Adding A Nice Effect to Your Drums with Drops and Mutes

Nowadays most producers are using some sort of updated piece of technology to make their drums, whether it’s the top of the line MPC, Fruity Loops, or Logic, most producers plug in some kicks and snares and sequence their drums to create a drum track. This is great, but there’s more that can be done to give your drums a fresh feel and help ya track. One of the ways you can tighten up your drum track is by dropping the drums.

Dropping out the drums, or muting the drums helps give ya track more feel and mixes it up so it’s not the same drum loop over and over. Try using them right before the hook or bridge, or even when ya emcee spits his hottest line so it really stands out.

Here’s an example of what we are talking about…as the track plays listen to the drums, eventually they will be muted for a nice effect:

Additionally, you can just mute most of the drums except one part, say for example the kicks. Here’s an example where the snares and hi-hats are muted, leaving only the kicks:

Remember, just because you might have made a sick drum pattern, don’t short-change yourself and stop there. Add some variety and mix it up to create some nice effects. Dropping out the drums is just one of the many techniques you can do – we’ll be definately dropping more techniques in the future so stay checkin in…oh and if ya feeling the track, it’s called Street Envy and is a free download from our downloads page.

don’t forget to check out Rhudeisland Records for the hottest instrumentals that’ll get you heard!

Drum Patterns

In a recent post we talked about four classic drum patterns that you will find all throughout hip hop.  Here we break them down and show how you would sequence patterns in a drum editor such as IDrum, Ultrabeat (Logic’s drum machine) or your drum machine/software of choice

The images below are snapshots of drum patterns sequenced in IDrum.  Copy the same patterns in your program to get the same beats:

The One Two Drum Pattern

This is the basic, kick-hat-snare-kick-hat-snare.  Of course in this example there are hats that play at the same time as the kicks and snares.  You can simplify it and only have the hats in between the kick and the snare.  Mix it up and try different variations.

The Double Kick

This is the same as the One Two only a second kick is added.  The Double Kick typically gives a more aggressive feel to the beat.

The Double Kick Offset

Similar to the Double Kick, except the third kick is offset just prior to where it would be in the Double Kick.  Still gives the aggressive feel of the Double Kick, but mixes it up a bit to add some flavor.

The 2-3 Kick

This is similar to the Double Kick but adds another kick right before the third kick.  Again, adds more to the beat and can be used in a variety of tracks.  A key point here is you usually want that extra kick to play a little softer than the other kicks.  This gets to the the human feel of drums which we’ll cover in another post.