A Quick Guide to Designing Dubstep Drums

Good drum mixing is a telltale sign of mature production, and often the first thing labels will focus on when listening to a demo. With the status that house music has reached in recent years, artists and sample companies have quickly saturated the market with sample packs to satisfy this particular genre. Unfortunately, the same has yet to happen for more underground genres like Dubstep and Drum and bass. For this reason, this article will provide you with the knowledge to build your own Dubstep drums.  

Making Dubstep Drums

First and foremost, people often overlook choosing suitable samples. In the electronic production community, there seems to be a common misunderstanding that having good drums comes mostly from sound sample processing (WRONG!). Therefore, if the samples you're working with don't have the right frequency content or are corrupted by a weird stereo image or artifacts, there is not much you can do to fix them. As they say - "garbage in, garbage out." Keep in mind that, in a lot of cases, drum samples will be layered. Don't lose your mind over finding the perfect sample; the final sample can combine several great-quality samples.  

Kicks

The kick is going to be very central in your mix. So, if you're trying to build a strong drum kit to use over your drop, eliminate samples that are panned unconventionally or have a strange stereo image. Since we're talking Dubstep, the kick will have to protrude through all your nasty bass and sub-layers. That means you should watch for kick samples that impact between 50 Hz and 60 Hz. Don't forget about the highs. Your kick has to fill the frequency spectrum. A common mistake is to use deep kicks that have no high-frequency content. This creates a strange contrast with the rest of your synths and basses, especially if you're using sidechain compression - whereby the synths duck when the kick hits, but that kick does not occupy frequencies missing from the spectrum.

Although articulation can be tweaked to a certain degree, watch out for the delay between the transient and when the sub of the kick (50 Hz - 60 Hz) hits. The reason for this delay is that digital kicks are often designed by putting a pitch envelope on a bass. Depending on the envelope's attack, the lift can reach the fundamental frequencies sooner or later than desired. You don't want the attack to be too long because the sub-frequencies of your kick will end up conflicting with your sub-bass.  

Snares

A big snare will have a frequency peak between 150 Hz and 200 Hz. Keep an eye out for samples that have somebody. Producers often mistake the tail of a snare to come solely from the reverb. However, you should apply reverb only to the higher frequency layers of your snare. A better way of getting that tail is to layer white noise samples or rides with this high content and decay. Keep away from over-compressed snare samples. 

A lot of sample packs contain snares that sound pleasingly loud but have lost their transient as a result of over-compression or limiting. For your snare to cut through the mix, it has to have a defined transient and maintain a specific dynamic range. Try going through some clap samples. Adding claps can widen the snare a bit and give it a more unique sound. Clap samples can be high-passed - acting as a top layer for your snare.  

Mixing and Layering

Once you've collected a solid group of snare and kick samples, it's time to identify what their most vital attributes are and compile them into coherent samples, respectively. Using a free third-party spectrum analyzer like Voxengo's Span, we can identify a sample's qualities:

• Articulation: Does it have an excellent transient or a good tail?
• Frequency content: Mostly high, mid, or low frequencies?
• Timbre: what is the characteristic of the sound? Synthetic? Organic?

With these qualities, we can layer the different samples. As you superpose the samples, use an EQ to filter out any conflicting frequencies. Play with the envelope to ensure a clean, transient body and tail. For this demonstration, I'll use Native Instruments Battery 4 to layer my samples.  

The Kick

First, I'll open up an instance of Battery 4 and load up the samples I've found.  

Although you can use more samples in this process, I only use two. The first sample seems to have some artifact or unwanted frequency around 1 kHz. I will EQ these frequencies out and then use the second sample to fill them in. Check out two unaffected drum samples:

First off, I am going to shorten the sample length to prevent the tail of the kick from interfering with the sub. I will use the volume envelope in Battery's "Main" tab. I'll set the same envelope for both kicks to sound cohesive.

Next, starting with the first kick, I will eliminate that problematic frequency. In the effects tab, I will select "Band 3 EQ" and turn the gain down to around 1 kHz. T should eliminate that problem frequency.

This is how the sample sounds now; notice that the resonant sound is gone.

For the second kick, I will isolate the frequencies around 1 kHz using a bandpass filter. I am going to set it to four poles so that I can eliminate more frequencies that might interfere with the other kick.

Now the sample sounds like this:

Finally, I am going to apply some effects on Battery's master bus in order to mesh the two samples together a little better.

I'll start with adding a little compression, paying particular attention to the attack in order to conserve the transient. I'll add a little saturation and set it to "drums" to give the sound more energy. When I layer the two samples together, we have our final kick drum.

The Snare

Now that I have my kick, I will load up another instance of Battery 4 and load up the snare samples I found. The first snare sample I found will serve as the main snare. I will affect the other snares around it to complement it and strengthen it. Since the first sample is shifted and starts only halfway through the clip, I will use the sampler to change the playback starting point. 

That way, the sample will play as soon as it is launched. I want to use the second sample as a high textural layer to give the snare some character. I'll set up a high pass filter in the effects tab and move the cutoff to about 550 Hz so that it will not mess with the low end.

Moving on, I want to use the third sample as a white noise tail for my snare. This enables me to ease up on the reverb and still get that characteristic snare articulation often heard on Dubstep tracks. To get rid of the transient, I'll move the sample starting point along to the tail of the sample.

Next, I'll high pass the sound, just like snare 2, to keep it out of the way of the main snare.

I will use the last snare to strengthen the fundamental frequency of the overall sound. However, I don't want it messing with the transient of Snare 1, so I'll increase the attack.

Here are snares 2, 3, and 4 affected.

 

Finalization

For the final step, I'll add some effects on the master bus - as I did with the drums - to blend the layers.

And then, when I play all the layers together:

So there you have it! Hopefully, you're more familiar with gathering samples, layering, and mixing them to create some Dubstep drums. As you can probably tell, how you affect the samples will depend significantly on the samples themselves. Additionally, you'll have to train your ear by going through this process many times and trying different things.

To conclude, use the tips above when searching for your samples and mixing them. They'll set you on the right track. Happy Mixing!