Need Pros advice on drum production.

[roman]

From reading all the posts of people talking about dumb moron amatuers, it would seem I can have confidence in the anonymous advice on this forum.
I'm trying to take a short cut to pro drum sound production. I use samplers and sample a lot from records. The style of beats I'm doing are: new york style hip hop and funky house. I like Dj premiers drum sound. And Masters at work drum sound. But what are the pro methods of making the beat so loud and powerful. Also how do you guys think house producers get that slighlty distorted hihat sound (overdriving something?)
Any other basic advice wlcome.
Peace.

[bluemt]

More than likely they get this sound from a digital limiter. They are probably slamming the input and limiting the signal to the extreme.

My opinion is that this "stylistic" approach is a result of a dumb, primitive concept such as, "I want these beats to be as slamming phat as can be... let's crank it up as loud as possible."

I would recommend not following this one-dimensional trend and to get the kit to sound big by adjusting the timbre of the kit using EQ, applying moderate compression, adding room sound, and trying other things more sophisticated than simply slamming the sound through a peak limiter. If you try this and succeed, who knows, your record making friends might be asking you how you get your drum sounds.

Good luck.

[Sortasonic]

I'm not a hip hop guy, but I dabble with samples on occasion. I run just about all of them through the Distressor at least once. The distortion settings go from warm to downright dirty. The EL-8 is good on a lot of things, but really shines on drum tracks. It's a chunk of change, but well worth it. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hip hop producers were using them.

[Rams Boy]

It's no so much distortion and compression. Alot of it is 12 bit samples. That's right. The 12 bit samples are grainier, edgier, and have that lo fi quality. Mixed with smooth clean R&B sounds, the 12 bit samples cut thru.

[adam_w1]

Yep. Try D-fi and reduce things to 12 bit and add some filth !