HELP!!! My drums need life...

Alright heres the skinny... I got these drum breaks right... They're off vinyl, so of course when I sample them they lack some punch... I EQ, do a little compression, add some Bass FX to get it thumpin... Everything seems to be goin right... I load the newly filtered drums into my MPC only to find they still lack punch for some reason... They dont' cut through the mix... So I figure some compression will do it good... Only now my kicks sound muddy, my snares sound over-compressed (They don't even sound like snares anymore).. The only things that sound good are my hi-hats... So I wanna mix down this track, Cause it sounds real good ( I mean programming-wise and the basic sample itself)... I figure go ahead and just EQ the kicks at least to clean them up since they hit real hard (They are compressed pretty well they just sound muddy)... Well in my headphones the kicks need more thump and bottom end... I refer to my monitors to sort of double check this and it's got too much thump... SO basically I'm now left with Lo-Fi drums that sound shitty... Snares that sound like a **** scratch on a record... And kicks that somehow have no bass and too much bass all at the same time... HELP!!!

You mean that when you sample drum breaks from vinyl, they LACK the punch That's odd.... To me it's the exact opposite, if I sample drums from a cd they don't sounds nearly as warm as the drums that I sample from vinyl. It could be the sounds you're sampling, if they're sh*t to begin with, they usually ain't going to sound that good no matter what you do to them. And bear in mind that when you sample a break from a record, it has already been eq'd and compressed and all that ish, so compressing it more might just make it overcompressed..

Remember sometimes less is more!

I think from what you say, that you have a problem with the way you compress (if you over compress, you will loose some high end thump from the kick and the snare, and maybe you eq each sound wrong. eq is very
subtle thing to master, if you boost too many of the same frequencies
from each sound, they will sound muddy and undefined. I think you need to compress the sounds a bit but using a low ratio, I usually stick with around 2:1 for drums, for me it just beefs them up. try a slightly slower attack cause a lot of the punch in kicks and snares is in the attack portion of the sound.
are you doing additive eq or subtractive eq. I discovered a whole new dimension to my sound when I started doing subtractive eq cause you
get rid of the frequency's you don't want and open up spaces for other sound.... this is an example..... my kick wants to sit around 40 to 120 hz
and my bass wants some slight boost a 300k. what I do is subtract some 300hz from the kick and add a slight boost around 80hz on on the kick...

Then on the bass I boost the 300hz in the space I've left open by reducing
that frequency on the kick. that's how you avoid muddy low end... often less is more in mixing and the key is to make sure that sounds don't interfere with each other. this is also a matter of panning and reverb, on different sounds to give them a window a space in the canvas. pan your toms, and different hits. only rule is kick in the centre and bass in the centre (that's why people have the most problems at first cause you need to work at it to make the low end sound fat.) A fat low end is not just a matter of boosting all the bass out of every instruments.

For your own sake, don't cross reference what your doing in your headphones with your monitors, stop using the headphones all together,
you will never get a tight mix with headphones cause the frequency respnonse in headphones are shit. get into the habit of mixing with your monitors and use cd's that you like to see how they sound get use to them and then replicate.

thas good advice.

does sound like you are over processing stuff way too much.

Number one rule - get it right at source! Make sure your original sample is a good one. agree with cheech - from vinyl it should be good. are you sampling directly into the MPC, or do you have a long signal path before it gets there (ie. From turntable to mixer, through aux sends etc...)? Keep it short and direct.

sample some drums from dr dre (chronic 2001)

Science wrote:sample some drums from dr dre (chronic 2001)

no, don't

Science wrote:sample some drums from dr dre (chronic 2001)

why every body giving me funny faces? im not really a kanye west fan but he samples his drums from dre, and his beats come out tight......... probally tighter than, you cats giving funny faces, get your mind right!!

Science wrote:why every body giving me funny faces? im not really a kanye west fan but he samples his drums from dre, and his beats come out tight......... probally tighter than, you cats giving funny faces, get your mind right!!

Wooooooooooo, slow down

Science wrote:sample some drums from dr dre (chronic 2001)

they are the best soundin drums to me.

your over compressing.

First off
Kayne does sample dre drums, but he layers them with drums he finds in records....

Look in the rOC FAMILIA! Hood Series #3 dvd2...

He spends aat least 20 min in the studio with the gemini and the mpc.....
on the dvd...

He is seen making a drum loop by taking drums off a record than grabbing another record and layering tha kick ontop but he says most cats **** themselves up by doing this...
It usually will add 3db more to your kick so I saw he was in the program mode an adjusting the attack...I had to rewind the dvd a million times...
Meaning The 2nd layer of a kick is adjusted so the main hit doesnt hit along with the first kickc you just hear the tail end
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He states that he used to get used to get his drums for dre in one point, but he states that was when alchemist was still producing the blueprint 2 now he has a library full of them...
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Also on your problem......
NEVER NEVER eq or compress on the MPC
Do it after...
Filter on the mpc thats all..Drums need filtering....
Eq on the comp cause the eq comb filter is usually 10 times better....
Also for weak record sounds....Make sure you are recording up to the 0 db or at least -3db... And maybe normalize your samples...
You dont know how many engineers mormalize there shit before doing anything with it...
NORMALIZING used to be bad when technology wasnt that great cause it would raise the headroom of the digital noise before dithering.
But now dithering and normalizing take care of this problem and there is no problems unless your doing vocals...

What you neeed is to Send your drums out from the MPC to a preamp or LImiter...
Okay mpc out your drums into a Universal audio 2-610 Tubeamplifier....Its pre amp and you can distort without nasty digital clipping...
Then I would recomend sending that too a Universal audio 1176ln limiter...
And you can adjust the compression or the limiting...And you can pull it into the all mode and it will pump like a B3 organ on a Leslie rotary...

But Just leave drums tille the end cause mastering engineers can boost your mix levels 100% if you dont **** with it...
If you do they can only do so much meaning your screwed

yeah, it sounds like you overcompress your drums,
slow the attack setting, it'll bring out the transients more
if it still not loud enough, you know about the output level right?

I appreciate all the tips and much of it will come to good use... Yea I'm really new to compression so it's hard to get right (as I'm sure anyone experienced here knows)...

In response to Freedom... I don't EQ on the MPC or compress... I think I really f*cked up by tryin to clean up the sound on my computer before I reprogrammed and chopped the break... What I ended up doin was over producin the kick and it came out all muddy and flat...

Is response to this staement...
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Originally posted by Science:
sample some drums from dr dre (chronic 2001)
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Absolutely not... I love Dre he's a great producer (one of the best ever), but jackin drums is weak... I'll never do it... I'd rather spend 3 months (or any matter of time for that matter) wth flat drums learnin the basics of compression and EQ, than jack anyone for drums... I wanna be a producer, not a programmer...

O yo and Freedom... are you sayin to run my MPC through a tube pre-amp then into a compressor and then into my Mixer... Or sample through the pre-amp first... Just for clarification