Make Real Drums Sound Like An 80s Drum Machine
From WikiRecording
This is a guide to making well recorded drums (mics on every source, room mics, overheads) sound as close as possible to sampled 80's style dry drums.
Getting the Source Right
If the drums are not already recorded, it's best to make it sound as much like a sample as possible at the source.
Get the sources right to start with. Firstly the player is all important, you need a player who can play strict good time.
Next comes acoustics. This means tackling the sources (the drums and cymbals!), treating any extraneous noise sources like sqeaky stool, kick and high hat pedal until they don't produce ANY sound at all, and tuning and damping the drums until they sound as close as possible to what you want.
Damping drums can mean Moongel on both heads, taping tissues or even towels laid over drums, choking down cymbals with similar techniques.
You may want to get some soft-faced baffles round the kit too, to dampen the room sound. Tricks like a tent or parachute over the top of the kit will also help dry things up. Don't neglect a good sized mat on the floor!
Once you have that right you might want to investigate recording some triggers, this can mean using a trigger to MIDI converter or simply recording the outputs of triggers clamped onto the rims of the drums. Acoustic triggers can be used to open software or hardware gates, and/or trigger replacement samples during the mixing process.
Things like taping a piece of paper to the top snare drum head, taking the bottom heads off of the toms, and taking the front head off of the bass drum (and stuffing a pillow inside) can contribute to an interesting sound...and if the drummer can play each element with zero dynamic variation, it will sound pretty machine like.
Dead drums in a dead room leaves a lot of room to really hear any effects you might add later, like the ubiquitous gated verb, or distortion, etc...
Search around for more ways to make live drum/percussion instruments sound non-real. One of those Remo Ocean Drums (the two headed thing with all the BB's in it) can sound really electronic if you put it on a snare stand and hit it with a brush. Like white noise with a decay.
Place small cymbals (splashes) on the snare or toms. Hit the drums without hitting the cymbals. Then hit the cymbal.
Place a bass drum flat on the floor and pour a bag of rice on the head. Instant giant snare drum!
Go nuts. Record the sounds one at a time (first pass: hi hat, second pass: bass drum, third pass: snare drums, etc...)
Place metal objects on the drums for a "canned" sound. Also, get junker cymbals and tape them up to the point of non-resonance, only clank.
Post Processing Techniques to Use
Gating the Drums
Gating drums was particularly popular in the 80s. Lots of gating keeps each sound totally separate from the others.
DownSample
Downsampling the recording to 16khz will emulate the quality of sound on an old, seriously lo-fi, 80's drum machine.
Add Synced Delay
Delay your high-hats and snares and sync the delay to the recording's BPM.
Dramatic Singular Processing
Try dramatic processing, a.k.a extreme eq, dense short delays and reverbs, on one particular sound and on no other. Drum machines often have different effects on each individual drum.
Looping
Cut and paste pattern repetition helps to emulate the repetitive nature of a drum machine. Since drum machines use repeats of patterns, consider making loops of a couple of really tight measures and fills and using them repeatedly, ex., the same fill before the chorus, every time. Especially do this with crash cymbals, so that they are the same hit, every time.
Loop the Hi-Hat
Drum-machine hi-hats are almost instantly recognizable in their unvarying dynamics, pitch, and pattern, often right through the snare rolls, if programmed badly.
Strict BPM
Make sure that your part is metronomically precise.
Cut the ride
Favor parts that have few sustaining elements. The ride cymbal is your enemy -- it is rarely in the drum machine vocabulary.
EQ Sweeps
Try eq sweeps on element of the track or the track as a whole.
Highpass
Highpass elements that need less thump.
Overdrive
Overdrive and distort the drums.
Resonant Lowpass Filter on the Kick
Use a resonant lowpass filter] on the kick.
Use Idiomatic Sounds
"Non-drum" sounds should be used. Playing on stands, random pieces of metal and oil drums all produce great non drum sounds.
Remove the Room Microphones
Remove the room mics and possibly the overheads. If you used a hat mic you should be able to get away with it.
Try turning on the overheads just for crashes, or go back and re-record the crash symbals.
Use Cheezy Reverb
Use cheezy, really long reverb. Many drum machines have a lot of bad reverb.
Add a Dry Shaker or Psuedo-Triangle
Add a super dry shaker and something that slightly resembles, but isn't a triangle.
Use Drum Replacer Software
Try using Drumagog or Aptrigga or any one of those sample-replacement programs to layer an SP-12 or Linndrum (or drum machine of your choice) sound bank up with the live drums, or replace the live drum sounds altogether.
Heavy Compression
Use heavy compression to remove most of the dynamics from each track - using a trigger program can help with that, if you just erase all the velocity data on the midi map of the triggered kit, and make every hit the same level.
Extreme Close Miking
Extreme close micing with dynamic microphones, 1 to 2 inches if possible, will create unusually strong separation and a thinner sound for each of the drums.
ProTools Sound Replacer
For ProTools users, try using sound replacer.
Drop the Transient
Remove the transient from the end of each attack.
Use Beat Detective
Use Beat detective to chop the regions at the transients then tab to region to drop in the samples.
Add a Synth Loop
Try dropping a loop or two on the material to establish a vibe. Synth bleeps and sweeps will do a lot to establish the vibe of the song as identifiably electronic.
Machine Gun Snare Roll
If the drummer can do it, a "machine-gun" snare rolls lacking dynamics and pitch change will emulate a drum machine.
Use Drum Machine Processing "Tricks"
Consider using the processing those of us who used drum machines a lot did to try to cover that fact up that they were using drum machines. For instance, run the drums through a guitar amp's reverb, and be obvious about it.
Play with the Overheads
Leave your room mics in but pan it to one side or the other and add some distortion to it.
Or make a stereo mix of your drums and send the whole thing through an EQ/filter and EQ it for effect...or send it through two distortion pedals or just drop in a distortion plugs.
Make them "Scream"
Try running it through through the "Scream" effect in Reason.
Bandpass Filtering
MDA BeatBox
MDA Beatbox
It's a free Vst
http://mda.smartelectronix.com/vst/help/beatbox.htm
Auto-Wah
Place a guitar pedal called an "Auto Wah" on the Aux send - get a filtered "Tortoise-like" sound. Try this on the snare and hats
Moog MF-101 LowPass Filter
Use the Moog MF-101 lowpass filter, put the envelope to "On" and add it to an Aux Send. Try this on the bass drum. Bandpass for the higher transient sounds, and lowpass for the low transient stuff. Set the envelopes to taste.
Ring Modulator
Ring mod on the hats at high frequencies.
Phaser
Phaser on the hats at really high settings. Flangers that have the ability to stop the sweep of the LFO will give you great comb-filtering effects.
Try Super Low Fi
Convert your sound files (make copies!) to 8 bit. After the damage is done, reconvert to 16 or whatever to import into your DAW. It will essentially compress and gate for you. then, of course, gated reverb.
Sources
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