Why keep acoustic and electronic drum sounds separate, when you can bring them together for the best of both sonic worlds? Here are a variety of techniques for doing just that…
Switch kits mid-song
Let’s start with perhaps the most straightforward way to hybridise a drum track: switching between complete acoustic and electronic kits to dramatically change the feel of a song as it progresses. You might run a delicate TR-808 percussion line through the verse, say, then switch to an all-out rock kit for the chorus; or drop down from a big EDM-style setup to a live breakbeat for the build-up in a house track. You’ll need to be on point with the production of your acoustic kit sounds, though, as the polish and dynamic heft of synthesised beats can make them sound anaemic in comparison if they’re not appropriately processed.
Combine discrete acoustic and electronic sounds
Experiment with different combinations of drum and cymbal sounds within your drum kit: an acoustic kick and toms alongside a synthesised snare and hi-hats, for example. The musical genre in which you’re writing might have particular implications here – you won’t want to compromise the power and low-end presence of the kick drum in dance music, most importantly – and care needs to be taken to ensure that your elements all come together without sounding too disparate, but EQ, bus compression and other group processing can help in that department.
Depending on your DAW, this technique will either entail splitting your MIDI drum parts across multiple tracks or routing notes from a single track to as many instruments as are required. And thanks to drum replacement plugins such as Slate Digital Trigger 2 and Wave Machine Labs Drumagog 5, it’s even possible to change drum types within audio tracks.
Create truly hybrid drum sounds
Take the previous tip up a level by merging the two types within individual kit pieces. Bolstering lacklustre kick drums with empowering electronic layers is a well established corrective engineering technique, and stacking acoustic snares with electronic claps is de rigueur in house and techno; but just working a bit of white noise into a hi-hat or snare line, or blending synthesised and live toms can really lift a drum track. Again, how this is set up will depend on the specifications of your DAW, but all of them will enable morphing between acoustic and electronic layers using velocity layering or automation, which brings another creative angle into play. Try an expressive acoustic snare for low-velocity ghost notes, dovetailing with a massive electronic stack for the main hits, for example.
Live performance meets programming
Mixing up acoustic and electronic sounds is one thing, but how about also combining the human feel of a live performance with the metronomic timing of a drum machine? Start by programming a rigidly quantised pattern on any one of the three main drum kit elements – kick, snare or hi-hats – in your drum machine, then record the other two live on your MIDI keyboard or pad controller, triggering further electronic and/or sampled acoustic sounds. We’d suggest that the hi-hats are the obvious choice for the drum machine part, as they’re the least upfront, but live hats can work well over a solid four-to-the-floor kick drum and/or snare backbeat, as long as the performance is relatively tight. You don’t have to use a drum machine, either, of course: try simply quantising one of the three elements in a completely live MIDI performance.
Background loops
If your programmed beat is sounding overly sparse and/or lacking in groove, one quick fix is to mix in a sampled live drum loop, chosen with the sound and feel of the track in mind – dry and funky for dance music, organic and roomy for singer-songwriter pop, etc. It could be high-pass filtered to provide just an enlivening top layer, filling the gaps in the programmed part with hi-hats and snare ghost notes, or kept full-frequency, so as to also reinforce or underpin the kick and snare hits. Either way, you’ll be amazed at the difference even a very low-level loop can make to the vibe of a drum track.
Ghost reverb
For a more subtle approach to fusing ’real’ and synthetic drum sounds, fire up a separate kit of each type, then layer one of them with a reverb signal generated by the other playing the exact same beat – or a completely different one! The ’reverb’ kit needs to remain muted so that you only hear the 100%-wet effect and none of the dry signal, but you can either run it in real time, sending to the reverb bus pre-fader, or render the reverb to an audio track once you’ve got it set up to your liking. And if you go for two radically dissimilar beats, key the sidechain input of a compressor on the reverb channel off the main drums to maintain their punch and clarity.
Mid-side mixing
As well as blending hybrid drum sounds through level mixing, exploitation of the stereo panorama opens up opportunities for unifying electronic and real-world sources in interesting ways. Using mid-side widening/narrowing plugins, you can easily separate the two within the stereo field so that your electronic parts slam down the middle, while their acoustic counterparts are pushed out to the sides, or vice-versa – or, indeed, any combination of individual element placements. Depending on the drums in question and how far you push the processing, this can yield anything from strange ambiences around the central instruments to an overt spreading effect.
How do you meld your sampled and synthesised drums? Let us know in the comments.