQ and FX to perfect your own kit. It would be nice to have the income to buy the cool toys but that’s probably not in the cards for most here.