Enliven those drum beats

A drumloop can soon become boring to listen to. At the same time, it can become quite tedious to try and build variations into the loop by hand if imagination is lacking.

Here's an interesting way to make drumloop variation a little easier to achieve and add some depth at the same time.

Wire the drumloop player, be it the Dr Rex or Redrum in series with a DDL-1 delay line. Increase the feedback setting to somewhere around the 100 mark and turn the Dry/Wet knob to the zero setting to begin with. We will vary this knob to obtain the effect we're looking to achieve. Other settings can be adjusted to taste.

Load up your drumloop and start it up. The fun begins when you start playing around with the Dry/Wet knob. Turn up the Dry/Wet value progressively and you will begin to hear fills behind the drum loop.

Here's an example of the method in action. The first three bars are comprised of the raw drumloop. The remaining bars bring the technique into play:

Expanding upon the idea, we can wire up a second DDL-1 in series with the first for an even more interesting fill effect, or perhaps split the sound signal from the drumloop player and feed a branch separately into each DDL-1. The possibilities are many.