Every studio should have a bag of percussion toys somewhere around. That bag may only contain a tambourine and an egg shaker, or it may hold everything from bongos, triangles and rainsticks to finger cymbals and castanets. Dig into that bag and experiment with adding percussion to your songs; it’s simple – and more important, it’s fun!
Timing Matters
The distance between ‘in time’ and ‘out of time’ – or ‘great feel’ and ‘terrible feel’ is a matter of a few milliseconds; most of us can feel a 5 millisecond delay and will hear 10 milliseconds. There are two ways to improve your timing when recording percussion parts. The first is to practice. The other is to use the grid function in Pro Tools.
Work on Consistency
If you record a tambourine hit on beats 2 and 4, the intensity of each hit needs to be consistent in level as well as in time, so that you won’t have to write a bunch of automation when you mix. If you add a shaker to a track, it’s better to play the part evenly than it is to fix it later.
Create Parts
Let the percussion tracks help the dynamics and intensity of the song rather than simply being a loop that goes throughout. If you choose to put a tambourine part on a song, consider creating specific parts for different sections of the song. For instance, you might leave the tambourine out of the first verse, then put a tambourine hit only on beat 4 of the second verse. A sixteenth note shake on the chorus (with accents on 2 and 4) might be followed by tambourine hits on 2 and 4 on the third verse.
Invent Your Own Instruments
While there’s a universe of really cool percussion instruments to buy, consider making your own. Put a few pebbles in a soda can and you have a shaker that sounds very different than using a tablespoon of gravel, or rice, or dried peas in that same can. Everything from empty pizza boxes to water bottles can be pressed into service as percussion, and they can add a truly interesting flavor to your track.
Mixing percussion
Once you’ve created all of your percussion tracks, consider where to put them in the mix. If you have two tracks (for example, a shaker and a tambourine) both primarily playing eighth or sixteenth notes, pan them away from each other. Should a tambourine that hits on 2 and 4 sound like part of the snare drum? Panning it to the center will help. If you want them to stand apart from the snare, pan them to one side or the other. If you want to separate your percussion tracks from the drum sound, use reverbs and delays to put the percussion in a different acoustic environment; long reverbs, short reverbs – remember that if it sounds good, it is good.