Destroyed Drums

Hi,

Welcome back.




Here's a little something I banged together one weekend in Reason. I love Reason as a way to sketch out song ideas; mostly because it's a closed environment with a good drum machine, good sampler, and now with Thor a pretty good analog modeling synth. Without the ability to scroll through endless plug-ins it forces you to focus on rhythm and melody as opposed to sound design. On the other hand, each synth is fairly deep and can be connected in almost endless ways which allows me to change up what I'm doing. This is always a source of inspiration for me.

When I wrote this song I had recently upgraded to Reason 4 and was trying to explore the Thor synth to find it's strength and weaknesses. I was really enjoying the sound of overdriving the filters with the synth sound and wanted to see if I could use those filters to get a crushed distorted drum sound. It ended up being a little tricky but I figured it out and this track was the result. The track starts with "dry" drums (the samples started pretty compressed and roomy), then half way through the destroyed drums come in.

This is about as distorted as I could get the drums to sound, and if I move ahead with this track to do something else with it, I might back off a bit or mix some of the dry drums back in.

As an aside, the vocals in this track are from what I believe was an Akai sample cd, I think it was called Arabic Traditions. One of the folders was this woman singing a song in Arabic cut into pieces. I grabbed the pieces and loaded them into a Redrum drum machine and triggered them in a sequence I thought sounded cool. I have know idea what the original song said, and I'm sure it makes no sense now. Although if anyone out there knows Arabic and wants to enlighten me, I'd be very curious to know what it says.

Peace,
Dan