Hello!
Before I explain what the title means I want to clarify to you all that I am by no means an experienced producer. I have been producing for fun for several years now, not with the goal of becoming the next Skrillex, but simply as a hobby because I enjoy making music. During that time I've been experimenting with sound and this is an idea that I came across last night listening to Noisia - Outer Edges (highly recommend, really unique DNB Album).
Title Explained
So I am going to explain a process that I started experimenting with that I think would be helpful to lots of producers. It is a very subtle effect, but when applied correctly it can surely add the appropriate amount of tension to a build up.
The idea is the following: creating a separate snare opposite of the one you would use for the basic beat of the track, and during a build-up, using a phaser that slowly increases the pitch of the snare adding tension to the mix. It gives the snare a tone that increases sort of like a basic super-saw riser for these moments before a drop or breakdown.
Like I said it's a very subtle effect but is less about actually hearing it and more about just being there. I mean of course how you mix this will be completely up to you, but it sounded best to me when it was more on the back-burner of the mix as opposed to front and center spotlight.
Why Phasers and not a simple pitch-correction software? I mean if you have a pitch correction software that doesn't sound like shit when you pitch shift the drums then by all means go for it, but the ones I use just do not sound as good as I would have liked personally.
Step 1: Setting up the Bus
Buses are cool and super helpful, so I suggest setting up a bus to save CPU and time.
On the bus all you will need is an EQ acting as a HP filter, a phaser (or phasers, but we will get to that later), and a compressor. Have the compressor act as a side-chain to the main snare so that the beat can still punch through this rising effect. For a phaser I am using the fantastic Melda Plugins Phaser. It's completely free to get along with a large amount of other free Melda plugins which recommend (you can find the phaser here).
Step 2: The Snare
For a snare you will need a single synth (for Logic Pro 9 I use the Ultrabeat, however you can really use any synth that has a white noise generator along side a synth oscillator. Massive would work well for this) and an audio track for your sampled snare. How you sample the snare is up to you, but I recommend a snare with a lot of distortion, high frequency, and a fast attack and short decay. It doesn't absolutely need this however as the synth will be making up any lost high frequencies in the snare regardless, and you can always use an enveloper afterwards to fix how the snare punches. Send both the synth track and the audio track to the same bus mentioned before.
The synth snare is important to this toned snare riser. Have the volume envelope give a 0ms attack and short decay and no release or sustain (like around 200ms in length total, but this depends on the tempo of your song). Set up a second envelope with an even shorter decay (I use around 30ms for an example). (Both envelopes should look as if, on graphing paper, they have a "negative slope," with a slight curve to it).
Now use the synth to generate some white noise (it should sound like a stab of white noise - don't make it too loud however). Now set up a synth oscillator to generate a sin wave, and use the second shorter envelope we created to modulate the sin wave between square sound and a sin sound. You can fiddle around with this, but essentially it should sound like a stab that progresses from a square wave to a sin wave (mostly sounding square however!). How you do this depends on the synth you are using, but for Massive and Ultrabeat there are designated parameters or wavetables that allow you to do exactly this.
Also, use the second envelope to modulate the note that the square/sin wav is playing by about an octave or two or three. (Note: if you are using Ultrabeat, tune the square/sin wave to the root note of the key of the track. If your track is in the key of Fminor, tune it to a lower F like 174.6hz. Otherwise simply play the note of the track for a synth like Massive).
The end result of the synth snare should be just a basic note-warped tone with white noise fluffing the upper end. Fool around with the volumes of both to see how it sounds and try to match the length of this synth snare with your sampled snare (similar ASDR).
With EQing, generally I keep the sampled snare more focused on upper frequencies with some mids, while the synth snare acting more as a mid to low mids (never in the bass area) to add a sort of meat to the snare.
Part 3: the Annoying Phaser Part
So your Snare is set up. If you want you can stereo widen it however you want, maybe set up another snare with the exact same effects and pan each differently. That's up to you, but now we're getting to the use of the phaser.
So Melda's phaser lets you choose two frequencies that the phaser sort of "filters" between, warping all the frequencies at a speed that you choose (which for Melda allows you to choose BPM and set it to 1/4, 1/2, or full bar lengths. I recommend using something shorter like 1/4, 1/8, or 1/16 as the tone that we'll produce sometimes seems to be more audible this way.)
Now, this is the key part: THE TWO FREQUENCIES YOU CHOOSE IN THE PHASER ARE WHAT WILL BE THE "NOTE" OF YOUR SNARE. If you chose the frequency 554.37 for instance, and typed that into both frequency options in the Medla Phaser, it would give your snare a slight tone of C#. With playing the C# on your synth snare, you may not start to hear the tonality of the snare much, but I assure you it is there.
Now, the rising part.
There's two ways to do this, and it really comes down to preference. Do you want your rising tones to sound very exact as specific note wise (F... F#... G... G# etc.)? Or do you want it to just progressively raise in tone (F, F.10, F.20, F.30, F.40,... F.90, F#, F#.10,... it basically includes all of the sounds "between notes").
Basically, if you want to give your snare more of a tonal sound, you will need to set up several Phasers on your Riser Snare bus so you can submit the specific frequency for each note into each one, and take turns bypassing each one. For instance:
- First Phaser tuned to frequency G,
- Second Phaser tuned to frequency G#
- Third Phaser tuned to frequency A...
- ...Eighth Phaser tuned to frequency D
Then, bypass all of them except the phaser set as the root note of the track, and then when you want to start rising, bypass the first phaser and allow the signal for the second, then after a bit bypass that phaser and allow the signal for the third etc., eventually reaching the final 8th phaser (I use the 8th phaser because it creates a perfect fifth to the root note of the track. D is the 5th of G and when going from the note of D to G it sounds "final" or "complete" from a Music Theory sense). Along side this, on the synth snare, play the correct note that you are currently running through the phaser. For instance if the phaser is playing a G#, have the synth play G#. Then when it progresses to A, switch it to A. Etc. There's probably a much easier way of doing this but like I said I started fooling around with this idea last night and haven't had much time to perfect it.
The easier and more chaotic way is to use Automation and simply have the tone frequency on the Phaser rise over time. This saves some CPU by not needing 8 or so Phasers, but you'll have to spend some time automating the volume on the Synth Snare as well and have the tone for both the Phaser and the Synth match up correctly (or not if you don't want to). This doesn't sound as good personally.
If you have questions or concerns about any of this, or confused about the way I described things or said anything please feel free to ask me and I will gladly explain. The end result, like I said, sounds much better in the background of a mix. It's not meant to be a sort of front line Big Room House Riser Snare, but maybe more along the lines of a background DNB snare that you might even want to Lowpass just a little depending on the snare you have. I shared this information with you all to see if any of you had any feedback or had delved in this direction before at all and had come up with any results that were possibly more refined than mine.
Thank you for reading this huge wall of text.
TLDR: Use Phaser to tune your drums, then modulate tuning
Submitted November 01, 2016 at 12:09PM by GiraffeNoises https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/5ajl4d/using_phasers_to_tune_your_drums_as_a_riser_in_a/?utm_source=ifttt