If you want better results on the drums, you must degrade through a speaker each drumkit piece. Play each piece (kick, snare, hi-hat, open-hihat, tom) through a speaker and record the output through a microphone on a recording device. To get “big” drums, you must record the samples from bigger speakers, but you can also use the same bluetooth speaker + smartphone inside a soundproofed shoebox or archive box described above. If you are using speakers with a subwoofer, you can play the kick and snare original electronic sounds first on the subwoofer and record the output, then do the same on the tweeters, then mix together the resulting samples, rolling off all the way frequencies above 250Hz on the subwoofer recording and below 250Hz on the tweeter recording.
To make kick and snare sound louder, crisper and “punchier” you can use the built-in “BOOST” effect on FL Studio. Click on the drum sample channel in the channel rack, find the “Precomputed effects” section in the window (on the right side, below the “Time stretching” section), click on the icon on the right of the claw hammer (the second one, near the word “Precomputed”), turn up the “BOOST” knob. Optimal results usually are achieved if you turn up the knob halfway and enable the “CLIP” option below the knob. Because the degradation procedure tends to take “click” and “punch” off a drum sound (especially kick drums), most of the times, for kick sounds you will have to add some “click”, turning the POGO knob slightly counterclockwise (see picture below). Sometimes snares sound better with the POGO slightly turned clockwise.
By degrading an electronic drum sample you will get a much longer sound, which could sound “muddy”, noisy and flat if not properly treated. To give the sample more dynamics you can apply an envelope to shorten it, add cutoff or other effects you may wish to apply.
You can also use the Transient Processor plugin, which will make the drum dynamics more exciting and suitable for dance beats.
Traditionally, a longer kick transient and a shorter snare transient are used for pop genres, the other way round for urban genres, but styles are constantly evolving so there’s really no set rule. It may sound as a paradox, but with corporate muzak you really have to find your own beat, unlike legitimate commercial music genres, which require you to understand deeply first, then be able to effectively deconstruct and later skillfully recreate the particular feel the beat is supposed to convey. In this sense, you may think as corporate sound bordering somehow with more “serious” genres, such as avant-garde and classical music, unlike mainstream and underground commercial music genres, which of course find inspiration in social rituals, shared values and collective imagery of youth urban cultures.
Once you have a separate sample for each drum piece, you can sequence them in a track on the Step Sequencer or by loading each sample into the FPC drum machine VST.
