Do you use your NL2/2X percussion patches?

Ligumo

I was wondering if any 2/2X players made use of their percussion kits? I'd always avoided using them, mainly because they sounded like they needed a bit of processing to get them sounding right.

However, last week I thought I would try and get into them a bit more, partly because I would like to do a few tracks that solely use my 2x. I recorded kits P0-P5 into Cubase playing each percussion item once. At first I noticed I was getting some of the hits weren't too loud and I was getting a little noise from turning the volume up so loud to get a good input signal - I remedied this by running CHA through my TL Audio 5050 Preamp and compressor, and after tweaking it a little made it louder without the noise, and as a bonus controlling some of the extreme transients a little.

Once this was done I exported my WAV to Recycle, sliced it up into each individual item and exporting it as a REX file before finally loading it into Battery 3 and spending about an hour sorting through each individual slice, grouping all the snares and basses together etc and finally saving as a finished kit. This final part in Battery is quite labour intensive, as anyone who's made their custom kits might know!

Thanks to Battery's ability to send indivudual drums to their own channels for their own processing, i've been getting some really great results. The good news is that the kits sounds great! Some really cool analogue sounds that sound much better than some of the samples in professional packages. I'm looking forward to using these kits in my own composistions over the next few weeks - I've only done P0-P5 as I said earlier, so I think I can probably get another 7 or so.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else has done something similar. It's a bit of a long winded approach, but it's one way to get the most out of the synth!

Wout Blommers · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 4:46 am Post subject:

Could you post some mp3?
Plain sound and reworked?

BTW Percussion mode isn't just drums and tics, but also a special mode in which a Slot is able to play 8 different synthesizers, although rather limited Smile

Wout

Drone · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 9:07 am Post subject:

I think some of the drum sounds are usable / workable in NL2 but drums are another one of those things that can be quite subjective.

Ligumo · Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 1:05 pm Post subject:

I've got a busy couple of days coming up, but I'll see if I can record some kind of demonstration by this time next week Smile

Ligumo · Posted: Thu Dec 10, 2009 2:20 pm Post subject:

I had chance today to record a demonstration of a 2X drum loop exported into battery. I followed a slightly different process this time, partly because I learned a few things from the last time I did it, and partly because I was only going to use one drumkit - my previous kit was an combination of the sounds I liked the most from kits 0P0-0P4. My previous attempt also had some noise leakage from the original recording, and because I knew you guys were going to hear this I wanted to make sure it was eliminated!

Differences were:

*Used slightly more compression on the original recording to bring the level of the quieter parts a little higher

*Used a very light noise gate in Recycle to eliminate the noise floor

*Exported each slice from Recycle as a WAV file. My first attempt I'd exported the entire loop as a REX, which Battery can handle fine - but having each sample as a seperate file is easier to manage in Battery.

I used every item of percussion on 0P5 in the piece. In all cases they were EQd using Cubase Studio 4's parametric EQ, and I used compressor plugins similar to a 1176 and DB160. There were a mixture of reverbs, either using Cubase's Roomworks plug-in or a digital reverb plug-in. There's also a small amount of delay on some parts.

The heaviest processing was on the snare, mainly because I didn't like the sound of the default one. There's some distortion and EQ on there as well as some of the little tweaks Battery allows.

Please bear in mind I'm no real expoert at drum programming (something I need to work on) and I'm still quite inexperienced at sound engineering. Nevertheless I'm quite pleased with the result, and I'd be interested to know if anyone else has any comments!

As I said in my earlier post, i've not really regarded the kits too highly up until now, but since I've been importing to Battery I've begun to realise their potential - they sound very current, what with the trend for using 808s in pop music so much at the moment.

Attatched are the processed mp3, a completely dry mp3 from the original kit, a screengrab of the kit set up in battery and the MIDI of the drumloop just in case anyone is interested.

battery screengrab.jpg

Description:

Filesize:

136.65 KB

Viewed:

390 Time(s)

This image has been reduced to fit the page. Click on it to enlarge.

0P5 Dry.mp3

Description:

Original 0P5 drumkit with no processing

Download (listen)

Filename:

0P5 Dry.mp3

Filesize:

2.62 MB

Downloaded:

644 Time(s)

0P5 Processed.mp3

Description:

0P5 after processing in Cubase Studio 4 and Battery 3

Download (listen)

Filename:

0P5 Processed.mp3

Filesize:

2.62 MB

Downloaded:

645 Time(s)

drum loop.mid

Description:

MIDI of the drum loop

Download (listen)

Filename:

drum loop.mid

Filesize:

8.16 KB

Downloaded:

449 Time(s)