Add Texture to Your Drums

Alternative approaches to drum processing have emerged in recent years. In the following tutorial, we will cover one that will add Texture to your drums.

As usual, we prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It includes most of the significant elements of a full mix. Let's take a listen to it.

Let's hear the shaker sound in solo.

The shaker lacks prominence in the overall mix, and the color could be more elaborate. Instead of using compression or EQ to fix this, we'll alter the shaker sound in another way. We will process the instrument with an instance of Texture by Devious Machines.

Texture

In essence, Texture is part effect, part synth. It makes it possible to create new layers that track the dynamics of your sound. Texture can handle a variety of incoming audio signals, but we believe it performs best when adding textures and changing the color of drums.

A drop-down menu with numerous presets is at the interface's top. In the left section, you can select the sample you want to layer over the original sound. The middle section is divided into four switchable sub-sections. The first is used to import your samples, followed by an area where you can control the value of limiting and gating. A modulation section, Texture, and EQ follow. The bottom section of the interface contains the primary filter, sidechain filter, envelope controls, and gate and limit controls. We can see the dry/wet mix and input/output parameters on the far left.

A preset menu would be an excellent place to start, but if you have previous experience with this effect, you might want to start from scratch, select the noise source from the sample section on the left, and proceed. We chose "static noise" as our sample, and as you can see in the image below, some additional work was done on the filter section, decay length, and dry/wet mix values. Let's hear how our shaker sounds solo after processing and then in the context of the whole mix.

If you liked this article on drum processing, here are some more on the same subject:

• Add Edge to Your Drums
• Tighten Up the Drums in Your Mix
• 3 Simple Steps to an Effective Drums and Percussion Tuning Strategy
• How To Create Drums Using Foley