Hand percussion can be transformative if used sympathetically. If your track needs a lift in the chorus then you owe it to yourself to try a shaker. Wind in some background vocals, change up the guitars and drop in a shaker. It can be that easy!
The thing about shakers, tambourines and the like is that a loop is going to sound like a loop. It’s the little variations and nuances like accents and rolls which make the performance. A sample set across a keyboard isn’t ideal. It doesn’t behave like a real shaker.
The best answer is of course to buy a shaker. An Egg shaker is the best place to start. Its small size and fine grained filling gives it a soft, high frequency “shhh shhh”. For a more purposeful sound you might favour a cylindrical shaker with its coarser filling and correspondingly coarser sound. More of a “craa craa”.
Beyond Shakers
The next step would be to buy a tambourine, the other essential for a top end lift to a section of a song. Apart from being surprisingly loud they are also surprisingly difficult to play well. And then we have that seasonal necessity - the sleigh bell. If you really must do a Christmas record you’ll need one…
So before we get as far as microphones and interfaces, which you might have but it’s not a given these days, we are already looking at quite a few instruments with which to populate your burgeoning percussion box. And that’s before you’ve got yourself what I consider to be the pinnacle of hand percussion, the vibraslap (dunno why, I just love them!).
An alternative, if you want to test the waters before “going analogue” with your hand percussion, is Rassel from Klevgrand. It’s a free iOS app which does a brilliant job of bringing an egg, a shaker, a tambourine and sleigh bells to your phone.
The movement of your phone is tracked and translated extremely convincingly into the appropriate noises from each of the four instruments and surprisingly natural performances can be created using exactly the same movements as would be used with the real instruments. In case you were wondering, yes the audio can be recorded out to your DAW via the Lightning connector, though for realism I’d probably use a mic and the built in speaker to capture the movement.
This is a joyful little app and if you own an iPhone you should try it just because of the smile it will put on your face. It might even make it onto a track or two!
What Klevgrand Say
Rassel – Pocket Shaker truly transforms your iPhone into a shaken percussion instrument. Just pick up the device and shake it. Rassel comes with four different instruments: egg, shaker, tambourine and bells. Simply swipe the screen to change between them. Unlike similar apps, Rassel is based on a unique audio rendering engine that account for continuous velocity changes based on how the sampled instruments are agitated. The device’s gyroscope is directly mapped to this velocity which makes any movement sound the way a real instrument would.
Features
Four different instruments: egg, shaker, tambourine and bells
Loose, normal or tight instrument setting
Loudness boost to crank it up
No hassle just endless Rassel fun