I am trying to figure out how to take classic drum machine samples (909,707,808) and utilize them with the RYTM sauce (layering with analog engines, FX like saturation, master distortion/compression). As well as cool ideas for utilizing trigs / lfos in unique ways I could learn from. Having trouble finding the right sound doing this on my own (ends up too muddy or overly distorted)
Is there a good sample pack recommendation that I could buy to reverse engineer this process. For example does anyone own the divine 909 pack from Elektron.se ? Couldn’t figure out if it’s just 909 samples loaded into kits or if it’s a hybrid of 909 samples with cool RYTM layering / processing added to it.
Any recommendations appreciated, even if it’s not classic drum machine samples just something that incorporates samples with RYTM engine processing .
before getting new samples, how hot are your individual tracks?
assuming you have your master distortion set anywhere around ~30-40 and the compressor MUP around 30, make sure to open up the threshold completely (127), for components with lowend try setting the AMP around 40-50 and start bringing up the individual parts of the voice up until you hear them start distorting, depending on the machines/samples you can end up with very low level setting for the SRC/SMPL parts, especially if you use the overdrive on track…
try making the loudest track barely touching the distortion/compressor and then build the other tracks around it.
there’s 3 places of gain for every track, SRC/SMP levels, AMP level and the TRACK level, every one of them will have different effect on the gain, don’t be afraid to go as down as you need with volume, you can always boost things back up with the master distortion or the compressor volume (bottom left on the compressor page)
another thing that gets overlooked easily but has real impact on the sound, especially samples, if the filters. by default the filter is set to LP2 which is 24db lowpass, if you change it to any other mode fully open you will see there’s a difference, here’s an example of the same sample playing through the LP2, LP1, HP2, HP1 all fully open:
Thank you for this, great tips and I will try messing with the gain staging at those 3 levels. I was having trouble understanding the gain structure of the RYTM. I wasn’t hitting the master distortion or compression super hard and the samples were sounding cool coming directly out of the rytm into my speakers but when I recorded them into ableton they sounded really dark / muddy when A/Bing with the original sounds. So yeah it may be that I need to adjust the gain staging further down in the process.
I try using only SRC/SMPL/AMP levels for sound design and keep the TRACK level for the final mix adjustments, depending how you use the rytm you need to keep in mind if the level is something you want to control while performing you want a solid parameter you can remember where it was, like if the TRACK level set to 68 and you want to bring it in from zero you might have trouble remembering where it was set, so I try to have the final level at AMP and use all my track levels at 100 so I remember where they are, but in some cases I need that extra volume down so I use the TRACK level too…
