8 Steps to Creating Sweet Cymbal Swells

Nothing will intensify the climax of your song like an epic, sweeping cymbal – followed by an explosion of energy, projected into space. This cliche is evident in so many house, club, dance, and EDM productions. Therefore, it is nearly a standard.

Basically, here I will show you one common way to set this up in Battery 4.

It involves: 2 crash samples, reversal, panning, filtering, delay, and automation.

This is what it sounds like….

STEP 1: THE SAMPLES

1. First of all, open Battery
2. Pick a crash sample for the first slot. Copy it and paste it into the next slot.
3. Then, link the samples together by selecting C1 for the key range of both slots.
4. Rename them Original and Copy
5. Pan them HARD left and right.
6. Additionally, modify the copy such that there is no phasing or distortion when the two samples play simultaneously. Try subtle pitch shifting, filtering, stretching, and enveloping. They should sound similar still. Like this….

STEP 2: SEQUENCE THE CRASH AND SWELL

1. Draw MIDI note C1 in the Lumit sequencer right on the downbeat of the drop, chorus, or climax.
2. Also, draw in an another MIDI note on the next pitch up (C#)  leading up to the downbeat of the drop, chorus, or climax. It can be anywhere from 1 measure to 4 measures. I will use a 2 measure swell for my example.

STEP 4: MAKE THE SWELLS

1. copy the first sample and paste it into slot 3.
2. copy the second sample (modified) and paste into slot 4.
3. Rename them swells 1 and swell 2
4. Set up C# to trigger both of their them

1. Reverse both of them
2. Drop the pitch of each slightly. Something like -20c and -40c.
3. Furthermore, adjust the volume envelope, and stretch amounts so that the duration of the swell matches the duration of your MIDI note. The envelope and stretch amounts do not have to be EXACTLY the same but the final duration of each swell does – so listen carefully.
4. In the editor, add a little fade out right at the climax of each swell to smooth the harshness.

STEP 5: MODULATE THE SWELLS

• Turn on the pitch envelope for each swell sample and drop the amount down just a little bit (not even to 11 o’clock). Crank the decay up to full for both.

• Also, for each swell sample, open the modulation tab of Battery. Set up a sine LFO 1 to modulate the pan position at about half amount somewhere between 1 and 3 Hz.

STEP 6: ADD DELAY AND REVERB

1. Move to the master tab in Battery 4. Set the delay time to 8th notes or quarter notes, whichever you prefer, and the feedback to about ¾ full.
2. Send the reversed samples to the delay tastefully. You don’t want them tailing into the crash too much – something like ⅛.
3. Send slots 1 and 2 to the delay generously – something like ¾.
4. Send slots 1 and 2 to the reverb just a little and slots 3 and 4 about half.  Set the reverb in the master tab to a relatively large space and bring pre-delay all the way down (since there’s already delay).

It should sound something like this now…..

STEP 7: POST EQ AND GENTLE LIMITING

1. Drop an instance of Lumit’s EQ onto the signal chain after Battery
2. Set a low shelf or low cut band somewhere around 160 Hz and drop it way down.
3. Boost the high shelf a little
4. Drop a bell around 3-7 kHz to cut some harshness.

• Moreover, drop a limiter after the EQ set to a pretty high threshold (between .3 and 1dB) and ratio just to limit any clipping there may be. This is what my swell sounds like with effects.

STEP 8: BOUNCE THE WHOLE THING

• Lastly, make one bounce with reverb and delay and one without.
• If you want to consolidate, reload the whole thing into one slot.

THE FINAL CONTEXT!

Download the WAV file HERE.