Obviously the best way to achieve this would be to tune and mic the drums in the 50s style. But in reality, we have a tiny budget; we recorded all the drums basically in one day with no time to adjust things in between songs. So I challenged myself to come up with two ways to mix the same drums and get very different sounds.

The first thing I did was listen to some reference tracks. Like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9OcPzjpXnk

Now that song was actually recorded in 1969, and in fact all my reference tracks actually came from the late 60s. Which is fine; I’m after a sound, not a date. At any rate, I took note of a few things:

• The snare is thin and tight.
• The kick has almost no boom, but you can really hear the pedal.
• The hihats are nice and crisp. (In my head the sound was super warm, but that’s not really the case at all. It’s easy to overdo those things, so it was good to check.)

With that in mind I got to work.

I wasn’t alive then, but reading up a bit it seems like close-micing individual drums didn’t become common until the 70s. Basically you’d just throw one mic up in the middle of the room. With that in mind, I attempted to work entirely off the overheads. The first thing I noticed was the overheads were suuuper bright, probably because they were placed so close to the cymbals. Listen:

Download audio file (drums_01_orig.wav.mp3)


I thought a little multiband would help so I fired up Voxengo Drumformer. I set it in two-band mode with the cutoff at 3k. For the lows, I added a moderate amount of compression, but actually only a tiny bit on the highs. I set the cutoff just barely below where the hihat peaks. Mostly I just rolled the high band a lot lower. Even that wasn’t enough so I added a little bit of high shelf as well.

Applying two-band compression to the overheads

Download audio file (drums_02_compressed.wav.mp3)


Now the balance sounds pretty good and I’m liking the way the crash tails fade away. I wanted to add a touch of saturation to give it that retro feel. My favorite tool for this is the Buzz plugin Zu Tube Head, but since I’ve switched to Mac I need to find a new one. I first tried Magnetic from Nomad Factory; it sounded good, but I didn’t really want to drop $129 at the moment. I auditioned a few more before finding Forex from ToneBoosters. The sound is nice and it’s a bargain at under $35 for the whole bundle of plugs.

Download audio file (drums_03_saturated.wav.mp3)


For the last step, I reasoned that recording with a single mic placed farther away, you’d pick up a bit more room, so I added just a hint of reverb to the whole thing. Naturally I used the amazing freebie Ambience by Magnus of Smartelectronix.

Download audio file (drums_04_verb.wav.mp3)


That’s it! The only further processing is to cut a hole for the vocals at 2.8k.

That’s my attempt at a 50s (but really 60s) drum sound. I’m still fiddling with the pop sound, but if I feel inspired I’ll write that up as well.

At any rate, if you don’t have another room to put your computer in, the next best thing is to make it quieter.  You can actually spend a ton of cash making your PC dead silent, but I recently got most of the way there for well under a hundred bucks.  The worst culprits are the things the move the most: the power supply (with its built-in cooling fan) and the CPU cooling fan.  Here’s what I got.

Nexus NX-3000 Real Silent PSU:  Well, “Real Silent” is a straight-up lie.  It’s very quiet, but 19 db(A) is not silent last I checked.  I still recommend it.  Some people might suggest that you need more than 300W from your PSU, but I don’t know if that applies to musical setups.  I run about a million USB-powered devices with no trouble.

Zalman CNPS9500 CPU fan: This is quite a monstrosity; the photos on the web site don’t really show how big it is.  Basically, the main way to make a quieter CPU cooler is to make the fan bigger and slower.  But of course a big slow fan doesn’t cool as well, so you need a bigger heat sink with lots of surface area to compensate.  This fan supports dynamic speed controls; in other words, the fan spins slowly at start and only increases in speed as needed.

In general, End PC Noise has a good selection of quiet computer parts.  I noticed that most web sites about customizing your PC are geared toward people who play video games, but musicians stand to gain just as much.

1.) Restrict Yourself
Back when my studio set-up consisted of nothing but a single sampler, I dreamt of the days when I would be able to afford more gear. Surely that would solve all my creative blocks! What I found out was just the opposite…. So impose some restrictions on yourself. Try making an entire song with nothing but a single synth. Make the drums and everything from scratch. Not only will you improve your sound programming abilities, but you’ll likely end up with a track that sounds utterly unlike anything else you’ve done.

Replace “single sampler” with “Impulse Tracker” and that story is eerily familiar.  Imposing limitations on yourself is a great way to prime your pump: puzzling over how to get around your restrictions gives your brain a starting point.

But another tip from Waveformless seemed to be directed at me personally:

5.) Be Productive
My motto in the studio is ‘always be working on something’.

Definitely an attitude I need to acquire.

I’ll throw in an extra tip of my own:

6.) Remove all barriers to productivity.

Keep your instruments out in the open, plugged in, tuned up, or what have you.  Make sure you can reach them easily.  If you use a computer, leave it on.  Even if it takes just ten seconds to get ready to play, try to knock that down to one.  It’s amazing how even the tiniest barriers to picking up your instruments can completely stymie your creativity.

When the microKorg’s clock is set to EXT, it accepts MIDI clock from the master.  MIDI clock is a series of ticks sent at regular intervals.  The synth can calculate the master tempo from the time between ticks.  But MIDI clock contains no information about bars and beats.  (Other MIDI protocols do, but the microKorg does not accept them as far as I can tell.)  So the synth matches its tempo to the master, but it has no knowledge of how to line up the first beat with the master.  The arpeggiator might start on the beat just by chance, but it’s just as likely to start halfway between beats.

After much investigation, I discovered that you can force the microKorg to jump back to the first beat in time with your host.  Details after the jump.

I’m using Ableton Live here (sorry, Buzzards), but you ought to be able to do the same trick with any host.  For that matter, this same trick probably works with other synths and grooveboxes.

1. Install MIDI Yoke and MIDI-Ox.  MIDI Yoke is a virtual MIDI driver that gives you extra MIDI ins and outs; you can use them to connect different programs together.  MIDI-Ox is an incredibly useful tool that lets you route, filter, and rewrite MIDI data.

2. In Live, disable our physical MIDI port (Out-1 USB Midisport) and enable our virtual MIDI port (Out to MIDI Yoke: 1).

3. Start up MIDI-Ox.  We need to connect the virtual MIDI port to the real MIDI port.  Go to the Options menu and open up MIDI Devices.  Make sure “Automatically attach Inputs to Outputs during selection” is checked.  In the MIDI Inputs box, find “In From MIDI Yoke: 1″ and select it.  In the MIDI Outputs box, find your physical MIDI port and select it.  Now MIDI data we send to the virtual port goes to the actual synth.

4. We need to send MIDI realtime messages to the microKorg on demand.  Live doesn’t support this directly, so we will configure MIDI-Ox to replace a regular note with the realtime message.  Go to Options on open Mappings.  Press the Insert button.  Under “When Input matches,” set “Event Type” to “NoteOn.”  Make sure “Pass original value on” is not checked.  Under “Set Output to,” set “Event Type” to “Start.”  Press OK.

5. Make sure “Turn Map On” is checked, and then press “OK.”

6. Leave MIDI-Ox open and go back to Live.  Add a MIDI track and set its “MIDI To” to “Out To MIDI Yoke: 1.”

7. Make a MIDI clip for your new track and put a note on the first beat.

Now you have a couple options.  You can play this clip as a loop and continuously re-start the microKorg arpeggiator in time with your Live clock.  This might be handy if you’re switching between a lot of different patches.  But this will also re-start your note pattern, which may or may not be desirable.  Alternately, you can configure the clip as a one-shot and trigger it whenever you need to fix the microKorg sync.  In this case, you might want to map a hotkey to trigger the clip.

If you don’t have Oppressor 3, you need to get it from Fuzzpilz’s site. Our scenario is the same as last time: we have a kick drum and a bass line; we want the bass line volume to duck in time with the kick drum.

1. Add an Oppressor 3 machine to your song. Run both your kick and bass through it.

2. Right-click the dropp machine and pick “Manage Inputs.”

4. Click on “kick” and press the “Level” button. Then click on “bass” and press the “Signal” button.

5. Start playing your tracks. Open up dropp and adjust the compressor settings to get the sound you want.

6. Finally, route your kick in to Master so you can hear it as well.

There you go. Just one machine, and no need to fiddle with the gate if you’re not going to use it. On the other hand, Oppressor has more complicated parameters than BG Sidechain, and you might prefer BG’s sound. It’s nice to have both options.

Want to know a secret? I mostly use neither; I use Slim Slow Slider Sidechain VST. Don’t tell anyone, or I might lose my secret Buzz decoder ring.

We want to take a drum loop, fit it to our song tempo, re-arrange it to make a new beat, and apply different effects to different sounds. This example starts with a drum loop trimmed to 8 beats. If you don’t have one handy, you can use this one (right-click to save):

Example drum loop

UnwieldyTracker may not be included with your Buzz install. If not, go to Fuzzpilz site and install it first. Then we’re ready to go.

1. Set your song tempo to 155 and your TPB to 8. Load the drum loop into the first sample slot. Then add an UnwieldyTracker to your song.

2. Make a pattern for UTrk and set it to 64 ticks long. (Remember we’re at 8 TPB: 8 beats * 8 TPB = 64 ticks.) Add a C-4 in the first row.

3. Start looping your pattern in the sequencer. Barring an amazing coincidence, you’ll notice that the length of your sample does not match the length of your pattern.

4. Look at your pattern and find the column to the left of your note. Put a 0040 in that column.

Your loop will magically fit your song’s tempo. This is the “stretch to fit” column– UTrk will stretch the sample to match the length you specify. In this case, 0040 hex = 64 ticks = 8 beats, so our loop is now 8 beats long. You can now change the song tempo and the UTrk will automatically stretch the loop to fit.

5. Find the column to the left of the stretch to fit column. Put a number in every fourth row: 0000 in row 0, 1000 in row 4, 2000 in row 3, and so on up to F000 in row 60. (Remember that A-F come after 0-9 in trackers.)

6. Watch the position line while you listen to your loop. When you hear a key beat that you want to steal, make a note of the number in that same row. In my example loop, there’s a crash on 0000, a snare on 2000 and 6000, a kick drum on 5000 and 8000, etc.

7. The numbers we just added are in the “offset” column. By rearranging the numbers in this column, we can rearrange the beats in the loop. Here I’ve made a simple pattern using the kick at 8000 and the snare at 6000. The note offs prevent the loop from continuing past the beat we want to extract.

8. In our example loop, the snare was a hair behind the beat, so it doesn’t sound quite right. We can fix that by replacing the 6000 with a slightly larger number, like 6200. (If the snare were ahead of the beat instead, we’d use a slightly smaller number, like 5E00.)

9. We can jazz up the pattern a little. I changed the kick pattern slightly and swapped in the kick at 5000 for variety.

10. We can add some cymbals to the pattern. Press Ctrl+Plus to add a new track. Use 1000 in the offset column to add rides. I used the velocity column to accentuate the beat.

11. Let’s now track a fill. Make a new 32 tick pattern and track a variation on your pattern.

Notice that I left the note column empty in a few places. If the previously note is still playing, you can put a new value in the offset column and leave the note column blank.

12. Finally, we want to route the ride and the kick/snare separately so we can use different effects and mix them separately. Add two Polac Out machines. Run the output of UTrk through both Outs in parallel. The sound from UTrk will be silent.

13. Right-click the first Out and select “Outputs…” Set “Channel L” to “Output 0 L” and set “Channel R” to “Output 0 R.” You’ll now hear the kick/snare track passing through.

14. Right-click Out2 and choose “Outputs…” Set “Channel L” to “Output 1 L” and “Channel R” to “Output 1 R.” The rides will now come through.

You can handle up to 16 separate tracks by adding more Polac Outs.

15. Your two tracks are now separate signals. We can process them separately. In this example, I put a compressor on the kick/snare track and added Joachim Temperature to warm up the ride track.

UnwieldyTracker has a lot of great features, and this tutorial just demonstrates a couple. Enter different values in the effect column and watch the status line to get a peek at its many capabilities.

This tutorial will teach you how to integrate an external MIDI synthesizer (or drum machine, or groovebox ..) with a Buzz song. In this scenario, I have a drum loop playing in Buzz. I want to synchronize the arpeggiator on a hardware synth– say, my beloved microKorg– to Buzz so the synth plays in time with the drum pattern. Then I want to use my favorite Buzz effects on the synth.

1. Go to Edit -> Preferences and go to the MIDI Output tab. Make sure the MIDI device that goes to your synth is checked. In this diagram, my microKorg is connected to “Out-1 USB MidiSport 8×8″.

2. Add a Rebirth MIDI 2 machine and connect it to Master. Right click on the Rebirth machine and choose Settings from the menu. Pick your MIDI device from the “Select Midi Out” dropdown. Set the appropriate MIDI channel (my synth is set to channel 1). Switch the “Song position unit” to “MIDI beats.” Then click OK.

(As you can see, the GUI for Rebirth MIDI 2 is buggy on my machine. It works fine though, so don’t worry if the settings box looks weird.)

3. Set your synth to sync to an external MIDI clock. (If you happen to have a microKorg: turn Edit Select 2 to MIDI and then turn Clock to EXT.)

4. Create a pattern for your Rebirth MIDI 2 machine called “start.” Put a 00 in the first column. This is the signal to start sending MIDI time code.

5. Add your Rebirth start pattern to the sequence and start playing your song. We now have MIDI sync. Play an arpeggiator or sequence on your synth.

6. The next step is to route the audio out of your synth into Buzz so you can use Buzz effects and mixers on it. Connect the output of your synth to your sound card’s input.

7. Add a Polac ASIO In machine to your song.

8. Right-click your ASIO In, go to the Inputs sub-menu, and pick your audio input device.

You’re done. Your synth is MIDI-synced and routed into your Buzz song. Now you can use your favorite Buzz effects on your hardware synth.

If your soundcard has multiple inputs, you can route multiple synths into Buzz in this manner. Even if you only have one stereo input, you can pan one synth hard left and another one hard right. Then add two mono Polac ASIO In machines to use their signals independently.

EDIT: Kibibu tipped me that Fuzzpilz Oppressor 3 also does sidechaining, and it’s a bit easier to set up.  Here’s this same tutorial using Oppressor instead of BG.

Here’s our initial setup. We have two tracks, a kick drum and a bass line. We want to duck the bass’s volume in time with the kick drum. (Click on any diagram to enlarge it.)

Let’s set up the sidechain.

1. Add a BG sidechain machine and run your bass through it.

2. Open BG SCD. Set the Mode to AUDIOCOMP and the Channel to 1.

3. Add a new BG sidechain machine, called BG SCD2. Run your kick through it.

4. Open up BG SCD2. Set Mode to LEVEL and Channel to 1.

5. Important non-obvious step: BG SCD2 is gated by default. You need to turn off the gate to allow audio through. To do this, turn Gate Thresh all the way down to -50 dB. These are the quirks that make us love Buzz, right?

6. Start playing your pattern so you can hear what happens next.

7. Open up the bass compressor, BG SCD, again. Adjust the Comp parameters (Thresh, Ratio, Attack, Release, and Gain) to get the sound you want. Compression settings deserve a tutorial or six by themselves, but here is a quickie formula: turn Ratio all the way up; slowly lower Thresh until you can clearly hear the bass track’s volume ducking; slowly turn Ratio back down until the volume changes sound smooth.

That’s it. You now have sidechaining. You can set up more sidechaining pairs in the same Buzz song by using a different Channel setting.