beats by the pound’s klc weighs in on how to build a kick ass drum kit.

The medicine men’s KLC is one of the most successful producers in the South. As one of the founding members of Beats by the Pound, No Limit’s former in-house production team, KLC has been partially responsible for selling over 30 million albums during the height of the No Limit Tank’s reign at the top of the hip-hop/R&B charts. Known for his beat-intensive tracks and for inventing the Soldier snare (the predominant sound in Ludacris’ “Move Bitch”), the New Orleans native continues to be one of the most influential producers in the South. On the eve of his first solo album, The Drum Major, Scratch sat down with KLC to chat about the fine art of building a booming drum kit.

SCRATCH As a producer you are known for your drum tracks. Why do you think that is?
KLC I guess by me [having been] a drummer in a school marching band I bring that to the way my drums are programmed. Every song that I produced be real drum heavy instead of melodic. That’s what gives me a real distinctive sound.

Do you build your own drum tracks or do you use the kits that come with the drum machines?
I don’t use many factory sounds. I might use a hi-hat or a cymbal, but snares and kicks, I don’t use ‘em. I sample my drums. I build my drums from scratch.

How?
I’ll take a drum sound that I hear on a record or something, sample it, then run it through some compression, EQ it, get it sounding the way I want to and then go back and re-sample it again and redo the same thing. You know, get different frequency of it and get that one snare to sound like three or four different snares. I might sample one snare or one kick and just take all of the highs off of it so it’ll be all mids or I’ll sample a snare and take all of the low end out it so it’ll be all highs and mids. And I’ll just throw the same two snares together at different EQ frequencies and it’ll give you a totally different sound. Then sometimes when I load up my kits in my drum machine, I’ll take like three or four snares, program them into the same rhythm at the same time to where they’ll hit at the same time. Then that gives me a whole different sound of a snare. So when you hear one of my snares on a record, you may not know that it’s three or four different snares that’s giving you that same sound.


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