Soi 
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Registration Date: 29-01-2003
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Ripped it mercilessly from spinwarp.com who ripped it equally mercilessly from dogsonacid.com.
Enjoy these tips, they might come in handy at inspirationless moments.
Filtered for quality and tidied up for YOU:
Gated Reverb Without a Gate
Put together a phat break, doin' all your EQ'ing, compressing, what-ever.
at the final stage when yer just about ready to resample it, slap yer best reverb ontop of it, but use a bit more(and a slightly longer tail) then you normally would....
Now drop the tempo in your sequencer down to like 50bpm
and resample the break with all that extra space between yer hits.
Now chop the break up again, and load it back into your sampler.
Now play with the ADSR on the individual hits. You can control the amount/decay-curve of the reverb much more easily then if you were using an actual gate and sending everything to multiple channels.
Build Up Effect.
Load a short sample into a sampler
Set the sample so that it loops while pressing the note until you release it
set the slide option on (or portamento)
set the slide time to more than 2 seconds
now play your root note say C1 then play C3
i hope it helps
Oldschool Timestretch Tip:
load a sample into your sampler (hard or soft, it doesnt matter).
map velocity to sample position.
filll up 8 bars (or whatever) with short notes, 32nds, 16ths, 64ths, make a funky pattern if you like.
draw a ramp of the velocity from 0 at the start to 127 at the last note...
this will accurately timestretch any sample to any amount of bars you like, regardless of the original tempo of the sample. it can also be fun on breaks (run them backwards, stretch the kick over a bar, etc,) - also try randomising the velocities for some random sounds.
Effecting Returns From Delays
effecting returns from delays and/or reverbs can create some fucking wicked effects. try flanging a reverb, or putting a comb filter on a delay (i did this recently on a pad i made and it sounded fucking lovely).
Bassline Frequencies
Basically when you make a bassline.. its always good to jot down the original note of the sample and its respective frequency. Once you have done that, its easier in the mixdown stage to get more bass presence (if you need it) to raise the harmonic intervals of that bass sound with the EQ.. which creates a psychoacoustic effect that there is more bass.. when there isnt. This technique can be used when you feel like raising just the bass EQ itself will screw up/muddy up the mix. Just be careful it doesn't clash with the melodies, pads, leads etc when you're boosting the upper harmonics of a bass tone.. in fact.. when you're designing your sounds its good to note the original notes and freqs of ALL the sounds.... use a freq analyzer to get precise wid it and have at it.
Rolling Percussion Lines
u can make some nice liquidish, flowing, rolling percussion lines by taking rhythm loops of some sort - old funk breaks, sample cd loops, hell, even whole tunes - no particular need to choose something designed for dnb either. wack it to the correct tempo - it wont matter if the quality of your time-stretching isnt great, although recycling is still probably best
then fuck with a load of plugins, basically. particular winners include:
phasers (especially with stereo field action)
spectral autopanner
comb filters
tempo synced (filter) delays
bitcrush/distortion
or pretty much anything you feel like
then the key - hipass filter, really rather high cutoff, decent amount of resonance too... turning the whole loop into nothing but hat/shaker territory. best if you can find a filter with some sort of envelope follower (favourites: filtrator, littleduck), if not, then an lfo will do. or use both if possible for even more variation. then a dash of reverb obviously.
you should now have a swishy rhythmic loop layer type thing... if you get lucky with the combination of your initial loop and the right tempo-based lfo filter mod or amp env-following filter mod, you can sometimes stumble onto a fucking NICE loop, with fantastic little whooshy sweepy things in it. other days... it sounds like arse...
if its got a bit too messy and cluttered at this stage you can tighten it up with a gapper or better yet a programmable rhythmgate such as the scuzzphut6. and if then it sounds too tight and stuttery you can obviously start all over again making it more rolling and liquid by adding further delay / reverb.
That "Roni Size" Ducked White-noise Snare Sound in Software.
I had read that huge snare sound came from keying the snare to some white-noise via a gate.
Anyone else who has tried to set-up a keyed gate in cubase or the like will feel me on this, It's HUGE pain....possible to do but not very quickly or efficiently...
SO........
run yer snare to a seperate out and use a send so you've got it on one of the group channels. Now slap a vocoder on the group channel and set it to carrier to "white- noise".
Baddabing, badda bang....
Oh, and running a send of yer whole drum track to a vocoder can have some very kewl results as well.....see, above.....
Use the Delay Parameter to Make Your Rhythms Sound More Life Like
My tip is to use the delay parameter to make your rhythms sound more life like. I am not talking about echo, tape delay or delay lines just so you're not confused. It is a well know funk trick to apply some negative delay to your snares (+ve delay makes sounds later, -ve delay makes them earlier) so they sound rushed and urgent. Hats often like a touch of negative delay too. Put delay on the kick drum to make it sound dragged and laid back. In house music the main offbeat snare sounds simultaneously with the kick drum. If you use this technique it means the snare will hit just before the kick which sounds rude. As with many production tips, be careful not to do too much. A bit of delay in your bassline will put the attack just after the kick drum so that they won't sound simultaneously preserving precious headroom in the bass region.
Happy funkin!
Peace
Envelope Volumes On Hits
Try volume envelopes on your individual drum hits rather than compression on your whole break
Synth Patches
Try to duplicate a patch/program from one synth on another. First, this is a good way to learn synth programming, second, this is a good way to learn the sound of a particular synth, as in most cases, even if you duplicate the signal path exactly, they will sound different, third, because they sound different yet similar, you can use this to create complementary parts, vary the sound in subtle ways other than just modulating filters and such.
Use Ring Modulators
if you've not had the pleasure before then try running a distorted bass sound through a ring modulator plugin (the basic ones in most sequencers are fine)
Sidechaining Synths To Percussion Lines in Logic
This is well known but no one has mentioned it so fuckit. load up a synth patch and record some melody in your sequencer. Then Load up a Noise Gate or Autofilter on the synth track and choose your drums/hi hats/bongo tracks as the sidechain source. Do abit of tweaking and you should come out with some good results. Also sidechaining Your basslines to your drums via autofilter can create some sick twisted blines
Another Logic Trick This Time Utilising the Tremelo Plugin
The default tremelo patch is an auto panner and you can use this to create a variety off pulsating fx by crossfading between 2 seperate aux objects....
Load up a pad sound or something similar in an audio/audio instrument track. Next load up the logic tremelo plugin onto a stereo buss and make sure the bus's audio output routing is empty. Then feed 2 stereo aux objects panned hard left and right respectivley, from this bus object. Now route both Auxs to another bus this time in Mono which then feeds the mix normally. Feeding the stereo buss from a channel causes audio to sweep between the 2 aux channels each of which can be given different Eq/Modulation settings etc. The Mono buss object then combines the 2 aux channels into a singal channel which can be panned to match the original source if required.
Been using this ALOT latley..infact i have my autoload file in logic setup for this so i dont have to go through the process each time
EDIT: Logic Tremolo is FUCKING BADASS. It's basic but that tempo lock feature is glorious. I use it in every tune.
Wobbly Bass
Start with a multi layer hooverish bass and LFO all of the above-sub layers on a high pass filter to 3/16th notes (or whatever your fancy) and adjust the amounts of the LFOs from the bottom layers up going from least to most....
it makes the highs of the bass the most wobbley and the lows steady...works nicely for rolling but grungy bass
Large Snares
here's a nice tip for cracking, larger than life snares inna 80s-influenced style... basically it's just jon's tip about vocoding a snare with noise but with a really fat, diffused reverb thrown in
just send some of your snare signal to a group channel containing a reverb followed by a vocoder with a white noise carrier, followed by a multiband compressor (or similar) + EQ (with a fairly drastic bell curve), all panned quite wide
really lifts a snare up + gives it impact
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