Producing music: Better drums (Impulse) -Tips for beginners (Ableton Live 9)

Hello steeamins!

In this short presentation I'll show you the Impulse tool in ableton and drop a few tips on how to make better sounding drums.

So Ableton's Impulse is basically a drum rack with built in modulations that you can use on your samples. Impulse can accept 8 different samples at once and you can do different modulations on each individually, how cool is that??

For this presentation I chose 2 random samples, a kick and a snare, so let's make a few changes on them:

The first 5 seconds of this track shows the raw samples, the second half consists the modified drums.
Let's start with the kicks:

Here you can see the section of switches that I've modified (every sample has these switches separately), starting with a little transpose, then stretch and time for extra fatness. I've also pulled back on the decay to avoid "whooshy" sounds and activated soft drive just for a tiny touch to reduce the initial snapping sound.

For the snares I stretched it backwards to sort out he rattling sound at the end of the sample. Here I also activated the filter and filtered out some of the high frequencies and added just a little bit of extra resonance .

Here you go, brand new drums.. I didn't do much, but still our drums sound compeletly different.
There are other things you can do to try to make your drums sound even better for example adding a little reverb with Lowcut, or trying to highlight certain frequencies with EQ8 while using the Spectrum audioeffect for an indicator.

There you can play with the switches, explore what suits your needs.... adding high value for reflect and diffuse usually sounds good for snares and kicks, while keeping the decay time on short.

We'll talk about each audioeffect and different uses in more detail, we'll touch a lot of things as time goes on, but once again:
experimentation is the key if u're trying to create something unique, so don't be afraid to improvise.

STEEM ON!