Walkthrough: Hammers by Charlie Clouser

hi there christian henson from spitfire audio here totally honored to be walking you through hammers brainchild of renowned composer charlie clauser of the sore franchise wayward pines resident evil but also former member of the nine-inch nails right how would i describe this library transcendent this library lifts our craft up an echelon and takes us on to a new chapter cinematic drums from 2021 and beyond are going to sound like this i'm just going to show you what i can do with a bass drum simple loop [Music] complexify [Music] now i'm going to take this midi and put it into a warped version of the kick [Music] and i've got some additional warps assigned to these levers [Music] [Music] and that's just the bass drum as a drum programmer having this ability to sculpt sound with rhythm is just absolutely scintillating but there's a lot of sounds in this library over a thousand different individual sounds over 400 kind of fresh raw loops and 400 warped loops with all of those different kind of warping and shaping capabilities so when you open it up you'll see the default is an ensemble's patch which is basically high up here medium down here just gives you a taste of all of the instruments all the way down to the bass drum just insane and then you have the separate drums bass drums solos tom's rotor tom's frame drums snare drums darbukas and scrap so as i mentioned before over a thousand different sounds but deeply sampled as well so six dynamic layers nine round robins and you'll see that then you have loops that match those different categories and then warps now it would be really easy to get into the weeds and play you through all of the different individual hits but that's not the way this library really operates it's all about incorporating the loops warps and hits together so i'm going to work kind of middle out and start with the raw loops this partnership really takes charlie's raw industrial sensibilities and couples them with the elegance of a spitfire audio gui and there's all sorts of really exciting new features to show you but let's just start with some of these loops and introduce you to the space that is this incredible glass steel and concrete room that is 23 feet high and gives you a very tight and focused sound but a brash and man-made one let's start with the mixes now whilst i really look forward to rolling my sleeves up as a drum programmer and an engineer what this also offers is speed of use and ease of use particularly if engineering may be your achilles heel and i do detect with some composers there's possibly a slight weakness in how to certainly engineer drums charlie's mixes are just incredible and they start with the fairly gentle curated and processed mix one and you'll hear immediately that these loops are what i'd refer to as as more cellular phrases they're part of a bigger picture so it's not a cerdo ensemble that's just going hell for leather it's all about you getting these cellular ingredients and building your own patterns for them so you'll hear that the lower drums are very much more about accents loud and then kind of ticking away and as you move up the registers they get busier and busier and more frantic you'll also hear that that sounded quite reverberant hammers ships with a personally curated selection of irs from charlie klauser including stuff like the stone room medium percussion ambient dark chambers drum chambers all specially curated for drums now i'll get on to those in a minute let's just pull the reverb down to nothing and just have a listen to these mixes raw [Music] it's just such a great sounding room mix 2 is a little bit more processed a bit more compressed through charlie's extraordinary selection of outboard and modular gear [Music] slightly more ambient and then mix three is him really crushing it [Music] and you'll hear there that the the dynamics are kind of reduced in the sense that you can hear the momentum a little bit more let's have a listen to the close mics [Music] and the overheads a little bit further away from the instrument now the room mics and then we've got a close mic setting pitched which is charlie's signature sound [Music] got a real subbiness great stuff and then the same with the overheads it's great it's got that real hybrid sound to it not one for the purists but this library certainly isn't like to make a little mix of those there stupendous and then we've also got this sub feed which is great for your lfe channel if you're working and surround so microphone mixes are by and large the same for every drum but we do have some speciality mics depending on the drums you'll see the bass drum here let's listen to the mix [Music] this is such a phenomenal sound so let's just quickly listen to the close mic on this and without the reverb we've also got a close rear mic for this particular drum with [Music] got our toms here [Music] and what's very unique about this library is is none of the drums have any wood in any animal skin or rope these are all vista light and stainless steel and plastic heads that give it that real kind of man-made industrial feel rota-toms i'd love to hear the pitched versions of those and then we have a frame drum and you'll see here we have the addition of a crush mic so that's what the mix sounds like let's hear what the crush mic sounds like and then the pitched version of that [Music] as a drum programmer i've always preferred using stuff like brushed toms and brushed frame drums as a shaker as opposed to jazzy shaker i find they're much more suited to uh drama we've got some darbukas these are great little tikis and then we've got our scrap which is bits of metal that charlie has picked up over the years okay for fits and giggles i just love to hear what they sound like all together so the raw loops we're listening to are currently at 90 bpm and these have been curated for the spirit of that tempo if you will so stalking mysterious music and you'll hear a change in character as we go up through the tempe let's go to 110 [Music] more purposeful 130 full-on action to pandemonian at 150. so a collection of patterns that aren't just sped up and slowed down for the different tempos but curated to fit in the spirit of those tempos and 70 is for well it's for marauding isn't it [Music] something that will immediately jump out at you when you pick up a copy of hammers is the consistency between the loops and the warp loops and the single hits there's basically a a cohesiveness where you don't feel that the loops are something separate from the hits and the warps are something different all unto themselves they're all meant to be integrated and there's all sorts of uh kind of logic to the way things are organized to make your job easier so charlie refers to these as bricks which are basically six notes groups clustered together with a kind of an internal logic so you have loop one two and these are basically different variations on similar kind of patterns and then as we move up safe here [Music] gets a bit busier but what's also great and something i'm sure many of you have experienced when working with loops is they all have loop enders also further down the keyboard you'll find there are reverse versions which just basically means it really speeds up that whole process of doing reverse transitions etc etc so huge variety of different loops and what's particularly special about this library is the loops are very much curated for the bpm and there's a quite an extraordinary feature in this library that not only does it follow tempo if you have this activated so sync to tempo on not only does it follow your tempo but actually when you go into a different kind of tempo category ie from 90 to 110 it'll actually automatically toggle to the loops that have been curated at 110. so you'll see here i've got a gliding tempo going up to 110 and then back down again and you'll hear it'll play the entire loop and follow the tempo and it'll toggle to this next tempo in time for it to be triggered stay with the serdos speeding up now and this also protects the purity of the sound so you're not getting loads of artifacts if you don't want to when you're transitioning into these more extreme tempos away from where the root tempo lies let's listen to the rototoms doing the same thing [Music] clever stuff obviously you can change the various stretch modes and you can switch off the sync to tempo feature and there's also a fantastic retro pitch way of syncing to tempo which just literally pitch shifts it up and down so again you're not getting all of those artifacts and it creates some really interesting effects just check this out [Music] but for those subtle shifts in tempo that would actually be my preferred route also lots of other functions there which i'll get to when we go to the the single hits so as the loops match the hits also so do the warps so theoretically what we'll be able to do is discover the warped version of each of these drums so here you had the raw version [Music] and here's the warped version [Music] so there's a relatability there and we've got all in all 12 different warps so let's have a listen through some of those [Music] i mean this is really insane stuff that charlie's doing with his amazing array of outboard and modular gear and charlie told me what was really conscious of was making low drums also sound high and high drums sound low tastefully bit crushed there very crunchy [Music] and finally 12. it's insane let's have a listen to what he's done with some of the scrap these types of of of cells that you can add to your compositions are such brilliant motivators for your cues and by blending them you can curate and pimp these to really suit your tastes so what i'm going to quickly do is swap all of these out for their warps and then have a listen to what madness we can create there so i'm just using exactly the same midi and i'm just going to go through and switch out for their warped counterparts right so let's have a listen to this i mean this is just great for building up those very contemporary sounding action sequences but also great as tension beds for police procedurals and for me the ability to really sculpt to picture in real time using the different warps is a really special feature and particularly if you're doing additive music and computer games charlie's basically handed you your stems on a plate for different levels of intensity in game play so that's 800 plus loops the building blocks from which you can construct rhythm patterns that are absolutely true and unique to you and a way of pimping them further or indeed starting from scratch is to use the individual hits and there's some amazing features to take you through so the hits it's a massive number of dynamic layers i think six and up to nine round robins so [Music] really incredibly dynamic and we've got all sorts of different dynamic and velocity settings here to suit your keyboard we've also got flams which really give a sense of scale roughs which are awesome and rolls which you control via your modulation wheel and also if you switch on this function you get a an end hit when you take the key off that's how they're organized on ensembles but when you switch to the individual hits so let's go to bass drums you'll see that basically it's organized differently and this again is organized in bricks so it's basically hit hit hit rough flam and roll and then the same again hit hit hit rough flam roll for the slightly different kick drums and the reason for this is well you can program it like this actually quite difficult to do that or on two keys but a technique charlie adopts is this but you can also go two-handed so there's an octave match and then again here [Music] so that'll be the same whether you're solo damped or solo open just the bottom end on that is just something incredible or indeed the four player [Music] there's also a really intuitive voice choking feature so for example this rough independent of whatever tempo you're working at you can actually shorten that by just hitting a straight hit so we'll make this shorter and that feature can be switched on and off there let's check out the four players and this is where the dynamics of what you program is really vital so for me this is all about accents now if you're wanting to really bring those lower dynamics up we have a bunch of features here so let's just try normalize and what that does is as you can see by the icon there is it flattens the dynamics so this is as it comes out of the box if i bring this all the way up [Music] you'll hear the actual amplitude is squashed but you may have also noticed a few other little tricks here we've got an lpf so normalize is almost like midi compression it manages the dynamics another way of doing that is with actual compression so compared to just makes it a little bit snappier personally i wouldn't use too much compression on individual instruments and prefer to compress the whole percussion bus but this is certainly a useful tool for making things just that little bit snappier but for any of you who have sculpted rhythm patterns you know that for transitions and stuff like that reversing stuff is a really cool and easy way to get through an awkward cut and charlie's made it even easier no longer are you having to print audio and then reverse and then kind of match it up you simply use the reverse function which is awesome because it's not just an on and off it is a mount so this will actually sync to your tempo from a quick reverse to a long one and what i'm particularly excited about is the prospect of being able to do that let's move along to the toms we've got our solo got our two player our four player and some rollers and also brushes i think that would be great with that normalize feature up there it might be fun just to check out these different reverbs let's try those in a stone room much more of a kind of gated sound and our drum chamber let's turn this right up it's just beautifully curated stuff medium perk and then uh ambient and again rototoms feature solo [Music] two-player amazing and four-player really very distinctive it's just great with this huge selection of dynamic layers brushes let's again put this about halfway up [Music] charlie sees this as a bit of a bonus instrument he just wanted to put a snare in because it sounded so bloody good in that room i don't know if i'll be using it much but the snare off is also quite interesting kind of almost gives you an alternate tom tom a lot of selections with the darbukas the center the edge and again you can layer all of these up send edge and high and then two player with really rich drums underneath really are your kind of your go-to for epic kind of action material so moving all the way from the bottom to the top to our scrap and we have a low pipe high pipe and iron to miscellaneous so for those of you who are nervous about percussion programming you don't feel it's your wheelhouse you're more into orchestral i think this is an instantaneous set of tools and a great education using these loops is you can hear how different rhythm types are suited to different pitches and different instruments it really helps you to understand how these loops are constructed by allowing you to construct them from cells yourself and then moving into the single hits to create intricate patterns of your own for me the ability to crossfade between the different warps unbuckles the straight jacket of working with loops for me sampling isn't about capturing other people's music and it's not just about capturing individual samples it's about capturing the essence of performance and that's what charlie has done here so for people working on tv thrillers uh procedural work this i think is an absolute must-have for contemporary dramas and for computer games particularly additive forms this is going to be a must go but where charlie the spitfire team and myself are very interested to see it being used is enhancing the work of the producers amongst you making rock pop edm and for old salty sea drum programmer dogs like me it enables us to take sonically cinematic percussion into 2021 and beyond and to be able to craft really intricate and clever rhythm patterns the functionality that you saw in the hits that is universal across the loops with exception to the normalized function so you can apply the reverse function to the loops and the warps as well so there's an ocean of possibility here and i really look forward to watching you surfing in it thanks so much to charlie klauser for just when you use it you just go this is someone who has done this for decades and has come up with a set of tools that finally answers our calls so thank you charlie if we give one up of those for him that would be much appreciated do subscribe if you haven't done there's loads of films coming up and linked below is all sorts of information about hammers and other videos that we've made demos the product page etc etc ding that bell if you want to be notified the next time we put a film up and thanks for watching to the end see you next time you

Channel: Spitfire Audio

Views: 10,238

Rating: 4.7493186 out of 5

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Id: HnQanz6FAr0

Length: 26min 21sec (1581 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021