Making old classic hip hop drums

[drumist]

Is there any known technique for making a vinyl hip hop drum sound from an acoustic drum, turning its sound into something completely different (be it kick, hat or snare but mainly kick) sounding like it came from an mpc, having that "tsch" and that has that cool lo-fi feel coming from the true golden age of hip hop, and are there possibly some good tips on how to process drums to get a true feel like they came from old tracks without layering vinyl crackling? Please, share your knowledge and freedom on ideas!

[thecontrolcentre]

I found recording my mate playing his acoustic kit, using a minimal (2 microphone) set up worked well. It doesn't sound like its come off vinyl exactly, but works well enough. Downsampling (resampling) the recordings at 8 or 12 bit gives it more of that old school sampled sound.

[Ari-S]

I might sound stupid, but why don't you just sample drums from vinyl?

[jacqueslacouth]

I might sound stupid, but why don't you just sample drums from vinyl?

This!

It's not as though the equipment and techniques of sampling are no longer with us. why not buy an old MPC, they can be had for not much coin and go to some car boot sales to pick up some vinyl if you don't have a collection.

Honestly, if you want the authenticity of old school hip hop, why not learn the old school way? It's way more fun and inspiring than sitting twitching in front of a computer screen.

[Zexila]

I found recording my mate playing his acoustic kit, using a minimal (2 microphone) set up worked well. It doesn't sound like its come off vinyl exactly, but works well enough. Downsampling (resampling) the recordings at 8 or 12 bit gives it more of that old school sampled sound.

This is great spot on advice, thing here is to really get what you actually like from whole thing, technology is so evolved now, we don't have to fiddle around and have niggles like crackles or whatever, but instead apply old techniques that we actually like.

You basically want a way to make your drums sounding like they were recorded in the past and these days you can really get that drums to sound more suitable for your music than any record you can sample and with less artifacts.

Nothing worst at least for me is that every single drum hit got his own tail of junk (reverb tails and whathaveyou), it becomes rhythmical junk suddenly, don't know about you, but I want to have full control over my mix and decide how much grit is enough, apply it actually on whole kit, just the way drums sounded on the record, than add whatever artifact I find pleasing and fitting the track.

[JerGoertz]

I can't vouch for it personally, but this is one of the things I've heard contributes to that old hip-hop sampled drum sound:

Memory limitations in the old samplers induced musicians of that era to speed up the records they were sampling, then slow down sample playback to compensate. This gave the samples some of that gritty aliasing or whatever. I've heard Battery 4 does this well in the appropriate mode.

[pheeleep]

Another trick is to add just a little hiss. I do this with Satin. Turn up the hiss until it's noticeable then turn it down slowly and stop when you don't hear it anymore. Now bypass the plugin and turn it on again. Do this a few times switching back and forth. Feel the difference? Even though you can't hear the hiss it's sort of acting as an exciter and gluing everything together.

Yup downgrading to 12 bit is great. Some bitcrushers have this feature.

I personally like to use things that sound gritty. Sometimes I use the Waldorf D Pole filter. It's got a special quality to it for that type of sound.

The Waves Vinyl is awesome on drums (I am putting it on individual drum hits). I completely turn down the crackles, noise and make it a super clean DJ turntable effect. Satin is great as well.

For EQ I really like the Nomad Factory Motown Studio EQs. Console emulations such as Waves NLS. Saturation, Vertigo VSM-3.

As mentioned nothing beats the actual hardware used at the time. My MPC 2000 has been at my side since 1999.

I wish I had an Emu SP1200 and an Ensoniq ASR-10... an ASR-10 would be awesome.

[pheeleep]

I found recording my mate playing his acoustic kit, using a minimal (2 microphone) set up worked well. It doesn't sound like its come off vinyl exactly, but works well enough. Downsampling (resampling) the recordings at 8 or 12 bit gives it more of that old school sampled sound.

This is great spot on advice, thing here is to really get what you actually like from whole thing, technology is so evolved now, we don't have to fiddle around and have niggles like crackles or whatever, but instead apply old techniques that we actually like.

You basically want a way to make your drums sounding like they were recorded in the past and these days you can really get that drums to sound more suitable for your music than any record you can sample and with less artifacts.

Nothing worst at least for me is that every single drum hit got his own tail of junk (reverb tails and whathaveyou), it becomes rhythmical junk suddenly, don't know about you, but I want to have full control over my mix and decide how much grit is enough, apply it actually on whole kit, just the way drums sounded on the record, than add whatever artifact I find pleasing and fitting the track.

Using a gate to get rid of the tails works really well. I personally use gates a lot on Hip Hop drums, not really specifically for the old school hip hop drum sound. Just in general.

[Dillinger]

Trying to stay in the box it sounds like,

Put your samples into:

TAL Sampler

Choose your desired degradation through DAc emulation, saturation and hiss.

...Or...

UVI Falcon

Run your samples through the wave shapper--diode clipper--redux modules

[alligatorlizard]

I've found Decimort 2 to be very useful for this - mpc60 or sp1200 presets and always remember tweak the input gain to taste. Mix of live samples and sampled hits to get the funk and the weight. It is tough to get right tho, I've been struggling with this a while now, lots of trial and error, and always have some reference tracks to hand. But honestly, discovering Decimort was the biggest breakthrough I made here - try the demo!

[thecontrolcentre]

+1 for Decimort. Awesome Akai sampler emulation.

Memory limitations in the old samplers induced musicians of that era to speed up the records they were sampling, then slow down sample playback to compensate. This gave the samples some of that gritty aliasing or whatever.

Good point. I'd forgotten I used to do that when sampling with my old Cheetah SX16 (512k of memory ).