Vaughn Oliver, one half of the production duo Oliver, is no stranger to crafting killer drum loops. As the creator of Power Tools, one of Splice’s most downloaded sample packs, his sounds have featured in hits by the likes of Dua Lipa, The Weeknd, SZA, Doja Cat, Adele and many more.

Now, in a new tutorial, the producer, DJ, and mix engineer peels back the curtain on some of the techniques behind his signature loops, and offers tips on levelling up your drum sound.

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One of the tricks in Oliver’s basket? Ableton’s Multiband Dynamics – a stock plugin many producers overlook beyond its famous OTT preset.

“Reduce Ambience. This is a big hack,” says the producer. “If you guys don’t know about this, this might be one of the best gate plugins, the Multiband Dynamics from Ableton.”

“And everyone knows it for OTT, right? People just go for the OTT preset, but I highly recommend going through some of the other stock presets because they do some insane stuff.”

“Basically, this is like a gate,” Oliver explains, as he illustrates using the tool to “tighten” his loop and “get rid of some of that high-end stuff”.

“You can really, really dial it in. Sometimes like say you have a loop that has a bunch of noise in the background or maybe there’s too much reverb – try Reduce Ambience and really play around with it.”

“And it’s multiband, so if you only want to affect the low end in it… say you have a snare where the low-end decay is too long, you can dial it back with that while keeping the high-end intact.”

As Oliver puts it, “People sleep on this because it’s like OTT. Everyone just always uses OTT and it’s like a really powerful multiband dynamics plugin and processor. So yeah, experiment with some of the other presets.”

Before reaching for the latest third-party plugin, Oliver’s advice is simple: master your DAW and mess around with what you already have.

“You might already have something that’s good or better than that in here that you don’t have to pay for,” says the producer.

Check out the full video below.

Take a look at the Oliver: Power Tools Sample Pack over at Splice.

The post “People sleep on this”: Vaughn Oliver reveals his favourite hack for crafting drum loops appeared first on MusicTech.