DFAM Techno Percs & Drums

追加: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, hope you doing well today.

[00:00:01]Percussion with the Dfam. If you want more video about Dfam, I made already with kick, bass, [snorts] hypnotic sequence. I put the link in description.

[00:00:09]But today, yeah, we're going to do what this synth was initially kind of designed which making percussion. And you're going to see that this synth has been very carefully thought about making percussion. Let's jump into it. So, to start on the same base, we have more or less everything at 12:00. You should get and you press trigger something like that. So, I add a bit of reverb because I always feel like it's better to hear like some of the tone variation.

[00:00:34]So, this is dry.

[00:00:36]This is wet. It's just a little Ableton reverb. It's very gentle. So, the first way to make uh interesting percussion, especially in techno, is kind of create weird tone. And the first way you can do that with the Dfam is with the hard sync. So, we're going to activate the hard sync.

[00:00:49]If I bring a little bit the frequency oscillator two up, you can see it's kind of creating a phasing flanger-y tone. Basically, hard syncing the phase of oscillator two is synced to oscillator one. And when you have the oscillator two frequency higher than the oscillator one, uh it kind of force to restart and it create this weird phasing effect, which is very interesting. So, for our percussion, keep in mind oscillator one kind of going to control our pitch of the perc.

[00:01:22]And VCO2, the tone.

[00:01:30]>> [music] >> Now, we can use also different waveform.

[00:01:41]Now, another great way to get weird tone is to use FM and you have a dedicated knob for that already. Just crank up the the knob. So, I always recommend to go very gentle with this because you have a lot of sweet spot all the way through the knob. So, if you go straight up like this, you might miss some spot.

[00:01:57]>> [music] >> You see already you got >> [music] >> Now, obviously, you can go back on VCO1 and VCO2 frequency to shape the sound the way you want. If you prefer something in the lower frequency or higher and change the tone. So, that's what we're GOING TO >> [music] >> OKAY, SOMETHING LIKE IT. WHY NOT? NOW, IT'S A VERY bright harsh sound and a great way to make it more like a percussion and like a usable sound is to use the filter. So, the idea is to use the low-pass filter to filter the sound and to open it very fast with an envelope. This way, you just catch very fastly this harsh harmonic transient.

[00:02:49]And so, you're going to hear.

[00:02:50]>> [music] >> So, first we muffle the sound, but then we use the envelope to quickly get this high So, then the decay will get you something a pluckier.

[00:03:09]The more you put envelope on the filter, the kind of more percussive your sound get.

[00:03:17]Now, it's pretty short this because our VCA decay is 12. If we make it a bit longer, our sound's going to be longer, so we can hear the filter modulation better.

[00:03:30]>> [music] >> Again, it's depend if you want a sharp sound or more like long.

[00:03:37]Now, we want percussive sound, so we want to add punch. And an easy way to add punch is to basically apply a pitch envelope. So, here we're going to apply it on VCO1 first because it's our Remember, it's the oscillator that set the pitch of your percussion. And if you go positively, you're going to have a tom-like effect.

[00:03:56]Maybe you crank up the decay.

[00:04:07]So, that's a bit too much for me, but it was just for you to hear.

[00:04:11]>> [music] >> Okay, cool.

[00:04:22]>> [music] >> Now, you can go negatively, you get an interesting tone also. But you need to be like very close to zero.

[00:04:31]>> [music] [music] >> If you go too much after, I personally don't like it much, but >> [music] >> Now, you don't need to be like a tom-like effect. You can just be gentle here as well.

[00:04:55]So, you just get this nice pitch modulation at the beginning.

[00:04:59]>> [music] >> Just to add a bit of interesting things to the sound. Now, you could use with a very short decay a bit of pitch amount to create a kind of a click at the beginning. So, we're going to put a short decay.

[00:05:13]>> [music] [music] >> And you can hear it at this transient at the beginning of the sound.

[00:05:28]>> [music] >> Uh I'm going to go back with slight >> [music] >> with a slight pitch modulation.

[00:05:39]>> [music] >> Just to create this detune effect. Now, we can apply this envelope to the VCO2.

[00:05:45]So, you remember it's going to change the tone. So, again, you can go >> [music] >> negatively or >> [music] >> positively. Personally, I like both.

[00:06:04]>> [music] >> I'm going to keep it positively. Now, another way to add transient is to use the noise. So, here >> [music] >> as the filter is kind of low-pass, uh you don't hear the noise as much if you keep your filter down. You need to open it a little bit more.

[00:06:24]>> [music] >> Without.

[00:06:29]>> [music] >> I always like a little bit of noise on the percussion. It's always add a bit of excitement. You can use this noise if you want a more dirty noise.

[00:06:44]>> [music] >> Okay, now we can fine-tune a little bit.

[00:06:55]>> [music] [music] >> Okay, cool. And then finally, we have the sequencer which allow you to create another percussive sequence. So, here what I'm going to do is I'm going to set my perc on two, four, five, seven.

[00:07:31]Uh and you get something like this.

[00:07:33]>> [music] >> Now, the idea is to use the sequencer, the pitch sequencer to maybe modulate the VCO2, which is going to change the tone. So, we're going to just switch down to VCO2. And now we have >> [music] >> Now, we can have fun.

[00:07:54]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] >> Okay, I got lost a little bit. So, I just reset everything. You know how it is with the Dfam. You always experiment.

[00:08:29]Now, another way to get percussion-like is to use the noise. So, we're going have the noise and we're going to use THE HIGH-PASS FILTER.

[00:08:44]WE CAN CRANK UP THE RESONANCE A LITTLE BIT.

[00:08:47]And you already have a hats-like sound. Now, one thing that can be interesting is to again use FM or hard sync to create this kind of weird effect and slightly add it to the hats.

[00:09:03]So, we're going to use >> [music] >> this and we can use >> [music] >> And now we have this nice We can add A BIT OF FILTER.

[00:10:00]>> SO, YOU CAN'T EVEN ADD THE OTHER ONE.

[00:10:13]IF YOU WANT more like a snare like sound.

[00:10:31]And now you see by having a very high frequency, you kind of create this resonance sound.

[00:10:49]You can add noise from here.

[00:10:55]Now, the great thing is to use the sequencer to add a bit more of movement.

[00:10:59]So, we're going to do a crescendo sequence which means like the first one is going to be at low so 12 and then we're going to go like at let's say 3:00 and then one at 5:00 and then back to zero and we do the same here. 3:00 here again, same on here, then 3:00, then maximum and this one we're going to put to the maximum and we get something like this.

[00:11:29]Now, the interesting things is to use the pitch to modulate the VCA decay. So, we're going to use our patch before that.

[00:11:36]VCA decay here and we can play now.

[00:11:52]Now, what you can do is to add a slow attack.

[00:12:01]Get more like a shaker like effect. Now, obviously, I didn't add delay but you could add delay to add even more.

[00:12:23]And then just tweak a deep um All right, I got lost again. Now, the last way of creating percussion I wanted to show you is to use the filter.

[00:12:49]Basically, the filter is a self-resonating filter so that mean like if you crank up the resonance almost up to the max it's basically act as a oscillator.

[00:13:06]So, that can be great also to create percussion like You can create kick drum, you can create tom.

[00:13:19]What I don't want you to show you is that now you can do FM with this because this is basically a oscillator. So, if you use VCO2 to modulate the filter, you're going to create FM like we did before with VCO1 modulating VCO2. So, we're going to use our VCO2 out and we're going to modulate the filter so we're going to use the VCF mod here on the patch bay.

[00:13:39]Now, you have nothing but if you crank up the this knob here >> [music] >> we'll start to have nice FM and then you can >> [music] >> And then you can obviously have VCO1 modulating VCO2. So, VCO1 will modulate VCO2 that we're going to modulate you cut off.

[00:14:29]All right, and again I got lost so we're going to stop here. Hope you learn a few tricks to design percussion or percussive loop. Thank you very much for watching and see you next time. Bye-bye.