Hey folks
Im trying to get some really funky drums like dj dan, mike balance, whitenoize even what used to be really popular back in the mid 00s but I don't really know how to get them to sound full.
These guys today make it sound like they are just using vengeance essential house loops but im pretty sure they are not. When I program kick snare hats perc it just sounds like stripped down deep house.
Ive layered loops on top and still have never been quite happy.
Ive looked at the sonic academy how to make funky house and that seems like a good starting point but still way off the end result that im looking for.

can anyone help im sure its pretty simple just need some direction.
advice on what sample packs to be looking at as well would be nice.

 

So first you would probably need a good original library of raw drums materials.

Battery 4 is a great sample library and plugin that has original, unprocessed drums and percussion that you could layer and process to create interesting drums.

Welcome to the exciting world of original drum programming! *yes*

Just this particular aspect will take a year to master, unless you want to use already made loops which you could find anywhere.

Start by learning how to make your own kick drum. You don't necessarily need to make them from scratch. Good kick drums is all about layering different parts of
anything together. But first, you must consider and understand the fundamentals of what makes a kick drums kick.

The world of kick drums is probably the weirdest shit you would ever come across...seriously...it's weird. It's basically this weird thumping thing that somehow fills up the mid and low of a track that makes the speakers shake and pound and destroy the ears of the elderly...

Kick drum is basically an element with very tight attack. This tight attack comes from a glide between the top end of a kick drum and the bottom end (the lows and the highs of the kick). This glide can only be achieved with a solid mid range. The mid range connects the top and bottom parts of the attack time of the kick drum which is what gives it a thumping sound.

So to create a kick drum, you need 3 parts. A low kick (can be an 808), a mid range kick(can be an acoustic real kick), and a high end (could be any little tiny transient with a high end, such as a little part of a rimshot)

Once you have gathered these elements together you have created a solid kick. To make them work, requires even further knowledge of engineering fundamentals(but this is a topic that drags on so we won't go further for now)

Now that you have a kick drum. Place them accordingly the way you want it. Funky House is 4/4 so place them in a 4/4 fashion.

Now for the funky percussion:

So this again requires you to have a good raw and unprocessed library, such asBattery 4 by Native Instruments. Find some percussive elements such as shakers, hihats, hats, snappy claps, metallic percs, tambourines, toms, woods, hand drums etc...and mix them together and see if you can create some percussive loops.

There is also fundamental knowledge on how to do this properly as well without it sounding like shit. However, being able to apply these fundamentals requires you to spend alot of time just playing around with drums and practicing how to make good percussive elements.

I wont go into too much detail into percussive fundamentals but I will give you a run-down of them in general so you may have some food for thought.

MIXING - You must know how to mix the individual percussion loops and elements together so they may work. This means you need to know how to seperate what needs to be seperated, and what needs to be kept together.

Usually funky house and other types of house requires you to seperate your drums in between Kicks, Claps, Hats, HiHats and a Percussive Loop. This is at it's most basic and you can be more complex than that. And even within the percussive loop that you create, you need to know how to mix the elements within that loop together.

SWING - ALOT of people know swing, but they don't know how to apply swing. The worst thing you could do, is place one massive swing on ALL your drums. DO NOT DO THAT, you will destroy the loop altogether. This is why seperating your elements is important. Maybe only add swing to the hats, or maybe just the loops. In order to do that you need to keep the loops seperate from the hihats etc... the more you seperate your parts, the better control you have in the initial mix...

This comes point to an advanced skill where you don't necessarily need to create a loop, you can seperate the loop if you want into it's individual parts and just swing certain elements...

PROCESSING - Process your drums, EQ them, compress them, add some FX like reverb, distortion, Chorus to them. But like SWING, don't just smash the effect on all the drums, seperate them and only add them to certain elements...

All of this will help make your drums more sophisticated and less generic. But knowing these skills isn't enough...you need to practice and it all takes time.

Trust me if it was easy we would all be inflating the world of Funky House right now...

 

Great thanks for these replies
I hadn't thought of just getting completely raw samples and then essentially making my own disco perc loops (makes perfect sense though) I had always just used the pre-processed sample packs stuff.
Thanks for the tips on mixing I think I need to revisit what fx and how im using them.
im noticing that a lot of the sounds are over lapping like its never kick pause hat pause kick, its more likely the hat starts before the kick ends which I assume has to do with placement and swing.
I think your right Derp practice is going to be my best friend here.
Does anyone have any good tutorials/books etc that cover this in more depth it was such a massive genre.

Thanks again guys

 

oooo that looks like an excellent one that goes in further depth with all the things that I've mentioned...might even give it a try myself in order to refresh my memory...

although I would like to add that not everything on that site should be considered, because some of the tutorial series on that site may formularise music production. It is also important to leave your production creativity to chance while backing it up with fundamental knowledge that you apply to what you have discovered. Following the rules of a formula will only let you create typical music that everyone else is doing...

the true pro discovers and formulates their own techniques and ideas, with consideration to both artistic skill and technical knowledge, intelligently mixing the two together to create solid pieces of work. The artistic aspect should back up the technical aspect, and the technical aspect should back up the artistic aspect, this is what creates a natural piece without being bound by anything that's out there...

 

I hate the fact that they call it dance music though...

it is so stupid, don't you think? The knowledge they teach or can teach could be applied to production in general unbound by genres. If they called it something like,
'Music Production Tutorials', they could have had a much more wider audience, but instead they decided to forumlarise there tutorials in order to buy into a market that's become oversaturated and made it specific for those who want to create dance music, being ignorant of the fact that the people who watch these tutorials could use these techniques for themselves rather than for some dying platform.

But that's not to say they aren't good tutorials, they are probably great, but it's also important to direct that knowledge to people in a way where they can use it intuitively rather than commercially...

It's like educating someone about the good and bad of something, and then directing them towards doing good and not bad, or else if you direct that knowledge the wrong way, they can use it to do more harm...