Need advice on transitionary percussive elements.

[Esperado]

So I've been using the same old tired cymbal crashes with effects layered on them to keep them interesting, for quite a while. Occasionally i use white noise with a slow decay and some reverb and maybe some other effects. but Its something that i think i could really improve on to spice up my mixes. does anyone have a good guide or resource for improving transitionary elements such as cymbals? I know you can use other things besides cymbals, right? also, does anyone know of a good cymbal sound library, i dont care if its just WAV files.

[Meteo Xavier]

Sometimes the compositions of the drum fills will be decent enough. You can't really escape using crash sounds, but if you think you're overdoing it, you can always try different types of cymbals or high hat sounds to complete the transition, or just reduce the volume and high shelf EQ out of the cymbals. They'll melt into the background better but still provide a proper transition.

For reference on learning some good drum fills and transitions, go to www.vgmusic.com, and download a shit-ton of Motoi Sakuraba MIDIs from Valkyrie Profile (PS1), Golden Sun (GBA), Star Ocean 2, and Tales of Symphonia (GC).

[timaeus222]

Since you're talking transitional, you *can* use a cymbal as a distinction between sections, but leading up to a new section, you could use snare rolls, tom rolls, reverse cymbals, risers, other types of reverses (I feel like reversed kicks or snares are most commonly overlooked as possibilities), etc.

By risers, I mean something like any of these, or others that I haven't listed:

- resonant FM filter modulation (a bubbly pitch rising-esque sound)

- Filter LFO with an upward-modulating envelope on the LFO rate on, say, white noise or some other medium

- white/pink noise band pass/low pass filter sweep (you've done this before)

- a simple volume envelope/automation on a sound you find interesting for the context. EX: an inharmonic bell, a glassy FM sound (an FM oscillator acting as a carrier placed in serial with an FM oscillator acting as the modulator creates these two types of sounds), etc.

- a relatively long sound of any sort that makes sense, reversed.

Edited February 18, 2014 by timaeus222

[Argle]

Reversed piano is one of my favorites. Also, you can literally sample any sound, edit it and pile on some fx and make a cool transition element.

[MindWanderer]

Occasionally i use white noise with a slow decay and some reverb and maybe some other effects.

I'm amused by this, as white noise with fast attack and slow decay is what 8- and 16-bit music use for crash cymbals anyway.

Used sparingly, dead air for a beat before the new measure can serve just as well as a crash. Occasionally another instrument with similar properties, like a tubular bell or triangle, can do the job, but that doesn't seem to suit many types of music. I suppose the cannons in the 1812 Overture accomplish the same thing.

[Rozovian]

If the drums are otherwise strong enough to stand on their own, you can just drop out the previous drums and use something lighter. I imagine a breakbeat could easily be interrupted with a filtered percussion loop for a measure before going into full gear... without a cymbal even starting it off.

The psychological effect you're after is to signal the listener that you're approach the end of a passage and something big is going to happen, whether this is a big breakdown or a big chorus. So you have to signal this change somehow. You can give you last snare hit (or even the last beat or the whole measure's drums) a glitchy stretch effect, where instead of remaining percussive, they morph into a glitchy texture instead. You can drop out the main drums and use a lighter or filtered kit. You can write a fill using non-cymbal elements of a drum kit. You can reverse everything but the kickdrum (or reverse that one too).

Non-drum solutions, like the backwards piano Argle suggested, also work. The trick here is that you have to pick a note or chord that is going to lead into the next part well. Unlike cymbals and white noise, which doesn't have a lot of tonal information and is instead noise with a particular timbre (to our ears, anyway), you have to pick something that won't clash with the key the preceding nor following part, and it has to work, tonally, even if it wasn't reversed. In C major, you can start your chorus on an F, so Em, G or Am should work well. Dm will be more awkward, C might not be much of a change from the preceding part (depending on the chords there, of course), and Bm generally doesn't agree with F particularly well. If you know how to move between keys and scales, you can apply that here. Theory and my guesswork won't take you all the way, use your ears.

It's all about signaling the listener.

[Ryan Jobson]

You could also think outside the box and move away from white noise or percussive elements and try something melodic. Maybe sample the first bar of the new part and then place it before, but only reversed, filtered, and with a nice reverb tail or something. Get creative.