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.
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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Here’s a short mix with some new music we’ve been working on lately.
1. Chocolate Puma feat. Colonel Red – Back Home (Defected)
Our forthcoming single on Defected, featuring the mighty Colonel Red.
2. Robert Owens – Deep Down (Underground Collective)
We got the chance to remix one of our heroes, Robert Owens.
3. Martin Accorsi feat. Sarah Kühne – Soul Jack (Stealth Records)
We did this remix voor Roger Sanchez‘ Stealth Records.
4. Zki & Dobre – Disco Sucks (Pssst Music)
Yes, that’s us. Coming up on our own imprint, Pssst Music.
Meanwhile, In The Chocolate Puma Studio… (lofi preview) by Chocolate Puma
