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Looper's Delight
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Hey Adam, you wrote: "I'm running a BOSS Dr 880 directly into my PA (Bose LP1 tower). I am thinking that I want to compress the sound and maybe warm it up a bit to make it sound less "machiney". Any thoughts or advice as to how to process the sound before it hits my PA?"" I've been using drum machines for years and years in live settings and wanted to share some things I've come to believe about their use to answer your question in a round about way. What I've found is that a drum machine is a drum machine.........................honestly, no matter how much you 'tube' it up, it's still going to sound mechanical for the most part, with these notable exceptions: I have found seven things that can make a drum machine sound more organic and effective in live music. 1) In nature, transient waves travel a little faster than lower midrange and bass notes. Drum machines (due to sampling and playback) cause this time alignment of frequencies to flatten out. The Barcus Berry Sonic Maximizer from my understanding, puts selective and very short delays onto low midrange and progressively onto bass notes. This allows the transient and treble waves to hit your ears miliseconds before the lower notes. It's a psycho-acoustic effect but it just sounds more 'organic' or real. They can be had as a song these days in a one rack space unit. 2) Additionally, the phase relationship of treble and upper midrange sounds can vary wildly when we are moving around in a physical acoustic space just do to the distance of our ears from one another (hearing the same sound in phase doubles the volume, hearing the same sound out of phase , theoretically complete cancels that particular frequency..........though his never happens in reality because we are always in some kind of an acoustic space with reverberant qualities. The Aphex Aural Exciter, again, from my understanding (and I'm a lay person when it comes to acoustics and psycho acoustics explanations) randomly changes the phase relationship of the upper harmonics in a sound . This process 'excites' the treble response of a sound and , again, though a psychoacoustic effect, lends itself to a more 'real' sound. These units can also be had relatively cheaply used on line. 3) Most people make the mistake that because the stasis of a drum machine lacks energy that if they make their drum computer programming more complex that it will compensate for this energy. I have found this to be a mistake. My feeling is the best drum computer progamming is that which gives the most 'air' and space to a mix...........................it is the programming that is relatively syncopatively neutral precisely because it gives much more freedom for the voices in the music that actually will be organic. You'll never find a drum beat in a drum machine that has the kick on beats 1 and 3, the snare on 2 and 4 and hi hats that play straight 8th notes. You wont' because it isn't flashy and doesn't help music store clerks sell the drum machines to prospective clients. In the 80's, if you randomly went up and down the radio dial and analyzed every single rhythm you'd be astonished to discover , however, that this was the very same drum machine used on 50% of the pop songs released. So, you want to write a funky rhythm? Make all your syncopations be 8th note syncopations and if you want to add a 16th note offbeat, add only one in the measure...................the funk is implied and then up to you to bring home with your other writing. 4) Also, a lot of people , fearing the stasis and mechanical quality of a drum machine, tend to turn them way far down in volume as a way of underplaying the static quality. Again, I have found the opposite approach much more effective. The machine lacks energy, intrinsically, so make up for it by playing it almost louder than you would have an acoustic drum kit. The volume will give it energy and it will sound huge if you purposefully keep your programming minimal as in example #3 above. 5) Judicious and very, very subtle use of cutoff frequency, resonance and volume can make even the simplest of hi hat patterns sound more realistic if you have those abilities to program on your drum machine. If so, remember that drummers tend to have one hand stronger than another hand. 16th note hi hat patterns will sound more realistic if you cut a little high end off of every other stroke (simulating a weak left hand in most drummers). Similarly you can take a little bit of volume of of every other strokes. Quickly copy a 16th or 8th note hi hat pattern to 10 different patterns and then spend 20 minutes tweaking each one so that they are just a little bit different than the others. Now you can take any piece of music and randomly add kicks and snare patterns to copies of these hi hat rhythms. Remember, make the effect as subtle as possible , yet still noticeable..................make a note of how much wiggle room you can have with each parameter and then be random in your assignment of cutoff and volume cuts for every other note. This will cause a decided percolative effect on your tracks over all. 6) Remember, if everything is loud, nothing sounds big because there is no contrast. Make sure your hi hat and ride sounds are considerably quieter than your kick and snare parts and will make the latter sound much bigger. Oddly enough, you don't even need to vary the volume settings of your kicks and snares because the brain has this habit of identifying a few key elements in a sound and then assigning it that 'real' classification. This is why in the 80's and still up until this day, a lot of producers program their kicks and snares and then have live studio drummers come in and overdub hihat sounds. The Police's innovative drummer, Stewart Copeland made a lot of money doing just hi hat overdubs on recording sessions. You hear some of those records and you could never tell that a real drumset wasn't played because your mind grasps the 'authenticity' of the hi hat overdubs and completely misses the sonic stasis of the drum machine parts. 7) Additionally, if you don't have all this sophisticated equipment or even ability to program things like cutoff and resonance, sometimes it's a very hip thing to just send your hi hats out as separate outs and put them through a cheap stomp box Phaser or Flanger (or if you are lucky, a Filter box). Set your sweep times to long times that are NOT synced to your rhythm. This will cause the hi hats to swirl in such a way that it is a little unpredictable. Remember it is human error that makes most drumming sound real (that and considerable technique and musicality in the composition of the drum parts). I hope this helps, yours, Rick Walker ps if you still want to put a pre amp onto your sound, I"d suggest that you not use an ART preamp as someone on this list pointed out that very little of the sound is actually routed through the A12 tube in that unit. If you can find a used Alesis BitRMan or Alesis Ineko pick one up. They have a zillion cool little sounds (including bit reduction, lo fi, distortion, tube amp simulation, flange, phase, rotary speaker, ring modulators etc.) They are an incredible bang for the buck..............just ask Scoots Galore (aka Michael Klobuchar) a regular contributor on this list for years about them if you need a recommendation.