Alternative approaches to drum processing have emerged in recent years. We will cover one that will add texture to your drums in the following tutorial.
As usual, we prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW. It includes most of the major 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. For that, 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 a plethora of presets is located at the top of the interface. The left section is where 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 a section 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 main filter, sidechain filter, envelope controls, and gate and limit controls. On the far left, we can see the dry/wet mix parameters as well as the input/output parameters.
A preset menu would be a good 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 from there. 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 sound sounds solo after processing and then in the context of the full mix.
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