One of my favourite styles of sounds for percussion is the IDM style glitches and buzzes you often hear in a lot of current electronica. There are many ways to make such sounds with VSTs that involve audio buffer manipulation various styles of bit reduction and distortion. Here’s a quick reason tutorial on how to emulate some of these effects.

Firstly find some sounds you would like to “glitch up”, I usually go for things like 909/analogue snares, and more metallic sounding hi hats and cymbals as a starting point.

Ok so method one involves getting a small bank of these sounds an messing with the playback parameters in the NN-XT sampler.

Load your sounds into the NN-XT and map them by selecting all the samples and using the “Automap zones chromatically” feature.

Now (making sure you still have all the samples selected change the playback mode to either FW-LOOP or FW-SUS and set the sample loop start for the samples to about 1-5% and loop end to another 1-2% longer.

You will find that sounds that have 1-2% section looping tend to sound like tuned buzz type noises and those that have even shorter loop times ( < 1% or so) tend to sound like clicks and glitches, all this relies on having suitable samples to start with of course. Anything with a strong impact at the sample start tends to work best.

Now grab individual samples and vary the loop lengths to make for more interesting variation in the sounds you get from this process. Unfortunately the loop start and end points in the NN-XT cannot be automated and so this technique is a little more limited than it would be otherwise (Say for example in Ableton Lives “Sampler”) but you can of course emulate changes in loop lengths on a single sample by copying the same sample to multiple zones and manipulating each zones loop length.

You can now play with amplitude envelope release times and filters to make the sounds less digital and harsh although in a lot of cases that hard digital edge is what people are after when using this technique.

One extra little tweak I find tends to add a little interest is selecting all the samples and setting the spread parameter to about 70% or so, this makes the stereo field a little more interesting.

Here are some example loops created using these techniques.