Well, lately I've had this obsession with trying to achieve really raw and unique-sounding drums; something that sounds new, rather than simply tossing in some sampled acoustic drums or some 909-styled beats. Think Bjork's "Homogenic", compared to other electronica records from 1997, or some of Data Romance's tunes (like "The Deep", "Ghosted", or "Arms") compared to other electropop tunes released last year.

Anyways, so I tried time and again to achieve something that sounded different, but was still actually useable in a song. Distortion plugins had a tendency to either do too much damage, or not enough, and usually robbed the drum of all it's punch when pushed. Reverbs and choruses created too much mud when used in large amounts, even with heavy compression and a noise-gate. Then, I heard about some producers taking advantage of malfunctioning plugins, working in and exporting at low-quality settings, etc. and thought "What the hell, let's try it!"

So, I set my DAW's audio to 22050 Hz. The difference was pretty huge. With just a basic 808 or 909 kick, and some kind of snare or rim-type sound with lots of mid-range energy, you can make some pretty crazy stuff. Just add your usual distortion, saturation, reverb, compression, chorus, EQ, limiting, etc. Experiment with dithering or truncating to lower bit-rates, like 8 or 12 bits. Then, just export at 16-bit.

Just thought I'd share this, I realize this probably isn't a new idea, but probably one that many people don't consider as making a big difference.

I can't confirm that distortion plugins are either doing too much or not enough of sound processing. I generally use Audio Damage kombinat dva, which is highly configurable. For an ongoing project I recreated the sound of a good drum loop, which was too inflexible for my needs. This loop has a nice distorted snare and I was able to get exactly this sound in just a few minutes, using BFD Eco + AD kombinat. Concerning distortion plugins it's also a matter of how to mix it in. Used as a send effect you can do everything from mild distortion to heavy sound destruction.

The same is true for reverb and choruses. Maybe you have to learn to use those tools properly. You could work with side chain compressors to achieve some kind of reverb ducking, you could use an EQ to get rid of unwanted reverb frequencies etc., etc.