the percussion trick every producer needs

you've got a kick, a clap and some hats, and the loop is... fine. it keeps time. it just doesn't roll. the usual reaction is to throw more drums on top, and that nearly always makes it worse, because the new sounds land in the same places as the old ones and the bar turns into a wall. the fix is percussion, used in one specific way: small, quiet, tuned hits that answer the kit instead of copying it.

percussion here means everything beyond the kick, snare and hats: shakers, tambourines, congas, bongos, toms, rimshots, claves and cowbells. and the trick fits in one sentence. give every percussion layer its own gap, its own pitch, its own spot between the speakers and its own (quiet) level. below we go through each of those four, explain in plain words why they work, and show you how to get a loop moving in ten minutes.

the percussion is right there on the panel

look at the Roland TR-808, which came out in 1980. next to the kick, snare and hats it has congas, rimshot, claves, a handclap, maracas and a cowbell built in. the 909 that followed in 1983, the machine Wikipedia credits with influencing techno, house and acid house, dropped the clave, cowbell, maracas and conga. but on the 808, which Wikipedia calls a cornerstone of the emerging electronic, dance and hip-hop genres, the percussion sat right next to the kick. see the 16 coloured buttons along the bottom of the 808? that's its step sequencer: one bar split into 16 equal steps, called 16th notes. that's the grid we'll use for the rest of this post.

part one: every layer gets its own gap

in a four-on-the-floor house beat the kick lands on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13, the clap on 5 and 13, and an open hat usually sits on the offbeats (3, 7, 11 and 15), the "and" halfway between each beat. percussion earns its place by filling what's left.

• start with one layer on every 16th. a shaker running through all 16 steps is the glue. Attack Magazine's deep tech house breakdown adds exactly that "to emphasise the swing", and says a tambourine works too, as long as it has a short attack and a short decay.
• put the tuned hits in the gaps. in Attack Magazine's rolling deep house beat, a 909-style tom plays the 3rd, 9th and 11th steps, which "reinforces that shuffle and gives the groove a jacking feel", and an extra percussion hit takes the 2nd and 10th.
• keep them short. the same beat keeps every sound "deliberately short, with no messy overlaps". a conga that rings into the next hit blurs the rhythm you just built.
• leave one hole. a step where almost nothing plays makes the ear lean in, and the next hit feels like it's rolling towards you.

it's the same idea that makes a bassline roll when it moves off the kick. we cover that side in rolling house rolls because of what's off the beat.

part two: velocity and ghost notes

velocity is how hard a note is played. Ableton's manual describes it simply as a note's loudness, set by how hard you hit the key or pad. a ghost note is a hit played so softly you almost feel it more than hear it: Wikipedia describes ghost notes in drumming as notes played "very softly between the 'main' notes". they're the difference between a machine gun and a groove.

• never leave a layer at one velocity. in Sound On Sound, Nicholas Rowland calls the relative velocity levels of your instruments "crucial to creating a sense of movement", and suggests tweaking hits so no two neighbours have the same value.
• accent the offbeats, ghost the rest. loud hits on the "and", quiet ones in between. Attack Magazine's deep tech house breakdown says the shaker's velocity changes play "a very important role here, avoiding a robotic sound", and its jackin' house beat uses ghost hits to "bring out the swing".
• make quiet hits sound quiet, not just smaller. a real drum changes its tone as well as its volume when you hit it harder, and Rowland points out that an acoustic drum struck harder even rises in pitch. Attack Magazine's bongo tutorial maps velocity to the filter cutoff or to the decay time, so ghost notes sound muted instead of like a turned-down loud hit.

part three: pitch, place and level

once the hits sit in the right steps at the right velocities, three settings decide whether the layers blend into a groove or just pile up.

• pitch. tune your percussion against each other first, and only loosely against the rest of the track. bongos come in pairs, one higher than the other, and Attack Magazine suggests roughly a fourth apart as a starting point, while admitting that even pro percussionists don't agree on tuning. its rolling deep house beat tunes the extra percussion hit against the tom "so that the two work in tandem". and Rowland warns that tuning congas and bongos to a precise melodic pitch tends to make them "disappear from the mix".
• place. panning is where a sound sits between your left and right speakers. low sounds belong in the middle: in Sound On Sound, Paul White says kicks and bass "shouldn't be allowed to wander very far from the centre". busy high percussion is the opposite. Rowland suggests panning hats, rides and shakers hard left and right because it "immediately opens up the soundstage", and White adds that spreading parts between nine and three o'clock on the pan knob often works better than the extremes.
• level. this is where most loops go wrong. Attack Magazine calls the shaker's level "crucial": too loud and it takes over, too quiet and the groove disappears, so it sits "at the back of the mix". its dusted deep house beat adds a percussion loop that's "mixed in very quietly to add a subtle background groove".

the ten-minute routine

here's the whole trick as a routine you can run on your next loop. the times are rough, the order matters.

• minutes 1 to 2: the kit. loop one bar of kick, clap and offbeat open hat. that's your frame, and it doesn't change from here on.
• minutes 3 to 4: the glue. add a shaker on all 16 steps. accent the offbeats, drop the rest to ghost level and pan it a little off centre.
• minutes 5 to 6: the low answer. add one low tuned hit, a tom or a low conga, in two or three gaps. never on the kick, and keep it short.
• minutes 7 to 8: the high answer. add one higher hit, a bongo, rim or clave, that answers the low one. tune it against the low hit and pan the two apart.
• minutes 9 to 10: the level. pull every percussion fader down until the loop only feels empty when you mute them. then swing the percussion and listen again.

try this: make one bar feel like eight

• let some hits roll the dice. in Ableton Live, note probability "determines the likelihood of a MIDI note being triggered". set a conga ghost note to around 60% and it plays in some bars and not in others, so a one-bar loop stops sounding like one bar.
• randomise velocity a little. Live's velocity deviation picks a new value within a range every time a note plays. the manual's example: a note at 60 with a range of +20 lands anywhere between 60 and 80.
• swing only the percussion. Attack Magazine says a jackin' house beat "can handle quite a lot" of 16th-note swing, somewhere around 60 to 65%, and its rough house breakdown says swinging the tambourine and shaker part has "a major impact" on the feel. there's more on swing in make your loop breathe.
• echo one hit. Rowland calls tempo-synced delay "one of the most underrated rhythmic tools", because a single perc hit with a dotted 8th echo (an echo three 16ths later) turns into a whole pattern for free.

common mistakes

• stacking percussion on the kick's steps. the busier the downbeat, the flatter the bar. fill the gaps instead.
• a shaker that's too loud. if you can hear it clearly when you're not listening for it, pull it down.
• layering two similar sounds without checking phase. if two samples on the same hit start moving in opposite directions, they partly cancel out and the hit goes thin. Attack Magazine's fix is the polarity button in your DAW: flip it on one layer and keep whichever version sounds fuller.
• processing the life out of it. for a live feel, Attack Magazine's advice on bongos is blunt: "the less processing, the better".
• a loop that fights your grid. if a percussion loop has loose timing, quantise it slightly or nudge your other hits until they agree, as the dusted deep house breakdown suggests.

where to get the sounds

you can do all of this with any decent kit, but it goes a lot faster when the percussion already sits well. that's the idea behind 90sDrumz: 153 sounds built on 808, 909 and old-school drum machine samples, every hit run through compression, EQ and saturation.

• 16 percussion loops and 8 shaker loops to drop in very quietly under your beat, the dusted deep house way.
• 8 percs, 8 toms, 16 hats and 8 claps as single hits, so you can program your own gaps, velocities and ghost notes.
• loops at 127 to 132 BPM, group-processed so they already sound like one kit. all WAV, 24-bit / 44.1kHz, royalty-free.

load one percussion loop, turn it down until you'd miss it if it stopped, then program a single perc hit into the biggest gap in the bar. that's the trick. press play. make a belter.

sources

• Roland TR-808 (Wikipedia)
• Roland TR-909 (Wikipedia)
• Ghost note (Wikipedia)
• Editing MIDI (Ableton Reference Manual)
• Beat Dissected: rolling deep house (Attack Magazine)
• Beat Dissected: deep tech house (Attack Magazine)
• Beat Dissected: simple jackin' house (Attack Magazine)
• Beat Dissected: dusted deep house (Attack Magazine)
• Beat Dissected: realistic bongos (Attack Magazine)
• Beat Dissected: rough house (Attack Magazine)
• The secrets of dance music production: layering drums (Attack Magazine)
• Effective drum programming, part 2 (Sound On Sound)
• Effective drum programming, part 4 (Sound On Sound)
• Improving your stereo mixing (Sound On Sound)