Programming, arranging and mixing drums for dance music can be an intimidating prospect for the music production newcomer looking to capture the hyper-polished sounds of today’s top artists. But don’t stress – with these core concepts and techniques by your side, you’ll be blowing the club doors off in no time.
Written by EVO
Start with great sounds
An awesome dance music drum track starts with an awesome set of drum sounds, be they synthesised, sampled or a combination of the two, so make sure you’re geared up with a few reliable instrumental options. There are tons of excellent plugin drum machines and sample players on the market including Native Instruments Battery 4, Sonic Charge Microtonic, XLN Audio XO and Rob Papen Punch 2, and your DAW likely has a few perfectly workable options among its bundled plugins. And if you’re after classic Roland TR-808 and 909 sounds, while Roland’s own software emulations can obviously be taken as definitive in their authenticity, D16’s Nepheton and Drumazon are well worth checking out, too. Don’t overlook virtual acoustic drum kits such as Toontrack’s EZdrummer 3 and FXpansion’s BFD3, either, if the idea of making bespoke breakbeats appeals.
Building and maintaining a well-organised library of workhorse drum and percussion samples for use in your sample player or directly on-track (see below) is a key part of developing your own sound and style. So, whenever you make a kick, snare or hi-hat worth keeping, or stumble across a particularly ear-catching or effective one-shot in a commercial sample pack, export or copy it into your library for re-use in future projects. Indeed, many big-name producers draw on a handful of proven drum sounds – kicks, especially – for every track they make, so don’t think of this as ‘cheating’ in any way.
Layering is key
Although you can just fire up a preset kit in your plugin of choice, throw on some effects and call it a day, it’s far more rewarding on every level to make your own drum sounds from scratch by layering multiple sampled and/or synthesised sources. Blending a subby 808 kick drum tail with a punchy sampled transient is common practice in many dance styles, as is stacking handclaps on top of snares, and merging hi-hats and ride cymbals for characterful hybrids. Filters and EQ are the go-to processors for carving out interlocking frequency ranges in each layer, and offsetting layers from each other by a few milliseconds on the timeline can radically alter the weight and envelope of a ‘drum’. Compressing and EQing the layers collectively on a group channel may also be required to pull them all together as a single sonic entity.
MIDI or audio?
You may have heard conflicting opinions on whether sample-based dance music drum parts are best produced by dragging samples directly onto tracks in the arrange page or triggering them in a sampler via MIDI. Some claim that audio is the way to go for the utmost in timing tightness, while others suggest that any such temporal differences are so insignificant – if they exist at all – that the versatility of MIDI makes it the better option. In truth, each approach brings its own benefits.
Timing controversy aside, the main difference between working with audio clips across multiple tracks and moving MIDI notes around in the piano roll is that with on-track audio, what you see is literally what you get: you can line up waveforms for precise timing and layer-smearing adjustments, and edit clip volumes and fades to shape dynamics directly in the arrange page, which is much more immediate and intuitive than the abstraction of visible MIDI data triggering instruments housing the sounds themselves can ever be. The advantages of MIDI, on the other hand, are that you can freely change the sounds being triggered at any point without affecting note placement and, of course, take advantage of the many powerful tools made available by your sampler or synth – filters, envelopes, LFOs, etc.
Our advice? Use whichever method you feel most comfortable with for the track in question, but don’t ever rule either of them out.
Get your drums in tune
With the drums in electronic and dance music being rather more tonal than their equivalents in the acoustic domain, they generally (but not always) need to be tuned to the key of the track using the pitch control in your sampler or synth. The kick drum, in particular, should be tuned to the root note of the scale or the perfect fourth (five semitones above the root) or fifth (seven semitones above the root), while toms can land on the root, third and/or fifth of the scale. The snare might not require tuning if it’s more ‘noise’ than ‘note’, but if it does, again, targeting the root, perfect fourth or perfect fifth should work well.
Fly in a top loop
Once you’ve got the kick/snare/hats foundation in place, introducing a ‘top’ layer can make all the difference to the pace and high-frequency energy of any beat. A top is simply a drum or percussion loop that’s been drastically high-pass filtered to remove all the low and mid frequencies, and while you’ll find plenty of them in most dance music sample libraries these days, making your own is as simple as, well, high-pass filtering a drum or percussion loop! Don’t set the volume level of your top so high that it dominates the drums mix – even the most subtle background loop can be enough to completely transform the groove.
Keep the kick and snare in the middle
This one’s short and sweet. Unless you’re intentionally shooting for stereo strangeness, always ensure that the kick and snare drums are dead centre in the mix, with no panning or effects pulling them off to either side. Hi-hats can be a little off centre, and toms can go wherever you like (within reason), but that all-important kick/snare core has to sit in the middle of the mix, not only because the track will sound obviously ‘wrong’ otherwise, but also in order to maintain compatibility with mono club PA and other playback systems.
Glue it all together on a bus
Finally, to get your dance music drums sounding truly hard-hitting and professional, you’ll want to route the channel outputs of every element of the kit through a bus or group channel and use compression and EQ to shape their unified dynamics and frequency profile, ‘gluing’ them together into a cohesive whole. How hard to compress and drastically to EQ will boil down to the specifics of your drum sounds, and the nature and styling of the track, and if you just can’t get them to gel convincingly as a bussed group, you might need to go back and rethink some (or all) of the individual components. Comparing your drums to those of a few choice commercially released reference tracks is always a good idea at this final stage of their production.
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Programming, arranging and mixing drums for dance music can be an intimidating prospect for the music production newcomer looking to capture the hyper-polished sounds of today’s top artists. But don’t stress – with these core concepts and techniques by your side, you’ll be blowing the club doors off in no time.
Written by Adrien Perinot
Start with great sounds
An awesome dance music drum track starts with an awesome set of drum sounds, be they synthesised, sampled or a combination of the two, so make sure you’re geared up with a few reliable instrumental options. There are tons of excellent plugin drum machines and sample players on the market including Native Instruments Battery 4, Sonic Charge Microtonic, XLN Audio XO and Rob Papen Punch 2, and your DAW likely has a few perfectly workable options among its bundled plugins. And if you’re after classic Roland TR-808 and 909 sounds, while Roland’s own software emulations can obviously be taken as definitive in their authenticity, D16’s Nepheton and Drumazon are well worth checking out, too. Don’t overlook virtual acoustic drum kits such as Toontrack’s EZdrummer 3 and FXpansion’s BFD3, either, if the idea of making bespoke breakbeats appeals.
Building and maintaining a well-organised library of workhorse drum and percussion samples for use in your sample player or directly on-track (see below) is a key part of developing your own sound and style. So, whenever you make a kick, snare or hi-hat worth keeping, or stumble across a particularly ear-catching or effective one-shot in a commercial sample pack, export or copy it into your library for re-use in future projects. Indeed, many big-name producers draw on a handful of proven drum sounds – kicks, especially – for every track they make, so don’t think of this as ‘cheating’ in any way.
Layering is key
Although you can just fire up a preset kit in your plugin of choice, throw on some effects and call it a day, it’s far more rewarding on every level to make your own drum sounds from scratch by layering multiple sampled and/or synthesised sources. Blending a subby 808 kick drum tail with a punchy sampled transient is common practice in many dance styles, as is stacking handclaps on top of snares, and merging hi-hats and ride cymbals for characterful hybrids. Filters and EQ are the go-to processors for carving out interlocking frequency ranges in each layer, and offsetting layers from each other by a few milliseconds on the timeline can radically alter the weight and envelope of a ‘drum’. Compressing and EQing the layers collectively on a group channel may also be required to pull them all together as a single sonic entity.
MIDI or audio?
You may have heard conflicting opinions on whether sample-based dance music drum parts are best produced by dragging samples directly onto tracks in the arrange page or triggering them in a sampler via MIDI. Some claim that audio is the way to go for the utmost in timing tightness, while others suggest that any such temporal differences are so insignificant – if they exist at all – that the versatility of MIDI makes it the better option. In truth, each approach brings its own benefits.
Timing controversy aside, the main difference between working with audio clips across multiple tracks and moving MIDI notes around in the piano roll is that with on-track audio, what you see is literally what you get: you can line up waveforms for precise timing and layer-smearing adjustments, and edit clip volumes and fades to shape dynamics directly in the arrange page, which is much more immediate and intuitive than the abstraction of visible MIDI data triggering instruments housing the sounds themselves can ever be. The advantages of MIDI, on the other hand, are that you can freely change the sounds being triggered at any point without affecting note placement and, of course, take advantage of the many powerful tools made available by your sampler or synth – filters, envelopes, LFOs, etc.
Our advice? Use whichever method you feel most comfortable with for the track in question, but don’t ever rule either of them out.
Get your drums in tune
With the drums in electronic and dance music being rather more tonal than their equivalents in the acoustic domain, they generally (but not always) need to be tuned to the key of the track using the pitch control in your sampler or synth. The kick drum, in particular, should be tuned to the root note of the scale or the perfect fourth (five semitones above the root) or fifth (seven semitones above the root), while toms can land on the root, third and/or fifth of the scale. The snare might not require tuning if it’s more ‘noise’ than ‘note’, but if it does, again, targeting the root, perfect fourth or perfect fifth should work well.
Fly in a top loop
Once you’ve got the kick/snare/hats foundation in place, introducing a ‘top’ layer can make all the difference to the pace and high-frequency energy of any beat. A top is simply a drum or percussion loop that’s been drastically high-pass filtered to remove all the low and mid frequencies, and while you’ll find plenty of them in most dance music sample libraries these days, making your own is as simple as, well, high-pass filtering a drum or percussion loop! Don’t set the volume level of your top so high that it dominates the drums mix – even the most subtle background loop can be enough to completely transform the groove.
Keep the kick and snare in the middle
This one’s short and sweet. Unless you’re intentionally shooting for stereo strangeness, always ensure that the kick and snare drums are dead centre in the mix, with no panning or effects pulling them off to either side. Hi-hats can be a little off centre, and toms can go wherever you like (within reason), but that all-important kick/snare core has to sit in the middle of the mix, not only because the track will sound obviously ‘wrong’ otherwise, but also in order to maintain compatibility with mono club PA and other playback systems.
Glue it all together on a bus
Finally, to get your dance music drums sounding truly hard-hitting and professional, you’ll want to route the channel outputs of every element of the kit through a bus or group channel and use compression and EQ to shape their unified dynamics and frequency profile, ‘gluing’ them together into a cohesive whole. How hard to compress and drastically to EQ will boil down to the specifics of your drum sounds, and the nature and styling of the track, and if you just can’t get them to gel convincingly as a bussed group, you might need to go back and rethink some (or all) of the individual components. Comparing your drums to those of a few choice commercially released reference tracks is always a good idea at this final stage of their production.
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