PERCS
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- Silas_Greenback
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Avoid kicks on the 2 & 4 beats..... 
Have a look through the prod forum for tips on Gated snare to get it nice and fat.
Layer up your Kicks, one toppy, one subby and blend them well with EQ.
Get some old break loops and lowpass them and sidechain them to the snare/kick and put them under your programmed drums to get a nice groove.
Don't quantize too heavily or you'll lose some of the natural swing you want to get on your drum track.
Experiment with using different perc instruments.
You cannot get enough Cowbell.

Have a look through the prod forum for tips on Gated snare to get it nice and fat.
Layer up your Kicks, one toppy, one subby and blend them well with EQ.
Get some old break loops and lowpass them and sidechain them to the snare/kick and put them under your programmed drums to get a nice groove.
Don't quantize too heavily or you'll lose some of the natural swing you want to get on your drum track.
Experiment with using different perc instruments.
You cannot get enough Cowbell.
How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it's just one -- if that one is Michael Jackson.
- Coyote
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a tip for programming:
slow you beat down to about hip hop pace (assuming your making a 130ish bpm track) and then record your self playing in the perc.
this will make it easyer to get into the grrove and come with some more complex rythms. then speed up the beat back to normal and it should sound propper bo
also a nice foundation to work from is the para diddle (probably spelt wrong), this is a drum roll that drummers use.
it goes like this
left right left left right left right right (use the words par ra did dle for the rythm)
basicaly if you put a high sound under your left hand and a low under your right sound or visa versa you get some nice tribal rythms. but from this foundation ts easy to come up with some nice varations.
finaly don't quantise anything too much
slow you beat down to about hip hop pace (assuming your making a 130ish bpm track) and then record your self playing in the perc.
this will make it easyer to get into the grrove and come with some more complex rythms. then speed up the beat back to normal and it should sound propper bo
also a nice foundation to work from is the para diddle (probably spelt wrong), this is a drum roll that drummers use.
it goes like this
left right left left right left right right (use the words par ra did dle for the rythm)
basicaly if you put a high sound under your left hand and a low under your right sound or visa versa you get some nice tribal rythms. but from this foundation ts easy to come up with some nice varations.
finaly don't quantise anything too much
"If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got"
- breakspeare
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in ableton find 8 or so percs you like, stick them in impulse and make 4 different clips with a rhythm that sounds cool. set these clips to trigger off as a group with follow actions in whatever way you like. make sure that for your rhythm you are triggering all notes at once, rather than programming individual ones in at different points.
stick an arpeggiator in front of impulse with the rate set to 1/16 and style to 'random other'. press play - instant variation on your percussion. then copy this track and pan one hard left and one hard right - sounds really cool if you have several similar rhythms triggering off together. then play with lengthening some of your trigger notes so that rather than play one note (if you originally made them 1/16 long) the arp starts triggering new ones at 1/16th intervals, or play with it's rate for new random rhythmic stuffs.
then (if you're feeling dangerous) start putting some beat repeats on each channel for even more fun
i think this works especially well where you choose quite a few sounds which are all very similar (like 8 variations on a roland rim shot sound) because rather than just random percussion it sounds like one instrument with lots of automation on it.
just made a track where the entire rhythm (apart form kick snare and hat) is made of this constantly shifting sound. sounds amazing and i think will make a great basis for live performance.
stick an arpeggiator in front of impulse with the rate set to 1/16 and style to 'random other'. press play - instant variation on your percussion. then copy this track and pan one hard left and one hard right - sounds really cool if you have several similar rhythms triggering off together. then play with lengthening some of your trigger notes so that rather than play one note (if you originally made them 1/16 long) the arp starts triggering new ones at 1/16th intervals, or play with it's rate for new random rhythmic stuffs.
then (if you're feeling dangerous) start putting some beat repeats on each channel for even more fun


i think this works especially well where you choose quite a few sounds which are all very similar (like 8 variations on a roland rim shot sound) because rather than just random percussion it sounds like one instrument with lots of automation on it.
just made a track where the entire rhythm (apart form kick snare and hat) is made of this constantly shifting sound. sounds amazing and i think will make a great basis for live performance.
- Eclectrik
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- Gme
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creative stuff! Nice tipsbreakspeare wrote:in ableton find 8 or so percs you like, stick them in impulse and make 4 different clips with a rhythm that sounds cool. set these clips to trigger off as a group with follow actions in whatever way you like. make sure that for your rhythm you are triggering all notes at once, rather than programming individual ones in at different points.
stick an arpeggiator in front of impulse with the rate set to 1/16 and style to 'random other'. press play - instant variation on your percussion. then copy this track and pan one hard left and one hard right - sounds really cool if you have several similar rhythms triggering off together. then play with lengthening some of your trigger notes so that rather than play one note (if you originally made them 1/16 long) the arp starts triggering new ones at 1/16th intervals, or play with it's rate for new random rhythmic stuffs.
then (if you're feeling dangerous) start putting some beat repeats on each channel for even more fun![]()
![]()
i think this works especially well where you choose quite a few sounds which are all very similar (like 8 variations on a roland rim shot sound) because rather than just random percussion it sounds like one instrument with lots of automation on it.
just made a track where the entire rhythm (apart form kick snare and hat) is made of this constantly shifting sound. sounds amazing and i think will make a great basis for live performance.

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- Stickybuds~
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Re: PERCS
Breakspeare you should make a video of you doing that, I dont get what the impulse triggering is all about...
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Re:
We've been doing stuff like this, on all kinds of sound, not just percs. Dr Choc is the master at this fo shizzlebreakspeare wrote:in ableton find 8 or so percs you like, stick them in impulse and make 4 different clips with a rhythm that sounds cool. set these clips to trigger off as a group with follow actions in whatever way you like. make sure that for your rhythm you are triggering all notes at once, rather than programming individual ones in at different points.
stick an arpeggiator in front of impulse with the rate set to 1/16 and style to 'random other'. press play - instant variation on your percussion. then copy this track and pan one hard left and one hard right - sounds really cool if you have several similar rhythms triggering off together. then play with lengthening some of your trigger notes so that rather than play one note (if you originally made them 1/16 long) the arp starts triggering new ones at 1/16th intervals, or play with it's rate for new random rhythmic stuffs.
then (if you're feeling dangerous) start putting some beat repeats on each channel for even more fun![]()
![]()
i think this works especially well where you choose quite a few sounds which are all very similar (like 8 variations on a roland rim shot sound) because rather than just random percussion it sounds like one instrument with lots of automation on it.
just made a track where the entire rhythm (apart form kick snare and hat) is made of this constantly shifting sound. sounds amazing and i think will make a great basis for live performance.
hope fully he will post some mroe to this as he has some excellent techniques
- breakspeare
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Re: PERCS
Stickybuds - sorry didnt see this post had resurfaced. the point i was trying make (quite badly now i read back on it) is that you only want one sample triggered on a particular point in the measure but you want to randomise which is being triggered: if, for example, you want a perc hit on beat two, put midi notes for all of your samples to be triggered on beat two. the arpeggiator when set on 'random other' will then choose one of these to be triggered at random. the 'other' part of this means that it will go through all of the samples before triggering the same one again - avoids horrible machine gun stuffs. hope this makes sense....