I love incorporating old drum break samples into my productions. They can serve to give your song a much more natural feel and inspire new ideas. It can be a challenge finding one that sonically meshes with your track, and takes some tweaking to sit the frequencies in the space you want. Today I will show you a quick and easy way to isolate the transients in your drum break, allowing you to shake the dust off while still preserving the character of the sample.
In this instance, the particular drum sample I was working with had a lot of high frequency hiss and room noise I wanted to extract. A low pass filter would get rid of this hiss, but would also make the entire drum break dull. I want a nice crisp break without the hiss and the room noise so that I could then put the drums in whatever room I wanted by adding my own reverb and processing.
Dry drum break...
As you can hear there's a lot of high frequencies choking up headroom in this sample that we can preserve for other elements in our mix. Here is the step by step process to transient isolation.
warp your sample and set the warp mode to 'BEATS'
in the 'PRESERVE' section, select 'TRANSIENTS'
set the transient loop mode to 'OFF'
choke down the transient envelope until you eliminate the air in the sample
post transient Isolation...
As you can hear pulling the transient envelope down really cut out all the space in between the transients without taking out any of the high frequencies we wanted to leave in the hits.
I know some of you are cursing me for getting rid of the vinyl hiss in this sample and I can agree that it gives the sample character. I just want more control over the sound. Isolating the transients lets you place the sample back in whatever space you want without worrying about all those extra frequencies in between that aren't needed.
My next step is to add some processing to the sample. In this case I added compression first, then some short plate reverb, about 777ms. After that I placed a high pass filter around 157Hz to cut out most of the original Kick drum, and then I started adding elements back around the sample to build it up.
Cutting out the low end lets me add my own kick drum back into the sample, this is easily my favorite trick to beefing up drum breaks. After that I will embellish further with whatever I feel like the sample is missing, layering snares, claps, or cymbals to fit it into whatever song i'm currently working on.
post processing...
The drum break really takes on new life after this. The process of breaking it down and building it back up gives you so much more control over the sonic character of the sample, and will allow you to cater the sound to your liking. I used these techniques throughout a lot of the Melanina Project with Troy Sylvia.
I hope this technique will help you to improve your productions in the future! If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out!