Designing Electronic Drums
Ableton Certified Trainer Craig McCullough reveals the steps to design fat, brilliant modern and classic electronic drum sounds. The techniques Craig shows you can then be applied in any DAW and to any type of sound to make them stand out and be noticed!
Videos
• Slice to New MIDI Track (15:17) - See how to use the powerful 'Slice to New MIDI Track’ function in Live 7 to trim, warp and slice audio data!
• Making a Kick Drum Sound (09:16) - Learn to shape a sliced sound into a more usable and familiar sounding kick drum using the filter and volume envelope settings on the simpler instrument and Live's Saturator and Compressor plug-ins.
• Creating a Clap Sound (18:47) - Discover how to fabricate a clap sound using the settings on the Simpler and Sampler instruments and some of Live's effects, such as Compressor, Simple Delay, Saturator, Reverb and Gate.
• Making a Closed Hi-Hat Sound (16:01) - See how to create a great sounding closed hi-hat sound using the settings on the Simpler and Sampler instruments and some of Live's effects, such as Compressor, Saturator, Reverb and Gate.
• Creating Slicing Presets (08:54) - Learn how to create a new slicing preset where no macros are mapped to any of the Simpler's parameters. This time saving procedure is crucial to working with drums in Live.
• Making an Open Hi-Hat Sound (12:02) - Explore designing the ever useful open hi-hat sound using the loop, envelope and filter settings on the Simpler instrument and some of Live's effects, such as Compressor, Reverb and Gate.
• Making a Tom Sound Pt. 1 (12:45) - See how to make two different types of Low, Mid and High Tom sounds. This tutorial also looks at creating a nested sub-rack within the main drum rack of our kit.
• Making a Tom Sound Pt. 2 (21:06) - Learn to map key parameters to the macros on the drum rack to allow flexible, real-time control over the most used parameters on all 3 Toms together. Also discover how to map send effects, and a Grain Delay to complete the sound.
• Making a Conga Sound (06:55) - Discover the secret to making conga sounds reminiscent of old vintage drum machines. Racks are further explored, as well as the 'Copy to Siblings' feature added in Live 7.
• Making a Ride Cymbal Sound (16:57) - See how a ride cymbal is created by layering 3 Simplers together in a nested drum rack, triggered by the same MIDI note, using 3 different, very short loops and some crafty programming.
• Making a Triangle Sound (13:07) - Starting with one of the Simplers created in the Ride cymbal tutorial, the sound is re-tuned and a nested rack is created containing an open and closed triangle sound.
• Making a 909 Kick (04:47) - Copying one of the Congas and using it as a starting point, the same short waveform loop is used to create a powerful second kick drum much closer to the classic ‘909’ sound by changing the filter, pitch and envelope settings.
• Making a 909 Snare (14:05) - See how you can make a great sounding snare similar to the classic ‘909’ snare using impressive programming techniques as well as the Saturator, EQ8 and Compressor plug-ins.
• Making a 808 Snare (08:58) - Starting with the snare created in the previous tutorial, some of the key parameters are changed to create a snare very close in sound to the classic ‘808’ snare.
• Saving the Finished Kit (08:57) - Explore the options for saving the different elements of our new kit, such as saving the devices and racks, using the new kit in other projects, and creating Live clips so that clips can be saved with the kit.