So, once I start messing around with intentionally making things sloppy or uneven I find that it’s something I can play around with forever and keep discovering things. Here are a couple of other tricks to keep things loose in the clap track.
A little bit of random panning in a few of the clap layers really helps because the more panned a sound is, the more it tends to stick out, so this creates an additional shifting of the balance from clap to clap.
As a finishing touch, you can triple the size of your clapping section and make it fuller sounding by getting a Filter Delay into the mix. Set it up something like this:
The essential parts of this setup are:
- All delays are in Time mode, set to values under 100ms, each 20ms apart.
- Feedback is set to 0% (or very low) to avoid obvious delay artifacts.
- All volumes are set to 0dB so the dry and delayed signals are the same volume
Feel free to experiment with the filter shapes, although I found that leaving them in their default positions worked just fine. Try turning them off and you’ll probably find that the whole thing gets a bit too bright and sounds less realistic…but of course your mileage may vary depending on what you’re doing…
