Drum Designer: Designer Tips

UVI developer Louis Couka breaks down his top 20 tips for getting the most out of Drum Designer.

1. Use Seq Transform functions in the menu to easily shift events left or right or augment a tracks tempo in one click, e.g. make a beat sound slower by reducing the speed of just the snare track.
   
2. Unlock the Cymbal Phase for a different texture at each trigger and avoid the gunshot effect.
3. Use Sequencer Mix Time to time-shift events left or right for better rhythmic placement.
4. As opposed to one-shot cymbal samples try using noise textures, maintaining the cymbal length while only changing the tone.
5. Snare noise samples can be used to easily add pre-echo and tail to your snare for that traditional pumping effect in a more controlled way.
6. Use Mono Amplitude envelopes on the Kick and Snare to avoid overlaps and phase issues.
7. Quickly browse patterns for each drum type to come up with new sequences and variations.
   
   
8. Use the Sequencer Event Link to quickly duplicate patterns, then manually add variations to create longer and more interesting sequences.
9. Use the Sequencer Event Link for periodic automations, such as ping-pong panning.
10. MIDI Modwheel will control all decay times except for the Kick.
11. Quickly tighten or widen your clap by using the main panel time-stretch knob to spread or bind clap atoms in time.
12. You can use the cymbal layer as a snare pre-shift: in the cymbal editor, put the env attack at 500ms, and the delay time at -500ms; in the sequencer, copy the snare track to the cymbal track using the “Copy Track from” function.
13. Avoid the gunshot effect on your Clap by using the Humanize knob to slightly change timing, pitch or pan at each trigger.
14. The Link button on the Edit page also works with prev/next sound buttons, meaning that just one click can completely change all layers - worth a try on any clap preset.
15. Spread your clap shots using the pan setting for each sub-trigger for a wider sound.
16. Click on the Clap Sort button twice to reverse its direction.
17. Kicks will generally go deeper if the first part of the tone is a pure sine.
18. Kick's Rumbles allows you to get dirty tails, perfect for acoustic kick drums.
19. If an element is not playing at the first beat on a sequence, this is probably because its delay time is negative; to fix this go to the tracks Edit page and enable the Link, then shift-click on the smallest time value to move the whole sound to 0.
20. Use Kick Tone Curve presets to quickly test different pitch envelopes.