I love the Machinedrum and have been using it for a few months now but I really can’t seem to get it to sound loud, punchy or full - I usually have to run it through some distortion and eqing in Ableton to get a thicker and louder sound out of it but I’m sure this can be done from within the machine because I’ve seen it done before!
Anyone have any tips on how to achieve this? And I’d be really interested to know how you post-process the Machinedrum (if at all) to give it that final touch?
Pitch down, decay up, and LFO on. Double up the step if you want to create layered kicks.
You can route one of the output thru the MD audio in and add additional FX or dinamics. Also the best friend of the MD Is a Monomachine used as FX machine and filterbank, really powerfull combo, I was doing crazy distorted techno with that!
have you explored the (master eq and) Dynamix compressor much yet?
the Autechre .syx are an interesting reference for how they setup for 2005-8 PA sets. (although i imagine they may have piped all that hardware through some external sound enhancing processing too)
yeah nice they gave for free their files, unfortunately these are not fully working for non UW versions…
You can learn a lot from there (AE))))) also the MD guides are very useful to get punchy drums.
Tips
Separate your outputs and you can use an impulse machine on your kick and or feed MD onto MD
low the extra gain on the master eq so you get a better sound and experiment on what MD users suggest
This machine sounds really punchy and aggressive!
Not to state the obvious but compression alone when properly applied.
I do all of the gain staging in the MD (since I’m only using the main stereo outs in my current set up) then I use the onboard compression and it get almost all the way there with just that. I generally have a limiter set up at the end of my software chain too and the combined results have my MD very punchy.
Before you do anything complicated, learn to get 90% of the way there with volume.
turn the MD up to 3 o’clock (any higher and you may be overdriving the signal, which can be desired… read this on a thread somewhere here). turn your mixer up, turn individual sounds down.
If you can’t get it punchy turn up your monitors more.
Be careful with any wideband noise like snares or hats, they can eat a ton of headroom and can be triggering the compressor if it’s enabled… turn them down and filter them
Last edit: if you’re going into master FX before I set compressor I adjust EQ, boost bass and highs