Doing Drums Like Igorrr

I’ve been listening to Igorrr for a while, and what do you know, he’s coming out with a new album soon! I decided to take a listen, and what I heard was just spectacular.

Now what really struck me about this release was the drums. I have legitimately never heard drums sounding quite like that. Aside from the obvious stuff like the panning and V’Snares editing, how does he make the drums sound so punchy and present? Brainstorming time?

I think it helps that many other elements in the music are acoustic in their origin, with much more natural reverb than what is the norm in this style of music.

So, to my ears it’s actually not the drums that are enormously punchy (well, they ARE punchy), it’s more a question of the rest being less so :slight_smile:

I’ve never heard of him, quite inspiring, thanks for the entry point.

Now on the brainstorming part… I agree with danoise that our ears can differentiate the types of attack. Combining opposing types can create presence.

With that said, I categorize the source material as either sample or synth, both have different approaches, some similar, and some of course can be combined.

Synthesizing kicks I’m mostly concerned with pitch modulation and for tone - the waveform itself, if I remember correctly the greater the pitch modulation, the more crisp or punch it has.

Ex: note C7 pitch modulated to C1

And the the more busy the waveform looks the more it fills up the frequency spectrum which can add to the punch effect. You can get creative with just those two such as busy waveform for the initial attack morphing into a simpler waveform combined with a either a simple pitch curve modulation or a complex one.

Sampled material I don’t often mess around with in terms of compressors, transient tools, or even stretching effects which can shape your source material for an evil attack.

I tend to leave sampled material alone which means I try to observe the natural impact of a source.

somewhat random examples of sample vs synth…

epic track, I think Danoise is right about how the contrast could work in this psychologically + you have to ask Igorrr for the specifics, maybe the source amen was already punchy and some eq’ing to bring presence and a compressor on top was all needed?

There are tons of amens to be downloaded on the net already prepared to sound similar, you could add extra punchy flavor using transient shaping plugins and/or stack a bunch of compressors on top.

Also check out Techdiff’s music for this kind of beatfuckery-sound :)

Igorrr’s tracks melt classical / baroque ambiances, ultra-fast breakbeats/break-core, combined with death/black metal typical structures. The vocal parts are very well done, as well as the arty / deranged schizophrenic visuals ; it’s a good crossover between 3 different genres. (And that’s why lots of people including me find this fusion extremely interesting). After that, drums looks like a clever collage of pre-made loops/breakbeats that are highly realtime pitch-shifted and HP filtered . Concerning the realtime pitch shifting technique, I don’t think that you can use it when you activate the Sync option in the Instruments Settings tab (that help you to perfectly put you loop into the pattern, at any speed). Pitching a breakbeat / loop in realtime requires the usage of the famous 0SXX technique. I’ve noticed that some short breaks are “stereo expanded”, while some other ones are more “centered”. And also, I’ve noticed that the drumtrack has a HP filter on it, you can clearly hear it at the end of the track.

The way the song is mixed/mastered is probably more complex, because you don’t mix a classical/baroque track the same way you mix a breakcore music, or a deathmetal music… I suppose that Igorrr had to define a dynamic mix setup that could go through the entire song. Let’s say that in each part of it the volume is highly raised maybe you can get the same result by using a true transparent brick wall limiter / maximizer such as think kind of tool :

or at least this kind of thing :

another good example of what Igorrr’s able to do :