Widen Your Drum Loops With a Frequency Shifter

Frequency Shifter raises or lowers the frequency of an input signal using a complex amplitude modulation-like technique. Unlike the pitch shifter, it does not preserve the harmonic relationships between the various tones and harmonics in the input signal. The following tutorial will show you how to widen your drum loops with a Frequency Shifter. So, we have already made a short sequence in SoundBridge: DAW, which contains essential elements like a kick drum, bassline, and a drum loop. Here is how it sounds.

~Full mix - Unprocessed

MFreq Shifter by Melda

Looking at the picture above, you will see that the drum loop channel is placed on the top. We will, therefore, start to process it by adding an instance of a frequency shifter effect to it. For this tutorial, we will use the MFreq Shifter effect by Melda, but you can use any other with more/less the same parameters to control.

Parameters

As you can see from the picture above, the frequency shifter effect has a set of parameters in the top part of the interface, and we will deal with some of them. Therefore, we can see Dry/Wet, Shift, Width, Feedback, and Delay parameters. The most important is the Shift, which allows frequency shifting. We found that the frequency somewhere around 327 Hz resonates with the root key of the track so we will set it to that value. Next, increasing the Feedback parameter a bit will be helpful to add some short delay.

~Drum Loop - Unprocessed

~Drum Loop - Processed With FS

Stereo Spreading

With the next step, we will start spreading the stereo spectrum of our drum loop. In order to do that, we will duplicate the channel of our drum loop containing the same frequency shifter effect. Furthermore, we will pan the first and second channels to hard left and right and finish it by dialing the Shift parameter on the second channel to -327 Hz, with a slight difference in feedback value.