Create Epic Cinematic Drums

Cinematic music production is, without any doubt, a vast industry. Its approach to sound processing is, in many cases, much more complicated than producing a regular pop tune. Scoring and layering of many instruments is often a time-consuming process. In earlier decades, most of the sounds used in cinematic music required a live orchestra, expensive studio recording, and many other aspects necessary to produce a great-sounding movie theme. We were recently introduced to sound banks containing pre-recorded live instruments and cinematic drum ensembles. These soundbanks became more realistic as time progressed, offering many options for further sound manipulation. One of these great-sounding sound banks is Ethnic Drum Ensembles by Heavyocity.  

Ethnic Vibe

Ethnic Drum Ensembles delivers six unique multi-sampled drum ensembles and over 375 tempo-synced loops. Each ensemble contains up to 12 different drums, performed simultaneously by seven players. Heavy City's team composed bank loops through creative processing and mixing to be inspiring and immediately applicable. So, we have created a short loop in the SoundBridge: DAW and will enrich it with drums from the Ethnic Drum Ensembles soundbank. Let's fist hears how the loop sounds without drums.  

~Instruments without drums  

Play the Drums

The next thing to do would be to open a new instance of the Kontakt player and place it on a new MIDI channel in SoundBridge. In Kontakt, we will also choose a new Ethnic Drum Ensembles bank. As mentioned before, the palette of sounds that this bank is offering is enormous. However, for this purpose, we will select the "Ethnic Mid Ensemble "preset and make some drum sequences we will hear next.  

~Ethnic Drum Ensembles Drums - Unprocessed  

Ethnic Drum Interface

The central part of the interface consists of several sections. On the left side, we can see the part of the effect (Delay, Modulation, Reverb, and Distortion). Moreover, the center section contains three parts. The Twist is used for further modulation, mix allows us to mix between 3 different microphone levels, and Punish is a helpful compressor/distortion processor. The right side of the interface is reserved for ADSR controls of 3 channels. Lastly, we have an equalizer and T-Fx section on the top, which contains more effects (distortion, filter, filter panner, and delay).

Final Touch

For this example, we will use reverb and distortion from the left side, marked in red. Furthermore, we'll compress the overall sound with the Punish effect. On top of that, we'll pan the positioning of different triggered drum sounds by entering the "Stage "section, which you can see in the bottom right corner of the interface.  

You can easily position the drum sounds in the Stage section by selecting the dots in the upper field. By doing this, the sound will become more realistic. After final processing, let's hear now how this drum sequence sounds, the first solo, and then with other instruments in the mix.

~Ethnic Drum Ensembles Drums -Processed

~Full Mix