Hey guys,

I'm not really sure whether this is the right place to post this.

I've been working recently on mimicking Madeon's drum style. His kicks are typically quite 'rounded' and punchy, they're almost soft but right in your face at the same time. It's a very tricky thing to achieve well, and requires a lot of layering and careful adjustment. His snares are also very rounded and punchy, when combined together they both have a very unique sound.

Here's the closest I've managed to achieve (don't judge the structure etc. of the mix, it's a very very rought draft):

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14923346/Katy%20Perry%20-%20Part%20O f%20Me%20%28Hi%20Def%20Remix%29%28Draft%29.mp3

I'm wondering if anyone likes the sound of the drums(maybe you don't and you think it's far from his sound, that's fine!) and wishes to know how to go about achieving it? Here's a brief summary, which might be of interest...

Spectral analysis of one of his snares:



As you can see, it's predominately bassy. In and around the 155hz region is very strong in particular. It doesn't just peak at 155hz and everything around it is quiet, but the whole frequency region is loud, and the peak is in the middle of that region. This is what gives it the more rounded and natural sound. It tails off at 500hz and peaks again at around 5k.

The higher freqs are probably just a layered clap of some sort, really even some sort of EQ'd/filtered white noise will do the trick as well.

The important thing, though, is compressing whatever sounds you layer, EQ'ing them and a thing that always gets overlooked...PHASE. You'll be amazed at how much better something can sound by just inverting the phase.

-----------

Anyhow, as I say, if this is something you guys would be interested in knowing more about then I wouldn't mind posting up a tutorial of how I emulated a similar sound.

Cheers!
Last edited by Codehook on Mon Apr 09, 2012 7:46 pm; edited 1 time in total

Post the tutorial man, it would be VERY welcome!!

what's more important to me is where you got ahold of that acapella!

where son, where?

Ha, I Googled it and downloaded several DIY'd versions. Can't remember where I got the one I ended up using in this mix, but it's pretty much identical to this one:

http://www.craigvanity.com/2010/11/acapellas.html

I just cleaned it up a bit with some compression & gating and tried to stay aware of the dirty parts so that I had some stuff going on in my mix to cover it up.

Alright so, I'll check back on this thread tomorrow and see if there's been enough interest. If so I'll work on doing a tutorial, which will probably be text/picture based.

Yes, why not?

Wow. I had no idea it was DIY from listening the first few moments. Nice cleanup

Give me that tutorial!!!

That was awesome. Definitely interested.

Edit: had this track on for the last hour or so, love it.

Tutorial would be much appreciated, especially your concept of the phase

Thanks

I'm writing the tutorial now, may take a while.

I would also love a tutorial. Sounds great man =)

Here's the tutorial guys:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=346754&sid=967 c2bdb6b936c878b904ef0f5efd32e