How to Fatten Up Drums and 808s Using PocketWave’s Parallel Processing

Focus: Specific tutorial on mixing drums and 808s, using the Mix knob, Tanh, and Sine features. Target Keywords: fatten 808s, drum distortion plugin, parallel processing VST, mix heavy bass, beatmaking tips, audio saturation, PocketWave.

If your beats are failing to translate across different speaker systems, the culprit is almost always a weak low-end or thin drums. Sub bass and 808s naturally lack the upper harmonics needed to be heard on smartphones and small monitors. While standard EQ can only boost what is already there, harmonic saturation creates new frequencies, ensuring your low-end hits hard everywhere.

PocketWave is engineered to solve this exact problem. By combining advanced waveshaping with a built-in parallel mixing engine, you can add aggressive grit to your drums and basses without losing their fundamental punch.

Step-by-Step: Making 808s Cut Through the Mix Thickening up a weak 808 is effortless with PocketWave’s dual-shaping algorithms:

1. Drive the Input: Start by pushing the Drive parameter to push your 808 into the waveshaping circuit. You will immediately hear the bass step forward in the mix.
2. Dial in the Tanh Slope: Navigate to the Tanh parameter. Increasing the slope introduces soft-clipping saturation. This creates warm, even harmonics that simulate the sound of an 808 being pushed through a vintage analog console.
3. Add Bite with Sine Freq: If the bass still isn’t cutting through, switch to the Sine parameters. Introducing a slight amount of Sine amplitude and frequency adds a wavefolding effect, generating aggressive mid-range harmonics that guarantee your 808 will translate on smaller speakers.
4. Blend to Perfection: Use the Mix control to dial it back to 50%. This is the magic of parallel processing—you keep the clean, rumbling sub-bass of the dry signal while layering the distorted, harmonic-rich signal right on top.

Glued and Punchy Drum Buses PocketWave isn’t just for bass; it’s a monster on the drum bus. Try loading up the “Boombap 1” or “MPC” preset. The plugin utilizes the Tanh algorithm to shave off harsh, runaway transients while simultaneously fattening up the body of your kick and snare. By backing off the Output Gain and adjusting the Mix knob, you can achieve that classic, glued-together drum sound popularized by 90s hardware samplers, all inside your DAW.

Why PocketWave Beats Traditional Distortion Most distortion plugins destroy your transients, leaving your drums sounding flat and lifeless. PocketWave’s layout ensures you always have immediate access to the Dry/Wet Mix and Output Gain controls. This means you can design the most aggressive, blown-out tones imaginable, and seamlessly tuck them behind your pristine dry audio.

Give your low-end the weight and power it deserves. Add PocketWave to your plugin folder and start making beats that hit harder, sound warmer, and stand out from the crowd.