With your drum track programmed, take another drum loop (as similar or different to the main one as you like), feed it into a 100% wet reverb and render the output. Similar in concept to the filtered top loop and envelope following noise, the ‘groove shadow’ is another great way to work texture and contouring into any beat. It should operate as an embedded high-frequency rhythmic texture, rather than a perceptibly discrete instrumental component. The idea is to set the filter cutoff frequency and resonance so that the rhythm sits comfortably on top of the beat without drawing too much attention to itself, but its absence is obvious when muted. The loop in question can comprise drum kit, hand percussion or both, and should be quite busy and pacy – think of it as a sort of tambourine or shaker substitute. Layer In A Top LoopĪ staple technique in dance music production, and one that’s often worth a try when looking to bring something different to programmed ‘acoustic’ drum parts, is the introduction of a high-pass filtered loop as an airy top layer. Various plugins are able to help with this, including synths (for their noise generators), and retro-fying effects such as XLN Audio RC-20 Vintage Color and iZotope Vinyl but particularly worthy of mention right now is Cableguys’ recently released NoiseShaper, which tracks the dynamics of an input signal to trigger any from a diverse library of noises whenever that signal is either present or absent.

Synthesised or sampled noise, meanwhile, is just the thing for bringing sizzle to hats and snares, or filling the gaps in between hits for a vintage feel.

A touch of analogue overdrive or tape saturation on the kick, snare and/or drums bus can boost their musculature and power no end, while bitcrushing and sample rate reduction are good for sharpening up electronic hi-hats, snares and toms. Distortion and synthesised/sampled noise are powerful tools for drum design, providing two different but entirely complementary ways to add grit and texture to individual drum sounds and full loops.

Dblue glitch or substitute