Noise samples under drums

You know how sometimes you want a little more ambience around your drums, but reverb doesn’t feel quite right, and the room mics have too much hi hat / cymbal / etc?

Something I like to do is to trigger noise samples as a means of generating an alternative sort of ambience!

A nice stereo pink noise sample can cover a lot of ground in this application. You can trigger a separate instance of the same sample on an aux for each drum that needs it, and EQ / envelope contour the sound to taste. (You can do your envelope contouring right in Trigger 2 if that’s what you’re using, or you can use a noise gate.)

Narrow your pans considerably and center them around the drum that’s triggering the sample for a cool “localized ambience” effect. For example, if you have a tom that’s panned <35, you might send it to an aux to trigger a stereo noise sample, and you might pan that noise sample <40 30>. Just a little width can give it a 3D feeling.

Noisily — jamie