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For our upcoming compilation Pssst Music Assorti 1 we went up to our studio’s attic in search for some old master tapes. Doing so, we stumbled upon some old studio equipment we have been using over the years.
Track playing: Chocolate Puma – The Wall Between Us
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How we sample these days
Back in the days we would go through our extensive record collection, look for interesting breaks or drum sounds, press sample on our Roland W30 sampler, chop it up by hand and make beats. Nowadays things have slightly changed for us. Soft samplers became very complicated with millions of possibilities. We’re not limited to our own old records anymore, and we don’t have to go crate digging to find real gems. We sample stuff we find on the internet. Now, finding samples and searching the internet is really fun, but for us, dealing with complicated soft samplers that look like spaceship controls isn’t.
The Samples
Gay Country & Western from the fifties, Awesome tapes from Africa, Disco from the early eighties, Russian Horror New-wave, Dutch Folksongs. You can all find it on music blogs. You really have to take your time to find the cool blogs, but once you have found the real gems, they are a great daily source for all your sample needs. Of course we’re not promoting copyright infringement, but a cowbell played by a German hippie does sound way cooler than your standard Logic percussion. And no, we’re not giving away which blogs we visit!
Snapper
Now, say we’ve downloaded this mp3 with the ultimate bongo break. How do we cut this break out and convert it into WAV so our sampler can handle it? Bring on Snapper. Snapper is a smart little application for Mac that will play any audio in your finder and show it as a waveform. Then you can select the part you want to use and convert it into WAV. It even gives you the possibility to place your selection directly on the cursor of your favorite DAW.
Chopping it up
We always loved chopping up samples. It’s a great way of re-using old records and turn them into something of your own. We started out with chopping them up by hand, then came Recycle and now we use FXpansion’s GURU (and its successor ‘Geist’) .
What is great about GURU is that it’s especially designed for drums, it’s simple, and it chops up your samples with an algorithm unknown to man. It means that it will kind of unpredictably choose which part of the sample goes to one of the 16 pads. The fun is that you can rediscover your record collection as GURU may chop and highlight parts you would never think of.
Now, open GURU, choose ‘Loops’ in the browser, make sure it says ‘Slice’ & ‘Auto’. Select the piece of WAV you just cut out with Snapper and GURU will instantly chop up the sample and place the individual parts on the pads. Adjust with the ‘Sensitivity’ slider or with ‘Pad Edit’. Make beats, have fun. Easy.
*this article was published in issue 235 of Future Music.
Music software developers FXpansion are known for their excellent drum plug-in GURU. We love GURU, and we just started using its rather excellent successor GEIST. So FXpansion thought it was the right moment to sit down with us and ask us some questions.
FX – How did the collaboration of DJ Zki & Dobre aka Chocolate Puma first come about and what’s kept you together all these years?
Z&D – We met around 1991 at a radio station where Zki was doing his show. He played me a demo of a track he was working on, and I instantly had some ideas about it. So we hooked up and we soon discovered that putting us in a room with equipment and crazy ideas worked very well indeed. Around the same period we also made a new jingle for his radio show which soon became one of our biggest hits, Give It Up by The Good Men. What kept us together is the mutual respect we have for each other. We both have our strange little things, and we are quite different people, but despite these differences we have always gone in the same direction in how we look at music, fashion or art.
FX – As producers you’ve worked under a number of different guises, why all the different guises?
Z&D – It was just a different time back then. For us it just made sense to use all these aliases, partly because, despite the huge success, we liked it to be underground and let the music speak for itself. But also because musically we were all over the place and we needed all these different projects. Now times have changed and we narrowed it down to just one, Chocolate Puma.
FX – Typically what roles do you play when creating a DJ Zki & Dobre production?
Z&D – Basically it’s me behind the controls and Zki giving input. And after all this time making music together we don’t have to use many words anymore to express how we feel about a sound or a drum. It became such a natural process.
FX – Tell us a secret about the way you make music?
Z&D – I think we’re very open for any musical style and sounds. We always keep our ears open for the next generation, as you can learn a lot and get lots of inspiration from young kids making the next big thing. That makes us work harder, as we don’t want these kiddos to beat us at our own game, haha.
FX – What impact have advancements in music technology had upon your production technique?
Z&D – We see it as a constant evolution. Nowadays we completely work ‘in the box’, but we’re still using old school mixing techniques we learned over the years, while taking full advantage of all the possibilities within a DAW. And those possibilities are endless, so you can really lose yourself going deep into details and forget the important stuff, but other than that we love it.
FX – What FXpansion products do you own and how do you use them?
Z&D – We own GURU and we use it in every production. It’s basically the core of our beats, and beats are the most important thing in our tracks. GURU is great, because it’s fast and simple. We also use samplers like Kontakt, but we feel that all the possibilities are a bit too much for us when it comes to laying down beats. We like to work fast, especially with beats, and GURU is just perfect for that.
FX – Do you have any GURU tips or tricks you would like to share?
Z&D – We used to chop up samples with Recycle, but the fun thing with GURU is that it’s kind of unpredictable in the way it slices your samples. So for us it was quite surprising to discover new things in a lot of our old records and samples we’ve already gone through over the years. So, go back to your record collection and your sample library, throw it in GURU and see what happens. Great fun.
FX – What do you do to entertain yourself when you are on tour?
Z&D – If we’re not in a plane reading a book, making a bootleg on our laptop or just feeling miserable of the few hours of (or no) sleep, then we just love to visit all these different countries. I mean, we’ve just been to Azerbaijan, not really a destination you would choose for your holiday, but how cool is it to visit a place like that?
FX – Where do you see yourself in ten years time in terms of making music?
Z&D – Well, we’re making records now for almost 20 years, and we couldn’t imagine all the things that have happened to us. But I think we will still be trying to make the best record we can.
Since this interview took place Zki & Dobre have been getting down with Geist (GURU’s successor) and find it to be even faster and more intuitive than GURU! :)
We use a lot of tracks for our productions. And with a lot of tracks things can get very busy. Sonically but also visually. A great way of fine-tuning your mix, but also of enhancing your workflow is to introduce an extra stage into your mix-down. So instead of routing our tracks directly into our main output, we always route them to a bus channel. This way we can group all different elements into sub-groups. Continue Reading →
Future Music is a magazine for producer geeks like us. We’ve been reading it for years now, so it was quite cool when the FM guys came by to our studio to find out how we do things.
Now, producing music is one thing, explaining how to do it is another!
Anyway, this edition of Future Music Magazine, including a shiny DVD, is on sale now. Hope you like!
We all love our daily dose of compression, and we know some amongst you can’t resist smacking the hell out of a signal. That’s cool, but the downside might be that you lose a lot of the dynamics and transients, and that your drumloops, synths, or even your whole track ends up sounding squashed and lifeless.
So, imagine you’ve got this really cool drumloop with hard hitting snare drums and really punchy attacks on the kick drum, but there’s also al kinds of cool noises and ghost notes in the background that you want to bring forward in the mix. But you don’t want to lose the punch!
Or you want to glue sounds together without messing with the peaks.
Or add that nice character that comes with this emulation of a vintage tube compressor without flattening the loud parts.
Sometimes we record some live percussion, which might have both great attacks from hands hitting a piece of drum skin, and nice soft undertones and noise at the same time that you really want to make more audible.
This is where parallel compression comes in. It’s a technique we use A LOT. Even back in the days, when we were still mixing on our analog mixing desk and Drawmer and Focusrite hardware compressors, we used parallel compression in practically every song.
Now what is it then?
Wiki says: Parallel compression, also known as New York compression, is a dynamic range compression technique used in sound recording and mixing. Parallel compression, a form of upward compression, is achieved by mixing an unprocessed ‘dry’, or lightly compressed, signal with a heavily compressed version of the same signal. Rather than bringing down the highest peaks for the purpose of dynamic range reduction, it accomplishes the same end by bringing up the softest sounds, adding audible detail.
So by combining a dry uncompressed signal together with a compressed version you get that nice squashy/characteristic/pumping sound of compression AND the impact, attacks and dynamics of an uncompressed signal.
Now, how do you use it?
If you’re a Logic user and using the standard Logic compressor it’s fairly straightforward.
- Just put a compressor on a channel, fool around with threshold, ratio and other knobs and squash it!
- Then go to the bottom lefthand corner and click the triangle to unfold this menu with extra parameters.
- At the bottom you will see a slider called ‘Mix’. If you pull the slider to the left you’re mixing the dry signal in.
Also, a lot of third party plug-in compressors have some kind of dry/wet slider, like one of our favourites, Fabfilter’s Pro-C.
Now, if your favourite compressor plug-in doesn’t have a dry/wet slider, don’t worry, as there are different ways of getting parallel compression.
- Put a compressor on a bus channel.
- Besides routing your signal to your main output, also send it to the bus channel using the send knob.
- Make sure you switch on any kind of latency/delay compensation, or you might get some nasty phasing problems.
or
- Make a duplicate of your uncompressed audio track
- Put a compressor on it.
Yay, you’re compressing parallel!
Now, you can use it on whatever you like. For example we always use it on our stereo bus, and very often on percussion and our drum tracks.
Audio examples:
Uncompressed signal: this sounds really static. Notice that the soft percussion hits are difficult to hear.
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Heavy compressed signal: this might sound cool, but it lacks power and dynamics
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70% uncompressed signal mixed with 30% heavy compressed signal: now we get the best of both worlds. Cool squashy sound of the compressor, soft notes are more audible, but we still retain the power and punch.
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Say you got a fat kick drum and on top of that a fat bass line. They both sound great if you solo them, but tend to clash when you play them both at the same time.
There are a few tricks to separate them. Most of the time you decide which one of the two is covering the sub frequencies, and which one is covering the higher bass frequencies. So say your kick has the most energy at 60hz and your bass line the most energy at 100hz, then you can be sure that you’re quite safe.
But what if you have trouble separating the two with just using your regular EQ? And what if you want to have a really low subby kick AND a really low subby bass line? Of course you could sidechain the bass line with a compressor. Or program your bass line, so that it doesn’t play at the same time as your kick drum.
But there’s another way: For example in our remix for ‘Mike Dunn’s Gitcho House On‘ we wanted to have both a low kick AND a sub bass line, the bass line played at the same time as the kick, and sidechaining wasn’t sufficient.
Bring on Logic’s Match EQ:
1. Put Match EQ on your bass line channel.
2. Go to the upper right hand side and choose your kick drum channel at the Side Chain dropdown menu.
3. Click ‘Template Learn’, press play and let Match EQ learn the characteristics of your kick.
4. Press stop, set your Side Chain to ‘None’.
5. Click ‘Current Learn’, press play and let Match EQ learn the characteristics of your bass line.
6. Click ‘Material Match’.
7. Set ‘Phase’ to ‘Minimal’ (especially with low frequencies this is important, if you use it to separate higher sounds, use ‘Linear’)
8. Slide ‘Apply’ to a minimal value (say -20% or something).
9. Use ‘Smoothing’ to fine tune.
10. Use Fade Extremes to cancel out frequencies you don’t want to be affected (click the triangle in the lower left hand corner to unfold).
Presto, you just separated your bass line from your kick drum!
Now you can also use this method to separate strings from a vocal. Or if you use a positive value at step 8, to match one sound to another sound.
