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Cool textures and movements - as is usual with your music.

Just curious and I know it's not par for your genre, but have you ever tried using real acoustic kick and snare samples or leaving out the kick and snare sounds in your tunes? Maybe you have and I've missed it.

Saz wrote:Cool textures and movements - as is usual with your music.
Just curious and I know it's not par for your genre, but have you ever tried using real acoustic kick and snare samples or leaving out the kick and snare sounds in your tunes? Maybe you have and I've missed it.

Thanks so much for listening and commenting, Saz. I do actually sometimes use real acoustic snare samples, but they are usually mixed in with a variety of other snare samples, many of which are totally unrealistic. I like that effect. I typically use 2 or more different snare drum sounds to get more variety happening. My recent tunes have been less busy though, in recent months. It's funny that you should also ask about acoustic kick drum samples also. I NEVER use acoustic kick drum samples; it's almost a rule. They just sound a lot weaker to me than synth kicks and are much harder to tweak to sound good. I do like how they sound tonally, but in terms of impact, I can never get them to kick hard enough so I just gave up on them altogether. I know that acoustic kicks can sound good, like in Hella Good, by No Doubt... I just don't know how to get them to sound that way, and I don't have any sample CD's of that either.

About leaving out the kicks and snares... that's an idea I've toyed around with a little bit. It's really easy to make a snare sound that is way too overbearing, and I make that mistake sometimes. And as I'm mixing sometimes the group I'm testing without drums sounds better that with drums. I think that the overall sound quality could go up without drums because drums take up so much dynamic range and all that fuss, especially cymbals. I know I've done some tunes without snares and many without hi hats and cymbals. But unfortunately, since my SoundClick account died, I don't have any of those online anymore. One thing I almost never use is crash cymbals. I think I used them twice on just one tune out of about 300.

I think in some of my new tunes coming up I may experiement with using scaled down percussion. I want to get into making tunes that are more like movie soundtracks. I'm already storing up some homemade sound effects from a field recorder... but I don't have the actual song structures happening yet.

Thanks for you curiousity in this. Your comments give me new ideas for new future tunes. Thanks again

Thanks for the insight into your process, Apophenia.

Just listened to Hella Good and that kick is pretty cool. Sounds like it had plenty of blankets in it and was smashed with a just little bit of a slightly open hihat hit keyed in.

Looking forward to hearing your music with scaled down percussion. It's not so much the other percussion elements, but the kick and snare that I find myself trying to "listen through" sometimes to appreciate the movements you have going on. World/ethnic percussion elements would serve well I think, but I hear you about crashes.