Hey,
has anyone a idea how to make a phat sounding crunchy drum buss with analog hardware?
At the moment i have a Elysia Xpressor, Elysia Xfilter and a Analog Heat… but i am still not happy with the results… what do i can improve?
thanks.
You have serious tools for crunch at your disposal there - think you just need to keep exploring and tweaking. I know that’s not very helpful, but it’s hard to describe how to get a sound that exists in your head. But with that hardware I think you have everything you need at your disposal.
I would start with the Rough Crunch circuit on the heat and play with the envelope follower for starters.
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okay… thanks for your replay… what could be the best order of the chain?
First AH and than Xpressor and than XFilter? or Xpressor, XFilter and than AH?
thanks
No right or wrong answer here
If it were a conventional mastering chain of some kind the order would be:
Processing (FX, EQ etc) -> Compressor -> Limiter
Personally I would have Heat -> XFilter -> Xpressor in this scenario
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If you’re having probs dialing in a sound you like with those tools, I suggest you break it down first. Learn to use only one of those at a time, and make note what kind of settings give results you like. Then, once you have done this with all of your processors individually, try combining them.
Also, alot of the times its about what goes in, cannot polish a turd and all that, so make sure evrything sounds as good as possible before hitting the 2bus processors.
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I just found out that i really need to cut a lot of the high frequencies to get that sound i am looking for. so i need to cut the highs around 9.5k - 11k. sounds much better now on my electronic drum kit. i wasn’t expecting that a hi-cut can be so important like a low-cut. before i always used a high shelf instead of a high cut with a boost. now it sounds like i love. thanks for your help.
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Lowcut and highcut are very important tools. Sometimes you don’t even need a filter, and can use a shelving eq to attenuate some lows/highs while not killing all the freqs.
Also one cool trick is to cut the highs at a specific frequency, but to boost a freq area very close to the cutoff point. You can do this with either adding resonance to a lpf filter or with a second eq point. When done correctly, it can give a psychoacoustical impression that the higher frequencies extend beyond the filtered point (even though they are not there). This is a common processing technique in telephone audio, where you only have a bandwidth of ~4kHz.
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yes… this is what i am exactly found out before… this works great for me at around 10k.
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I’m going to ask what might seem like a silly question, are you driving the inputs hot or have you tried driving the inputs at different levels?
i am afraid of driving… can driving destroy my hardware?
U could set up a return channel with filter and compressor on it. Cut out mid freqs with the filter and crank up the compressor heavily. Would put the AH on the sum of that. Or depending if you havr enough routing then get the Heat on another return.
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Hey another way to roll of highs and get gritty is by simply converting the audio to 12 bit and then sending it through heat. Heat can be set so the envelope controls the drive here and it can sound punchy gritty and killler!
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How do you convert to 12 bit? My Mfb Tanzmaus sounds amazing with it 12 bit sounds.
thanks
How I get grit? It’s not the coolest but I use a boss br 600 like an effects processor by setting it to 12 bit in the effects section. The sp 303 404 and Zoom st 224 are few other ways to sound gritty but I bet there’s hundreds of ways
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TAL-Sampler is also something to look into.
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afaik, no.
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I’ve got a bunch of outboard distortion/Fuzz etc (not as nice as the gear listed tho 
but best drum crunch I get here is from D16 Decimort 2. Bit crusher kind of plug with bunch of parameters. Kinda different vibe to disrortion/saturation but gives a killer drum crunch that I was looking for in gear for a long time. You might want to get something similar in hardware if that’s the sound you’re after…
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