Denver Recording Studio

Using Foley to Spice Up Your Drum Tracks is easy and rewarding.

I am not much of a minimalist in my work and often add textural additions to regular parts to give a bit more character to the track. Start by building a foley library either by downloading sounds from the internet, recording your own, or accessing sound foley CDs or the foley packages that come standard in software like Soundtrack Pro or Garage Band. Also, do not be afraid to hold on to less than quality recordings as well because these foley parts serve as compliments to the existing tracks and are often layered beneath the other recordings. For this reason, there is a lot more room for crappy recordings to fly under the radar in quality, yet still get the job done effectively for the overall track.

Moving on, I like to do a little categorizing of my sound foley so that I can quickly pull-up and demo sounds to work with. Having a sequencer is very important to streamline your work efficiencies so that you can quickly switch sounds in and out. To be able to quickly find the right foley for the part, I often categorize foley into folders of kicks, snares, hi hats, crashes, ambience, industrial, household, etc.

Once your sound is selected, solo the sounds out and find a nice relationship with their volume levels - this will stear you in the direction of what sort of processing is appropriate. I like to use lots of effects, but at least some compression and a little EQing is necessary to get them to sit more closely. Using a gate may also present a favorable relationship between the sounds and will typically highlight the foley sound more than if they are compressed together. Compression is more like glue, in this case. Once you’ve found a nice medium for volumes, panning, processing effects and whatever else, bring the elements back into the mix and fine-tune the sound you are looking for. By now you should have a good idea of how this process works and by using a sequencer, you can easily interchange your foley to search other possibilities.

— Mike with the Mic

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