Hi! My name is Tchad Blake,
and I'm here at La Fabrique,
and I just got some tidbits really.
Drum workshop stuff,
a toolkit,
things that you can do on any song,
any session,
and it's just play time,
but play time that can lead to creation.
I find that essential for what I do.
I need to go through this process with every mix I do
whether it gets used in that mix or not.
I want to get it out of my system,
and more times than not,
it leads to something that gets used.
Maybe not the first thing that comes up or the big extreme thing that comes up,
but maybe in some fashion
it gets toned down and gets very usable for a section,
maybe it even transforms the song.
I don't know. I never know!
It's just fun,
and that's why I got into this.
I've got a clean drum kit here.
The drummer was not playing with any other musician,
he was just out there freeform playing.
And I'll go through
how I like to use my samples for my bass drum
because that's where I like my subs to come from,
and maybe a little higher, but mostly subs.
I'll do some crunching up of things,
and maybe some manipulations of the SansAmp,
and maybe beefing up the drums
with a reverb of some sort,
and just see where that takes us.
It might go into atmosphere land
or effect land.
And it's all going to be done with plug-ins. There's no outboard.
The drums were not recorded with any outboard,
they were pretty close...
Well, they weren't flat, I EQ,
but when I record I don't compress anything to tape.
Pro Tools, whatever.
So, let's get started.
One of the things I use the most is,
to get my subs on the bass drum
I use a sample.
I'm using Drumagog these days,
have been for a long time,
and I, you know,
I'm just using what they have in here.
Techno 15 is one that I use quite often,
Techno 5,
those are probably my two most used,
and then there's 606 ones,
so I mean,
any of these will work
depending on the kind of length and, you know, depth you want.
So let's start with that and see how this is sounding.
Here is the kit just on its own.
Let me make sure everything is off here
and down, so you just hear the kit as is.
There's nothing going on in this plug-in,
it's hitting very soft so there's really
no compression going on there.
This is just the kit, as recorded.
Nice small little kick,
it's got a lot of low end,
I love the sound of that kick but I may want to get a little deeper in there,
so there's a couple of ways I can do it.
One is with a sample.
I'm going to mess the tuning up a little bit
just to see where it takes us.
A bit higher.
It's always important to play with the phase button.
I really quite like that.
Let's hear another sample.
Let's see what Techno...
Where is it? 5 is like.
It's shorter.
But I'm hearing the snare drum kind of weak.
I'm getting tired of hearing that weak snare drum,
so I'm going to get a little crunch in on the kit.
Just...
I just go through and do this stuff really fast,
it's not, you know,
I just want to hear changes.
And I can change down the line
depending on the song and the instrumentation.
So this is one of my standard things.
I used to use 610 compressors to record the drums,
and this is the closest thing I found in the plug-in world,
the Eventide Omnipressor.
I love this thing for all sorts of reasons.
But here I'm using it like my Spectra Sonics 610.
That's being sent off the head.
I guess I should say something about that.
The overhead here is a KU 100,
a Neumann KU 100, which is a binaural head,
which is what I love to use for overheads.
And that's being sent to the Omnipressor.
What you get is...
...splat.
I like it.
And add it in.
I like the long sample. I just do.
I threw bass in there,
I might not be able to get away with that long sample,
but since we're just doing drums here, this is fine.
I'm going to try something else just to satisfy our curiosity.
I've got a SansAmp set up here
and
I'm going to send it off the kick drum,
pre-fader,
and see what happens there,
and see if I can do the low end another way.
It's a bit splatty, do you hear it?
Let's see what I can do with this.
I'll use the expander.
Now let's just hear that.
That's kind of cool,
the snare is starting to come...
Actually, that's given me an idea to try something else here.
I'll try that.
So that's a really slow
sweep rate,
which I think will give a nice change to the bass drum, over time.
What happens if I put the snare drum there, too?
Now, I've got a second drum bus set up here.
It's a duplicate as far as the Input is concerned,
but I've got some different things to play with on it.
Right now this drum bus is clean.
You can see I have things ready to go if I need them.
But let's try adding, like,
this lovely little baby.
Let's see what it's doing.
You can see it doesn't take much for it
to get a little excitement
into this fairly flat track.
Or we can do it the opposite way.
Have this one be the main one.
Let's see what that sounds like with a sample.
I don't like really...
I don't like hearing a sweep that I can tell is a sweep.
That's why I like things slow,
it's more subversive.
There's that. Let's bring this up too.
That's a cool sound.
That's kind of fun. I like that.
Wow!
There's one thing I like about doing things like this
because you never know what's going to happen.
I like that, anyway.
That's pretty cool, huh? Was that fun?