Tired ears....??

norty303

norty303

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I've been sat at my pc now for 6 hours working on some percussion sections and despite fiddling with respective levels of parts and slight changes to velocity and delays i still can't get the groove to come together just right with all the elements. In fact i like it less now that i did before i started. Is this a case of tired ears syndrome. I've got 3 separate sets of speakers i can pump it through and i've been switching between them to check how it sounds on each (they're all coloured soundwise in different ways) and i have reached a happy medium but there's something not quite right.

Have i been listening to it too long. Any hints to get that groove right. I'm gonna try changing some samples on the drum machine maybe.


By the way anyone using Linplug's RM IV drum machine here. I think it's the mutts meself... :D
 
Try and make each individual percussion instrument sound as if it was played by a real person, ie. no machine-gun rolls, left-hand/right-hand velocity variation (is your percussionist left or right-handed?); try taking out every other hit (especially if you're using lots of delay)... try adding an early reflection/ambience type reverb (small room) to some of the parts rather than delay - in fact, try a different room treatment on each part.

Failing that, quantise it to fuck.
 
Hmmmm.... sorta related to this thread.. I've noticed that when I get tired, I twiddle my ears. Weird huh? :blink:
 
deffinatly tired ears! But i would say you have the sleep on it syndrome. You make a fat beat which feels as if you could dance to it for hours, go to sleep listen to it on fresh ears and realise that it is crap!

Its the long route round but create youself two channels and then each beat is on a different channel. This then means that the tails of the audio doesn't stop when a new sound starts. It can really take the 'drum machine' quantise out and put in a really fresh feel to the percussion track. Then this then creates huge posibilities for different eq, delay etc etc
 
Yeah, I feel that listening to it again today i actually quite like it so it may be just boredom of hearing the same thing too many times.

I've got each instrument on a separate channel so the option of tweakin each sound in it's own right is very much open to me. I just wanna get it perfect before i bounce it.

I tend to use very little delay because it can take away from a minimal groove that you've spent ages building up.

I think that i need to learn how to set up decent subtle reverbs on sends as at the moment i'm applying diff reverbs to some of the parts and it's sounding a little disjointed with all them diff verbs flying around----less is more an all that.

BTW thanks for the b-line tips, i'm now getting phat sounds i'm happy with..... :D
 
the way i became happy with my percussion was simple, i found the right drum kit

it all sticks together like glue and cant help but groove , i never even process the hats or snares, much prefer them sounding crisp and dynamic

so maybe your drum hits suck, i cant say, but they might
 
thats definately my prob, my drum sounds are poo. i've got a couple of good kicks, and a nice close hi hat, but thats it, oh and a nice crash cymbal. it would be nice to have at least 4 or 5 nice snares, and a few other perc sounds tho :crazy:
 
</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Double_Helix @ Dec 30 2003, 10:16 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>thats definately my prob, my drum sounds are poo. i've got a couple of good kicks, and a nice close hi hat, but thats it, oh and a nice crash cymbal. it would be nice to have at least 4 or 5 nice snares, and a few other perc sounds tho :crazy:[/quote:55c36829c8]
You can't beat a good old sound module with a few drum-kits in it...cos you can make your own easily, pitching them right before you sample them, filtering and stuff like that.

I've got heaps of drum samples (many taken from soundmodules) which were published on the CD with Computer Music a while back. There's 54Mb in total (116 Claps, 92 Cymbals, 198 Hats, 314 Kicks, 211 Snares and 227 samples of other percussion).

It compresses down to about 27Mb. I'll email it to anyone who requests it, or you can download the seperate parts as ZIPS here (I tinyurl'd the links to the files cos they're on an ftp site and the URL includes the password which I can't give out here), just click and it'll download...!

Claps.zip
Cymbals.zip
Hats.zip
Kicks.zip
Snares.zip
Percussion.zip

K
 
Man, you don't know how useful those zips are going to be... just as I was starting to get fed up with my sample set too.

Much kudos, Kudos... :)

<span style='font-size:8pt;line-height:100%'>(sorry, that was lame.. couldn't resist.)</span>

J.
 
Heh...well this is one fortunate coincidence :)
I was just about to ask if someone could point me to a website with good percussion samples - as I'm fed up with most of my current ones - and all of a sudden there's a heap of them right here. Thank you!
 
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