Hey guys newbie here
I want to put together a kinda gritty trip hop based project
I’m looking for audio hardware to process drums thru
Think Portishead/Black Science Orchestra/Morcheeba
Any ideas???
Morning. Depending on your budget two routes might be Elektron’s Analogue Heat but that’s quite expensive and if not check out some guitar pedals. Someone might be able to suggest which may work.
If you’ve got nice gritty samples/live drums sorted then compression, saturation and overdrive will help get them the rest of the way. Haven’t used it for trip-hop but the OTO Boum does all 3 and sounds good to me. Analog Heat is a good suggestion too, maybe with a 1176-style compressor/limiter. Messing with pedal combinations is also a good shout and can get you something unique.
Boum link with vid:
Paul from Morcheeba shares quite a lot here on his methods:
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Thanks guys
Great tips btw have you guys tried recording to cassette tape and importing result back into session? I’m curious if you just get more noise floor or a natural sounding saturation.
Pedals sound good but also looking to process STEREO stems
Thanks again
You’ll get some of both and more of both the harder you push the record gain plus some tape compression and high-end roll-off. Might be what you’re looking for and if you can try it on the cheap or free then go for it. If it’s too noisy you could add a gate to reduce the noise between hits but that can make it sound odd.
I found consumer tape decks don’t have much headroom before going into a noisy mush. Reel to reel are a bit expensive and faffy for my tastes but old portastudio-type multi-trackers with a high-speed tape settings have less hiss and some headroom to find a nice sweet spot. I had best results with normal tape as chrome did unpleasant things to low frequencies (but keeps more highs). Portastudios are getting a bit pricey these days though.
Other things you can try with stuff you might have already are cranking the gain (and reducing the fader) on a mixer channel or re-amping through a speaker or cabinet and re-recording with a mic. Although these tend to work better on individual instruments than drum buss stems.
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Soundtoys Decapitator is what you need.