The "Tips and Tricks" thread

some sick tips.

glad to see this thread still breathin. keep em comin and thanks for all the tips

A tip from a noob:

create your own shakers, snares, hihats, kicks, sound effects-
pick up a mic and even if you've never tried beatboxing before-
TRY IT

either record in your daw of choice or directly into your MP (if youre lucky), chop away and layer underneith your drums.

To me its all about the layers.... that way you have a bunch of options to choose from when you arrange a beat with an MC and can create interesting and dynamic drops.

Never stop experimenting.
Also, if before you get rid of a mistake- listen to it, often times I get stuck in the same mindstate and mistakes can reveal new ideas and new ways of looking at the same sample/beat/song/etc.

ROC

instead of building new kits when youre uninspired, heres something i've been having fun with recently:

turn off time correction/quantize
turn the tempo to something silly like 290
2 bar loop
load up your favourite programs
press record and go nuts on the pads, just bang on stuff randomly and stop randomly too.

do this with several or only a couple of programs on as many tracks as you want.

you'll wind up with an ungodly mess of noise.

so slow things back down to a respectable 90bpm
turn on time correction to whatever setting you normally like. i find that 1/16 works best on this for me. swing is set to about 60ish.

what it does is it creates some pretty interesting drumtracks around which you can build things. the trick to this is placing regularly timed hits amidst the chaos after youve slowed things down. rides or high hat and a regular minimal beat over it normally adds nice structure.

then add and subtract things till you start feeling it.

crashes are pretty interesting cos the mpc cuts them off once you max out polyphony, leaving you with some nice effects.

oh and dont forget to play with the track velocity settings too. i tend to turn them down so things sit better.

why play a sampler only like a drummer when its capable of so much more

hjahaha thats some crazy shit

hehehe fun isnt it

it takes advantage of the mpcs great swing and sequencing, and exploits its limitations like its polyphony.

i forgot to mention that you should try and put the 'regular' timed additions on seperate tracks,.... snares, hihats, rides. ideally play them in without quantise on.

then play with track mute

it works quite nicely with multi sampled pianos too. kinda like an arrpeggiator but not.

not sure if this has been said... but throw a little reverb on a kick and it'll give you a deeper/larger sounding kick.. seem to work really well with a mpc2500

GarrettReza wrote:not sure if this has been said... but throw a little reverb on a kick and it'll give you a deeper/larger sounding kick.. seem to work really well with a mpc2500

thats interesting.. i've NEVER had a good result with reverb on a kick.. therfor i never do it

i rarely every hear reverb on kicks too.. unless its too slight for me to notice

you got an example?

es-k wrote:

GarrettReza wrote:not sure if this has been said... but throw a little reverb on a kick and it'll give you a deeper/larger sounding kick.. seem to work really well with a mpc2500

thats interesting.. i've NEVER had a good result with reverb on a kick.. therfor i never do it

i rarely every hear reverb on kicks too.. unless its too slight for me to notice

you got an example?

storch/dre use some very subtle reverb on their kicks some time.

ok, here's a tip for ya.



Create three aux channels. These are going to be your three master stereo outs, so all your elements will be routed to all these three auxes, exactly the same as if they were one master fader.

Now, the trick...strap a good filter plugin on all three auxes. The key here is to make one the lows, one the mids, one the highs. set the lows from around 200Hz, the mid to be from 200-300Hz to 3kHz-5kHz, and the highs from around 4-5kHz on up. The cutoff will preferably be pretty steep, like an 18 or 24 dB per octave filter. And play with the cutoffs of the different frequency ranges, you want them to overlap a bit. Then you can compress or otherwise process these different frequency ranges differently. Kind of like a home brew multiband compressor, only there are much more options. Be sure to turn on delay compensation in your DAW!!!!

i'll just copy and paste this from another thread, its a GREAT trick.


New York compression, or parallel processing.

For example, say you have your drums all bused to a stereo aux, just for level control over the whole drum kit or maybe some group processing or whatever. In pro tools or any other DAW, you duplicate that same aux, so you have two drum subgroups now, except on one you leave clean and the other you compress the snot out of it with like a 20:1 ratio, threshold all the way down, adjust attack and release to taste. Then you tuck that up under the normal drum subgroup, and from there you can play with attack and release, EQ, etc. to get the sound you want, maybe add a bit of distortion. That is the essence of New York compression, or parallel compression.

Be sure to calculate for the delay that this will cause, meaning if your DAW has plugin delay compensation, be sure to enable it, or you'll have to record the output of these seperately processed parallel auxes and slide them back into time with the original tracks.

This technique will change your life, i guarantee it. When i discovered this for myself, it completely revolutionized my mixes. Probably THE BEST mix trick anyone can ever teach you. Try it with all sorts of things, try bussing just the kick and the bass to a seperate aux and process that with some compression and EQ. Experiment with the techique and you'll find all sorts of cool applications for it.

^^^

nice one a mentor of mine deos a similar thing when mixing live.

he calls it freq splitting. instead of splitting the 2-bus, he splits the input channels......so for example you would have a bass going into 2 channels of the console and each would have different EQ and gain settings

jaem wrote:^^^

nice one a mentor of mine deos a similar thing when mixing live.

he calls it freq splitting. instead of splitting the 2-bus, he splits the input channels......so for example you would have a bass going into 2 channels of the console and each would have different EQ and gain settings

i do that as well, thats a bit different and more similar to parallel processing, which is crucial to mixing

Any tip/tricks on tweaking drum sounds? Anything that isn't too closely tied to the MPC would be helpful.

rickrock305 wrote:Be sure to calculate for the delay that this will cause, meaning if your DAW has plugin delay compensation, be sure to enable it, or you'll have to record the output of these seperately processed parallel auxes and slide them back into time with the original tracks.

thx for this great tips, but i have a newbie question, how do you calculate the delay ? is it relating to the attack time + release time of the compressors ?

or is the delay specific to the processor used (the compression algorithm, the size of the audio buffers used) where can i found such infos ?
i am asking this, because, most software plug ins include a delay compensator (at least good ones) but what about digital hardware mixer ?

so far i ve only the signal delay from the channels inputs to the main ST out , and as stated in the specification, it is about less than 2.5ms