Gluing sounds together

I am trying to make beats from downbeat triphop to jungle. Both have a heavily sampled, dirty, layered sound. I want to play them live whenever possible.

My problem (or one of), is that no matter what I do I can't get the beat to sound cohesive, and glued together. I am mostly layering one-shots, but I've experimented with chopping a breakbeat too, and a combination of chopped breaks with layered oneshots. Using a break gives a bit more consistancy to the sound but things still stick out a bit, and often feel choppy or staccato.

I'd appreciate any tips for treating samples (or the drum track) so it sounds more like its all coming from the same instrument rather than just stuck together oneshots, and also if there is some way to smooth things out so its not so 'choppy'. I've tried a touch of reverb, or a mild dist over the whole drum channel but it doesn't quite work. Am I missing something? What do you do to glue all your sounds together?


edit: the only time it starts to sound fluid and consistent is if I leave a whole break running in the background. But since I wanna play the chops live, I don't like doing this..

Are you chopping your drum one shots from breaks? If yes, don't chop so much at the end point, leave the "air" (so lets say the kick drum has a natural tail/reverb on the record, don't chop it off). This way your drums will sound more natural.

Also, to make it sound more "glued together", try selecting drums that are in tune and also "fit" with your sample (for example, play 20 different kicks, snares, hi-hats along to your samples, which one fits best? Take that one...).

I guess my sample selection has something to do with it, but I suspect that there are other things to do, like adding room reverb, an eq and compression to the whole track. I am guessing that the listeners ear hears that its common to all the samles and so sort of groups them together. Thats the theory Im working with anyway but I am not getting much out of it yet...

The chops are generally mixed and matched one shots, so they don't often have anything in common. Perhaps this is a major part of the problem. I'll try more break choppage for a while and see what happens. Generally my chops run on until the next transient (ie as long as possible). I suppose I could try looping at the end or reversing or something to make the air even longer...

a cheap compressor would do wonders.

There are a number of ways to impove the overall cohesion. Working with only one shots myself (usually from all different places) I would recommend using an ADSR envelope or fade out to make the drums/percussive samples as short as possible. Usually I'll trim the sample as short as i can then apply a "fade out" from the start of the sample to make it a short and clean percussive burst. It will sound even better and more rythmic if you make samples similiar in length the exact same length. Something else to try that I've been using a lot lately is subtle master/group reverb, not only will it glue an assortment of sounds together but you get some nice stereo width out it as well. Of course compression is a common goto option for gluing, but to be more specific I think the SSL master bus compressor emulations do the best master gluing. There are other great gluing master comps but they usually color a lot a lot as well.