How Schranz Drive Layers Create Midrange Movement

Alright, so we went over how to make a Schranz kick. Now the next thing we need to tackle in the drums are the drives. The drives are the signature sound of Schranz, in my opinion. The kick is obviously super important because it dictates how the track is like grooving and moving in the club. The drives are what separates Schranz from other genres of hard techno. So let's listen to the drums and then I am going to solo the drives so you can hear what they sound like by themselves. So these

are our drives. This is like the grooving hat and percussion. And just like the kick, it's not just one file, it's three sounds layered together. Three drives doing three different jobs that fuse into one just wall of sound. So here's how this video is going to go. First I'll walk you through the three drive layers that are already in our project. Solo each one and talk about why I chose them. What role they're playing, why they belong in the stack. So then once you understand my layering rules and why I

picked these three drives in particular, then I'm going to go into a new Ableton project and show you how to layer drives from scratch. So let's zoom in here. I'm going to just highlight this one quarter note because it's just this drive pattern is just the same quarter note repeating over and over and over. It's following the kick pattern. So we'll highlight a quarter note, we'll hit command L so we're looped, and then I'm going to solo the drives and press play. Now that is all three drives together played at

the same time. Let's go into each drive one by one. So let's check out drive one. So this first layer to me really resembles a high hat pattern more so than the other two layers we're going to go over. And I have a ton of processing on here, but I'm going to go into that in the next video. So let's just focus on how these drives sound. So we have drive one, which is like our hat and our percussive drive. And this is in charge of giving us that groove. Now

let's listen to drive two. Now drive two is completely different from drive one. It's not nearly as percussive. It's not nearly as groovy. But what it has that drive one doesn't have is it's super noisy. It's got a lot of texture. It's really bright and it's wide. So if the first layer is like the main attraction, this second drive loop is like filling up the space behind it and giving it that full frequency spectrum. So first I'm going to play drive one, then I'm going to play drive two, and then

I'm going to play them together. They both work together so well and they really need each other. And this is why layering is so important because each one of these drives are just performing a completely different job. Alone, they're not enough to just stand on their own, but together they make an amazing sound. So now let's go on to drive three. Drive three is very different. It honestly doesn't even it's it's not even a drive. It's a percussion loop. So let's listen to drive three. And these are like very short,

stabby, like redux bitcrushed type of sounds. And so real quick, what I'm noticing is especially when we compare to drive two, drive two is very bright and noisy and like not percussive at all. When drive three is very percussive and it's not as bright. So now let's listen to our drives and I'm going to turn drive three on and off like sporadically so you can hear what it's adding to the group. It's crazy because it just it just fills in the bottom of the drive so well. And when you take

it away, it just feels like there's something entirely missing. And so this is how I approach layering my drive loops. You know, if I'm going to stack three sounds together, I need to make sure all three of those sounds are all doing something a little bit different. So they fit together like a puzzle and make, you know, a much better full drive stack. So now that you understand how I like to layer these drive loops, I'm going to go into a new Ableton project and show you how I would start

layering. All right. So now I'm in a blank Ableton project. I'm going to hit tab to go to arrangement view. I'm going to set the BPM to 155 and I'm going to delete all of our tracks except for one audio track. And just as a placeholder, I am going to find a Schranz kick loop. I'll use this one, a kick loop one, and then I'm going to zoom in, highlight a quarter note and then hit command L so we can just loop this quarter note. And just so we have some

headroom, I'm going to set this loop to negative six. Now we have our kick. Let's find our first drive loop that we want. I'm going to make a new audio track using command T and then I'm going to go into the sample pack and go to drive loops and just look for one that I like. And honestly, sometimes it's better to just start dragging stuff in because you just never know how it's going to sound with the kick. Okay, I like the way that sounds. So let's just solo this and

let's try to identify like what it's doing and what it's missing. So to me, it's not super, super percussive. So maybe we can add another drive loop that's more percussive. So we get those nice transients in there. And then maybe we can add an even noisier brighter one so we could fill in more of the frequency range. So let's go look for either of those two and just see if we find any. So I really love these like texture drive loops because I just love mixing them in underneath our first

drive loop. So let's drag in drive loop 24. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by turning this all the way down and then slowly turning it back up so we can just mix it into that right spot. And now let me play around with the gain staging of both of these because now I think I want to turn down this first drive a little. And you can really hear just how much energy it loses when we don't have this second drive in here. Especially when it's

tucked back like that, you almost can't even hear it. But when I remove it, you'll just hear the energy get sucked out of the track. So we have our main drive loop that's sort of setting the tone, setting the groove. We have our noisy textural drive loop. Now let's make a new track and we can kind of get a little creative with this one. So maybe I want to find a percussion loop, something that's more percussive. That's pretty cool. Let's loop that first bar and see if we like the way

this sounds. I'm going to start by turning it down all the way and mixing it in just like we did with the last loop. Now I don't love this, but here's a little trick. You can click right here, hit Command E. And then if we hold Shift and Option, you'll see this little like pointer icon. And we can actually cycle through the loop just to find different parts that we like. So maybe let's try this little section. That sounds pretty cool. It's not exactly as percussive as I liked, but you

get the idea. You can find different loops that fit together like a puzzle. And then in the end, it just creates this big wall of sound that is really the signature sound of Schranz. And I know I'm not walking you through how to make each one of these drive loops, but that in itself is its own rabbit hole. I just want to teach you how to layer these drives effectively so you can start writing Schranz and Schranz tracks.

So now that we understand how to layer drives, I'm going to show you this processing rack that I briefly mentioned in the last video. So you can see how I transformed this first drive from this to this. Like just night and day sounds so much better. So let's get into it. So this was our drive one that I spoke about in the last video, which I said sounded like a hat loop and was very percussive. And the reason it sounds like that is because of this processing chain. So again, let's

listen to it with the processing off. It's not really percussive at all and it doesn't resemble hi-hats. But when you turn the processing on, it starts to have that splashy nature and that splashy like tonality that hi-hats do. It's very percussive all of a sudden. So let's dive into how I did that. So right here, I have a processing chain that is an EQ followed by another EQ, followed by a vocoder and then followed by auto-pan and saturator. So first I'm gonna break down how what each one of these audio

devices is doing. And then I'm gonna turn them all off and turn them on one by one. And then in the end, I'll recreate it so you can kind of see like my thought process when I was doing this. So first device, EQ8, let's look at what this is doing. So we have a low cut at 135 and then we have some notching happening around 1K. This is a mess here. I mean, I could have simplified this a lot but I was just moving and I got the sound that I

wanted, so whatever. And then the last band we have is a high shelf at around 5K. So that's the first EQ. Now the second EQ is another low cut but this one's at 310 Hertz or 300 Hertz and it's much more gradual of a roll-off than this first EQ. Could I have consolidated these into the same EQ? Probably, but I do this a lot. It just is what it is. Then the vocoder. This is what's adding that white noise and that splash. This is kind of like the secret weapon here.

Same with the auto pan but the vocoder is adding like a whole new texture to the sound. And this auto pan is acting as like almost like a transient creator or like an LFO tool type of thing. We have this going at 16th notes and we're creating these spikes. And then we have our saturator that is just adding some saturation, some clipping and therefore like kind of compressing the signal. So let's turn all of these off and then I'll turn them back on one by one. So the saturator is really

adding that gain back. So I'm actually gonna leave this on and I'm gonna turn these two off. Vocoder and auto pan tremolo. And now let's listen to it. So you could see that the vocoder is like really softening it up and adding a lot of white noise. And then that auto pan is just sort of chopping, chopping it and giving it that transient. Now that you sort of understand how this works, I am going to duplicate this track and I'm going to delete all of this processing and we will start

over and try to achieve a similar sound, but I'm not gonna just copy the settings. I'm gonna actually just do it like I would if this were a whole new track. So it might not sound exactly the same, but I'm gonna show you the process. So we have our drive here. And what I wanna do first is add an EQA and start shaping the tonality of this. So let's make a low cut. And you can see that this sound is already low cut, but I wanna cut some more of the

lows out of it. Then there's a little peak at 1K, so I'm gonna just notch that out a tiny bit. So it's not as harsh. And I think that sounds nice. I think it's like a little bit brighter. It's a little bit thinner, but when I go to saturate it at the end, I'm gonna bring back all those frequencies that I'm losing. So we don't need that second EQ. Like I said, I could have consolidated that into one, but I just chose not to. So we're gonna stick with just one

EQ here. Now let's add our vocoder, and I'm gonna show you how this works and why this is such a hack. So if we turn the vocoder on by default, this is what it's gonna sound like. And it sounds like really like spectral. It sounds like really bad. It has like a digital like timbre to it. And that's because of the amount of bands. The more bands that we add, the more like weird and spectral it's gonna sound. And you can hear when we bring it down to four bands, it

starts to sound more like white noise, but we can shape it even further. First thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring this range all the way up because I don't know why by default, it's at 12 kilohertz. It's just basically adding a filter on the noise. That's like our highs, I guess. I'm not sure. Really not sure, but I'm just going with it. So then we have our release, and this is like that extra noise that's added. We can set the release time of it. It might not sound like

that much, but maybe we can turn the gate up so we're catching less of the input signal. [t So we can turn the release down, and we get that texture sound, or we can turn it up. [t We can change the format. [t So this is what I mean by like you can really shape the tonality of these drive loops with a vocoder. [t [t [t So I think that sounds pretty good, and now what I want to do is mix that back in with our original signal by using this

dry wet. [t [t [t [t So what's happening is we're losing a lot of that percussive sound. So that is why I added an auto pan dash tremolo, because I don't want to pan this back and forth if we just leave it on panning. [t You're going to hear the signal get panned back and forth, but I don't want that. I want a tremolo effect, which isn't going to pan things back and forth, but it's going to turn the volume up and down. [t So what we want to do is

we want to hit this drop down where it says rate and we want to go to synced and I want this to be a sixteenth note repeating pattern because these hats are basically four sixteenth notes and that is what this quarter note loop is made up of. So let's set the rate to sixteenth notes, but I don't want this shape. I'm going to play with this shape knob down here and this is actually going to adjust the shape of this tremolo or it's almost like an LFO. If we turn it

all the way to the right, it's going to make more of a square wave. And if we turn it all the way to the left, we're going to get this descending saw shape, but then we're going to get this like exponential curve down. And this is the shape I want. So now if we listen to it. We almost have like a closed hat sound now. And if we turn it off, it goes from this really like bright, washy kind of sound to this closed hat sound. And so all we want

to do is then take the amount down. So it's a blend of both.

All right, so we talked about how to process one drive loop. Now we're going to talk about bus processing all the drive loops together. So they sound like glued together and real crunchy and nice. So I have my drive group right here. And you can see the only bus processing that I have on here is a drum bus, an EQA, a saturator and a compressor. And that's I've done way crazier processing. I've done less processing. It really just depends like what the track needs. So what I'm going to do is

I'm going to play this quarter note loop with all the drums. Then I'm going to solo the drives and then I'm going to show you what it sounds like without the processing on there. Spoiler alert, it's not going to sound so different, but this bus processing is definitely helping the drives fit with the rest of the drums. So let's listen to all the drums right now. And if we turn the processing off. So the difference that I'm hearing with the processing on and off is A, this compressor, this sidechain compressor

is the main thing. It's adding a like a pumping effect to it. And what this is basically doing is whenever the kick is hitting, we're sidechain compressing the drives. So the kick has room to punch through the mix and isn't being like, isn't fighting for space with the drives. So sidechain compression isn't something you're entirely familiar with. Just go watch a quick video on YouTube about it. It's nothing that crazy. There's a ton of information out there. It's a very common technique in music production in general, especially nowadays. But the

other thing that I'm hearing is we're scooping out some of these lows. We're boosting the transients a little bit and making the loop feel a little tighter. And then I'm just doing a little bit of hard clipping at the end just to make sure those peaks aren't getting out of control. So let's turn all of the effects off and then I'll turn them back one by one. So first effect we have is the drum buss. This is just adding there's something about drum buss that I just love. It adds this

character to the sound, even when it's seemingly doing nothing that I just love. I love the sound of it. On this drum buss, I have this transient knob down and I'll show you what it sounds like when this knob is all the way down. First, let's turn the dry, wet all the way up. It basically just enhances the transients and makes the whole loop a little bit tighter. And then the other thing that I have is this damp knob that's actually down from 20 K Hertz. So let's turn the dry,

wet back up all the way and I'll show you what the damp knob is doing. It just does such an amazing job of like transparently rolling off those harsh high frequencies that are just constantly in drive loops. So I really love drum buss for this. I can sort of like kill two birds with one stone, make the transients hit a little bit harder and also filter out some of that, some of those harsh frequencies. So let's command Z and go back to our original value. And then I think the dry,

wet was at like 48. So without it, little bit nicer transients, little bit nicer frequency response that I'm just enjoying. So then the next device that we have is the EQ8. So let's listen to it without it. It's just doing a great job of scooping out those lows that we don't need because that is what our kick is for. Our kick is there to dominate the low end. So we don't need the drives to dominate the low end. So we have a low cut here and then if we actually double

click here, we can see like just a higher resolution of our EQ. So this third band is at like around 5K and we just have like a one and a half dB notch there, as well as taking a little bit off the high end. So I think it's cleaning up the low end, it's cleaning up the high end, it's sounding a lot more like polished and ready to fit in the track. Then the last effect we have is the digital clip. And you can tell when the clipper is actually like

performing its job. There's like a blinking light right here and it's visually telling you like, hey, peaks are getting clipped. And you can sort of see whenever this like shaded blue box reaches into this area, like right on the sides here, this is the knee of the clipper. Whenever it's surpassing the knee, those peaks are getting chopped off. So I just did this to control the peak level of the sound. And we can see that again, if I hit tab and go to our drive group, and I'll click this right

here so we can just clear our results. With the digital clipper on, we are peaking at negative 2.5. And with the clipper off, we're peaking at zero dB basically. And it sounds exactly the same. To me, it doesn't sound any quieter or any louder. Maybe a hair louder with the with the saturator on. But again, we're peaking at negative 2.5 anyway. So that's that's a win. Then the last effect that we have is the sidechain compressor. So what is a sidechain compressor? It is a compressor that gets triggered by an

external source. Normally, a compressor is getting triggered when the sound that the track is on is going past the threshold. But in this case, we are setting the source as something else. And in this case, we picked the attack of the kick builder because it's a very, very short signal. So just to start this over real quick, I'm going to turn this one off and I will add a new compressor and I'll show you how I set this up from scratch. So new compressor, if we press play, sounds exactly the

same. I'm going to hit this little button right here. This is going to open up like our sidechain source settings. I'm going to select external and then I will set our source to attack. Now you can see the signal right here is actually the signal of this attack layer in the kick builder. So let's go back here. Next, I'm going to set this to peak because this sound is so short. I want this compressor to be reacting to the peak signal, not the RMS, which is like the average volume over

time. And then I'm going to drag the attack all the way down because I want this sidechain effect to happen immediately. As soon as the signal passes the threshold, I want the sidechain effect to take place. And then the last thing I'm going to do is drag this threshold down. And also, if your compressor doesn't look like this, there's buttons down here that show the different types of views. This view is the best. I just I love this view. So I think my compressor is set up that way by default.

But it's these three buttons at the bottom. So then we're going to drag the threshold down. And you can start to hear that pumping take place. So now let's listen to the drives and the kick so you can really hear how the sidechain compressor is working. So first, I'm going to turn the sidechain on. Now let's listen to it with it off. So two things are happening here. With the sidechain being on, you're removing the drives for the beginning part of the kick. So for example, if I were to select

this quarter note right here and hit command B, you can see our drive right here. There's nothing in the beginning of this kick. And that is the sidechain compressor taking place. If we were to turn the sidechain off and do the same thing, highlight this one bar and hit command B, you can see that now we have this huge transient right in the front. And this is going to be fighting with the transient of the kick. So that is why we might sidechain compress our drives. The other thing that's happening,

though, is that the groove is changing. It's becoming more like swung and less like straight and aggressive. And so this comes down to like a style choice. So on this original sidechain compressor, I had the ratio all the way up, which means that the effect is going to be as intense as possible. But you can turn the ratio down and get a little bit less compression. So maybe all you need is that it's really all up to your personal taste. Sometimes I don't even sidechain them at all because the drives

just aren't really conflicting with the kick. But in this case, they were. And in this case, I also wanted to go for that like very like pumpy kind of sound. So just a quick recap. This is what it sounds like with no processing. So to me, that sounds better. That is more in line with the sound that I was trying to achieve in this track. For you, you may not like it. And that's why I definitely recommend you to experiment and explore different combinations, because that's the only way you're going

to find the perfect sound that you love.