Percussion tuning, toning and timing

Had a good beatmaking session last night. Really good. A couple of hours after I started, I had a polished eight-bar loop that had my head bobbing and my hands drumming like a sixth-grader's on my knees, my thighs, my tabletop, finally getting me off the couch, bopping around in my underwear as far from my 307 as my headphone cable would let me go. Still sounded great this morning; listening to it again (and again) made me late for work, but it was totally worth it. ...Yeah.

Thinking about it en route to the dayjob, I realized that what allowed me to get to this point was what I'd been doing the previous few nights: Accumulating a good set of percussion tones in a User Rhythm Set, and then tweaking each one so that they all go together -- i.e., when played as a group they sound like music, not just a bunch of individually awesome yet poorly matched noises.

Now this task took a lot of time and patience, and doing it was not fun in and of itself. But it was absolutely critical to making me enjoy what I heard both while composing and afterward. And that has to happen if an audience is ever going to enjoy it.

So for those of you who have been making EM for years, this may be old hat, but it's worth repeating something I learned years ago:

A good drum part is a complete composition in itself. It has more than just good rhythm -- it has good melody and harmony too.

Listen to any great techno composer, someone who can combine just four or five drum tones and still somehow make you enjoy listening to them loop for minutes on end. Some of the reasons this magic happens? Each drum hit 1) has a pitch that harmonizes with the others, 2) has a tone and volume that make it heard clearly but in balance with the others (i.e. it doesn't overpower), and 3) takes up just the right amount of time and space...it fills up some air but lets the rest of the pattern breathe.

Much of achieving this balance is an art that can't be quantified. But one key to controlling your art is by tweaking each and every tone you use, which on the 307 means creating and fine-tuning a User Rhythm Set. Once you've gathered your drum tones, the number of parameters available for fine-tuning them (pp. 105-112 in the manual) is a bit overwhelming, but you can do a lot with these four:

-Coarse tune: Each +/-1 you change it adjusts the pitch by a semitone, or the difference between two adjacent keys on the piano. If you know even a little about harmony, you can tune your percussion hits so they don't clash with one another or the synths. (Only mess with Fine tune if you get close but can't quite tune a drum hit perfectly.)
-Filter type and cutoff: Allows you to adjust how bright a drum tone is. Using an LPF with a cutoff of 80 or higher will usually give you a darker sound, for example. Filters can help to minimize those frequencies/overtones that can annoy the ears over time.
-Amp envelope time: Gives you control over how long a drum tone lasts. Cranking these down appropriately can turn a cymbal crash into, say, a short click.
-Amp tone level: Gives you far greater control over the tone's volume than you get through the Wave/Key: Gain parameter alone, which only gives you four choices (-6, 0, +6, +12 dB). Experiment with adjusting both parameters for a better mix/balance.

If these ideas seem relatively new to you, first get comfortable with what these parameters do, then try this experiment:

Take a cool but simple two- to four-bar percussion loop -- one that uses only 4-5 drum tones and preferably no distracting synths -- from a track you like. Copy it into your sampler/looper (if you have one) or keep your player's rewind button handy so you can listen to it and your 307 simultaneously. Now: How would you go about reproducing this loop on your 307? What drum tones would you bring into a User Kit in order to remake it? If the drum tones aren't quite the same as the loop's, how would you adjust them?

...I find that not only is it great practice and ear training to see how close I can get, but the beauty of it is that I rarely remake that loop exactly. I learn a lot, and I also end up with a loop and balanced set of percussion tones I can recast as I like for use in my own tracks.