How I Get Those Nasty, Dirty Drum Sounds 💩🥁

So yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine about what I do to get drums to sound a little bit more nasty, a little bit more gritty. That's what we're going to be talking about today.

As I was preparing for this video, I was going through a couple of the things that I thought that I did - that I ended up not doing - and it kind of surprised me. But before we get to those things, let's just start with just a few of the elements that help create the type of nasty and gritty drum sounds that I like to hear.

I'm going to play a section of the song so you can kind of hear it in context and then we'll break down some of the things that I did for this. So here we go.

[Music Playing]

Okay. So one of the first things that I did is I put a trigger on my bass drum. So here's what the bass drum sounded like before I did any sound replacement. And that's what trigger is - trigger is a sound replacer for drums. So this is what the bass drum sounds like before.

[Music Playing]

So what I did, just to make things easy, I pulled up trigger, so I'm making it active now. And then what it does is it just reads the "wave form" of whatever you are feeding into it and then it replaces it with whatever sound that you want. So I just go to my browser and I just picked, (I don't even know where I got this), this one specific library from, this is from "That Sound" (https://www.iwantthatsound.com/) is the name of the library. But yeah, this one's called bottoms kick and then fuzzy kick and Subi kicks. I feel like I picked and choose from different places to create this one. And so this is what it sounds like now.

[Music Playing]

So it's definitely a bass drum with more grit and and more room to it. The next thing - this is what my snare drum sounded like.

[Music Playing]

And so what I did is I just duplicated it. I only recorded it on the top, so I just duplicated it. And I also put an incidence of Trigger on it. These are big beauty, big and dry and room. This is a Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum.

So this is what it sounds like. Oh - and what I did is, unlike the bass drum, I didn't completely replace the sound. I still kept my original snare, but I brought in this extra kind of Trigger sound-replaced snare. So now there's kind of two going at the same time - I just blended them together.

[Music Playing]

Because I still liked a bit of the attack that I had from my original snare. Sometimes when you sound replace drums that you've got, they can almost sound too perfect. A lot of times these samples have been recorded in really nice studios with great gear and they've been dialed in super perfect. You know? But I don't necessarily like that on every song that I do, so I'll still keep my original drums in there sometimes.

So that's what I do to get my kick and snare happening. So here it is, the kick and snare.

[Music Playing]

And what I was surprised about is I actually thought that I had put a little bit of distortion on my kicks and snares, but really I just used the sound replaced samples to bring in a bit of that grit. I just looked for the drums that already had a bit of that distortion, a bit of that dirtiness already built into it. But what I do sometimes here - is I will create an aux track, which is what I did right down here. I called this 'distortion effects' or 'dist FX' and I put a "Devil-Loc" plugin from Soundtoys (https://www.soundtoys.com/) and this is where I can blend in some of the distortion into the overall drum sound. I've got it sitting here on my drum sub and so all of my drums are feeding into this drum sub right here. And then I'm able to use this as an effects bus to just blend in a bit of the distortion that I have here on this track. So without it, this is what the entire drum set sounds like. Actually, let me just solo the drums so we can hear what we're dealing with. So these are the drums without any of the distortion.

[Music Playing]

And then with this distortion plug in, I'll unmute that. I've just put it a little bit right here. This is what it sounds like now:

[Music Playing].

It's probably not a huge difference. I'll keep it going, but I'll toggle the mute on and off. It's not a big difference, but for what I needed for this song, I just wanted just a little bit more. So here's with it off and then I'll put it back on.

[Music Playing].

So here I'm going to increase the level of distortion so you can really hear the drastic difference it can make. So here it is - just a little bit.

[Music Playing]

So as it got more and more, you could totally hear why I didn't keep it up there all the time because they can really get out of control with this Soundtoys Devil-Loc plugin. It's a nasty little booger! But it is one of my favorite little boogers! Do people have favorite boogers, I don't know. I do!

So that's it! That's, the quick and dirty of what I reach for when I'm going for quick and dirty drums.

xxx - Josh