Drum Rack Fun - Wave manipulation gallore!

Hi There,


Today we're going to explore how far you can go with wave manipulations using the cool drum rack. We're going to take a single sample and create a whole drum kit out of it. The drum kit will also be completely dynamic, constantly changing.


It's gonna be so cool! I just can't wait!

Lets get started!

First off lets create a sample to manipulate: Lets drag an operator into a midi channel. Next we'll choose the noise waveform to get a rich harmonic base sample. create a beat in a midi loop and freeze it.

Next drag the frozen clip into an audio channel and voila! you got an audio sample of the operator beat. Now lets drag a drum rack into a new midi channel. Open up the device and you'll see 16 slots for drum sounds. Drag the frozen sample into C1. For convinience rename it to Original.

Now copy the sample into C#1 and rename that slot "Kick". Double click the slot and check out the whole control panel that appears. Let's turn this noisy wave into a punchy kick:

• To get a sharp attack and no resonance, lets set the ADSR (Attack/Decay/Sustain.Release) envelope to A:0 ms D: 200 ms S: -inf R:1.
• transpose it down -48 st to give it a bassy sound. now it sounds more like a hammer than a bass :) let's add some EQ
• Take an EQ eight and leave only one high cut filter on a freq of about 250 hz and Q of about 0.8. Now we have a dull bass kick.
• Let's spice it up a bit with a Saturator, The "mid range Phattener" preset will do just fine!

now let her rip! This kick is wicked! can't believe it used to be a noise sample...

another cool thing to notice is that we can chain as many devices as we want to any specific patch.

ok, let's make a hi hat:

copy the "Kick" sample into D1 and rename that slot "hi hat". Double click the slot:

• Remove the Saturator and the EQ.
• Set the Transposition up to +24 st
• Now take the attack up to 15 ms and the decay up to 300 ms. sounds pretty good all ready.
• Let's give the hi hat a "random" feel with an LFO: Turn on the filter and the LFO. Set the filter Freq on 14khz with and LFO input to 5. Now put the LFO on a random wave form, set the frequency on a hi value (I used 8 bars) and put the Retrig switch on.

Now you have a cute,crisp hi hat with a slightly changing feel each hit.

Let's keep going and make a snare:

copy the "Kick" sample into D#1 and rename that slot "Snare". Double click the slot:

• Remove the Saturator and the EQ.
• Set Tranposition at 0
• set the Decay to 400 to get a bit of resonance. This already is a half-way decent snare but let's make it a bit more interesting.
• Add a Reverb -> singing can into the chain. set the decay time to 1 second and the dry/wet to 10%.

Now that's a nice snare!

So basically , with a noise wave form which had absolutely no character at all , we made a 3 piece drum set which sounds pretty cool.

Next you should try adding all kinds of envelopes to the different parameters we tweaked to get nice sounds out of the set over time.

Have fun :)

Wanna contribute a cool tip?
email me : fireballgames AT hotmail DOT com
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Cheers
J