Enormous drum and percussion sounds are the order of the day as we turn our attention to producing blockbuster beats suitable for a Hollywood epic

Larger-than-life, ‘cinematic’ beats have become such a mainstay of soundtracks, TV idents and advertising that they’re almost part of the media wallpaper. Take a quick surf through Saturday night TV or any number of recent movie blockbusters and you’ll be bombarded with huge, epic percussion sounds. Listen a little closer and you’ll hear that these sounds, although rooted in real instruments, can also sound ‘otherworldly’, which only adds to their mystery and overall epic feel. To get straight to the point of this tutorial, achieving these cinematic sounds is primarily a case of careful sound selection and appropriate effects processing.

Our first step, then, is to put together a set of core sounds that we know will deliver. We’ll cherry-pick from ‘world’ and orchestral percussion to get a good sonic spread. You should be able to find these sounds in most DAWs or the instruments we suggest.

We can also find plenty of percussive greatness in everyday sounds and objects. To that end, we’ll be looking at more unusual sources and ‘found’ sounds, too, in our quest to push the boundaries of percussion.

With our sound set sorted, we’ll guide you through some programming basics in order to help you get the patterns you’re used to hearing.We’ll then move on to look at processing the sounds in context using EQ, reverb, exciters and stereo enhancement.

Finally, it’s worth saying that if you’d rather just go for some high quality ready made sounds, there are some truly excellent sample libraries out there – Sample Logic Trailer Xpressions 2 and Heavyocity Damage 2 are two particularly good examples – that work wellrecorded source material into mix-ready epic sounds. For raw core sounds that you can process yourself, it’s also worth checking out Project Sam’s True Strike series, Vir2 World Impact and Native Instruments’ West Africa Kontakt library, among many others.

We’re using Live, Logic and Cubase in our walkthroughs but the techniques apply to any DAW. Right, let’s make some noise!