fat azz drums

anyone have tips for making drum sounds alot fatter larger louder?
somone told me a limiter and compressor .. i compress all my drum sounds and eq, but was wonderin if there is anything more i can do to get the most out of a sound..

i dont really understand the use of a limiter tho...

ive seen stereo expanders and whatnot for sale dunno if this is good for drums.. anyone have suggestions ?

compressing drums is good. you can give it a crunch or make it real punchy. fast attack and fast release will crunch your drums. most of the drums everyone samples are compressed alot in this method. it gives it that extended sound. by moving the release slower you will get a punchy sound. something like that. try layering your drums, get your drums the way you want them to sound then and a extra kick behind the kick and a snare behind the snare. use filtering too. if you sample just the kick, snare hi hat by themselves try putting a drum loop behind them. you can also try adding bass before you sample your drums. get creative and spend some time with just your drums. a little reverb helps too. not to much though because it tends to sound fake. use a reverd with a eq or filter built in and get most of the hi frequences out.play with all of your parameters.
try running your drums through a reverb thats filtered, then thru a compressor. or record several different takes of your drums on seperate tracks with different eq settings. or with a external mixing board split your signal to multiple shannels and ajust from there with all the different methods. sorry for the long post. hope some of this stuff helped.
peace.

oh yeah, think of a limiter as something that limits the peak of sound.set it at -2db and it won't let anything go over that.then you can adjust the loudness of the hole signal to zero db. good for making tracks louder. kind of like a compressor. kind of levels things out. too much could make it sound like ish. i don't know maybe some else can explain it better?

yeah i never used a limitier. i was tryin to do that with a compressor but would wind up squashing the shi* outta my samples. Imma try that limiter right now.

compression is good, you have to set the ratio right, the level of db it starts compressing at(threshold), the release and attack. try the threshold about -10 to -15 db, the attack fast(0), the release about 1/8 to 1/4 from the fastest release setting(10 -20 on scale of 1-100). then mess around with the ratio control. start at infinity and work your way from there.
spend some time on getting in touch with what each parameter does.

A limiter is just a compressor with an extreme(or infinite) ratio. Instead of just "taming" dynamics it stops them from going past the threshold you set.

yeah thats what i been trying to do. last night i had a sample that was real low and i got it to sound right with compression.

stereo expander will just expand the stereo sound, make it more wide. drums are usually the punchest mono. stereo expanders are good for the hole track to wide the signal. but it will give you a different effect on the drums. a stereo reverd will do more on a mono sample. try it out you might like it. if your samples are not level in both stereo channels it might make things sound uneven(panning).

JUST SAMPLE LOUDER DRUMS

so i was playin with my mackie today and i just put my drums from my mpc to the mackie and aux sent them to another channel of which i just boosted the bass almost all the way and it sounded pretty nice on my headphones..
is this a sloppy fix for low bassdrums? can it mess up a clean signal with fazing or anything or is it all good ?

as you may know the bass in your headphones might sound good but in the monitors itll be much different..

it should be alright, when you do that digitally it starts to phase, anology is ok. you can split it three ways, one for only lows, one for only mids, and one for only highs. you can do that with all your sounds, try it out.