Just tried a 10-minute rule for cleaning up messy drum loops and it saved my track

I've been messing around with a beat I made on a cheap Yamaha keyboard from 1985, and the timing was all over the place. So I spent 10 minutes just chopping the drum hits and realigning them manually in Audacity, nothing fancy. It turned this clunky mess into something that actually grooves, even though the original samples sound like tin cans. Has anyone else tried fixing terrible timing instead of just leaning into the badness?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric54013d ago

Bet on it being worth the effort. I did the same thing with a beat from one of those old Casio keyboards and honestly I spent way more than 10 minutes on it, ended up with a loop that still sounded like garbage but now it was garbage in time. Seems like a lot of work for a sound that's probably gonna get buried in the mix anyway. Unless you're going for that super clean lo-fi thing, which is fine, but I just let my bad timing be part of the charm. What kind of music are you even making that needs the drums to be that tight?

ramirez.daniel12d ago

Man, come on. You really think bad timing is some kind of charm? There's a difference between a loose groove and a trainwreck. I get not wanting everything quantized to death but letting your flams hit like a second off isn't "character" it's just sloppy. Have you actually listened back to your own stuff on decent speakers? Not phone speakers or laptop. A real set of monitors. Because I'm guessing that "charm" sounds like a mess when it's not buried under everything else.