Q: How Do You Make Punchy & Fat Drums In Renoise?

Tarek-GM says you are welcome!! Ha hA!!! Totally kidding I know the g is right next to the f key!! :lol: :rolleyes: :lol:

  • Use a multiband compressor (like Stardust), whack the threshold right down and the gain right up. Then wind some of the settings back to restore clarity.

  • Set the compressor attack at about 5-20ms (adds ‘snap’ or ‘stick’-ness).

  • Chuck an EQ after it to recover the bass frequencies and round off some of the highs so they don’t snap your eardrums.

  • I like to ‘clean’ my drumtracks of unwanted crap in the low-end with a final highpass filterm, usually a butterworth 8.

And drive the volume of the rest of the whole track against it: use signal follower to bring down the volume of other channels on your drums’ attacks – make that drive a few key sendtrack gainers or just directly drive track gainers. Use high-pass to make sure your drums ‘pump’ the track but not drown it out. Another thing that helps this ‘pumping’ is to move the signal follower before your compressor (giving it more sensitivity to the attack, and less sensitivity to the sustain/release).

  • A bit of jittered/staggered attack can sometimes fatten drums too (short, one-tap delay on the drumtrack(s) of interest).

EDIT: Oh yes how could I forget – use one of those Stereo Imager VSTs with the ‘chop’ setting to widen the stereo on your (probably) otherwise mono hits

This does the trick very well.

Another thing i just remembered;

High-shelving all the instruments somewhere around 15khz or lower, aroudn there, wherever doesnt take away anything major, leaving the high end for percussion. Was advised of thsi by a trusted source, and it sure opens up all that percussion that was hiding behind synths that really didnt need to be peaking that high anyway

Also found that elogoxa’s Baxxpander works wonders on kick drums. Not so nice for basses but kicks it adds a whole new level of ‘up-front’ ness.

Also maybe put some mid-side or stereo expansion on some auto panning percussion (LFO device on the pan to taste) to bring it into the periphery. Voxengo MSED and Bootsy Rescue are nice M/S plugs, and the Melda Mstereoexpander is a good expander (better than the native :P). One or the other, m/s or stereo expansion, its sort of redundant (sort of, not really but, virtually :P) to use both on the same channel.

And TUNE YOUR SAMPLES :P Its amazing how just proper tuning can make everything POP.

i agree with mudpeople. Baxxpander is a nice plugin, and i’ll re-mention the free Audio Damage Rough Rider plugin here again, as mentioned before by Rex.

tuning your kickdrums is a great way of making them stand out, making them feel solid in your track. you might not get it so much from YouTube audio, but i always believed the reason stuff by the Party Animals sounded so great was because they tuned their kickdrums properly. (also, you might not know these guys as they are Dutch, but give it a listen anyway - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJkgOK-7Sj4)

adding a bass synth sound to your kickdrums works, and you should of course tune that properly as well.

furthermore, on the subject of EQ’ing, as mudpeople said make sure you give all your sounds their proper place in the mix. if you got a snare sound, it probably does not have much low-end. so, cut that shit off. use a Frequency Analyser to see the effect. if you want a EQ chart, you can find one here: http://www.roaldblijleven.net/renoise/cheatsheet/links.php

most important thing is, it does not come down to having just the solo’d fat & punchy drums. stuff needs to work together. work on that, and you’ll hit the jackpot someday.

It’s the other way round over here,

I allways get praised for my drums and never got them as fat as in renoise in maschine.
For me the Bus Compressor> Drums Snap Preset and EQing (whenever needed) does a brilliant job
Check the Renoise Filter presets for layered Subkicks…

daniel

Do not underestimate the power of the Renoise native maximiser. I immediately duplicate my drum tracks and run them through a bus with the Maximiser, tweak a little, maybe add some light distortion or compression to add a little more.

oh yes… the maximiser :D

also great on the master channel!

on thing i like to do is put a really short delay on the drums in a separate channel. sure its not phat as in something in a mos def album, but sounds cool in a different way.

Hey there noisemaker have you tried sampling the same sound in both maschine and renoise and then compare? OR using the same wav file and listen for a difference in renoise and maschine… also if you can upload comparison then you can have an unbiased opinion from the forum?