Drum/rhythm knowledge rolling thread

Blackdown said:

2step (garage) takes the general kick snare kick snare pattern but it's the detail and embelishment that make it funky.

firstly you often overlay four offbeat hats (so shifted an eighth from the main four beats in the bar), that date from house/techno. These are often pitchbent down between the third and fourth beat

Then you swing the hats that fall outside of the main four beats and four-offbeats. Then there's loads of other embelishments you can add, double kicks around the first beat, or delay the kick on the third, by an eighth. these can be pitchbent in places too.

Or you can push the second snare on the fourth back by an eighth.

And you can fill the hole between the second and third beat with additional percussion.

All that said, i can do all these and more but somehow geniuses like El-B make it sound yet funkier by some magic tricks that have decived my ears for the best part of seven years... but no mind, it makes me happy that there will always be some more drum magic out there to learn.

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Following on from Blackdown... Some have what I would call "flat" snares, ie on the expected (in terms of backbeat syncopation) 2 and 4 beat... and really swung hi hats/shakers (ie- subtly fluid in terms of placement just before or after the quantised position by a tiny amount to give a live-ish feel). But the best stuff (and this is something which Grime certainly used to excel at) has them at funky angles, slightly before or after the expect 2 and four, giving it this kind of mutated cubist snap effect. The best dubstep also does this, and it enables crazy syncopation, especially if the music (basslines especially) is synced up to coincide rhythmically with the "off"-placement of kicks and snares, that really amps up the jitteryness (almost taking it into jazz territory of skittering anti-funk).

Another key part of 2-step is having space or gaps in the beat and music, little stops which create an additional level of unexpected rhythm-drive. Combined with the "off" snares and basskicks this makes this kind of music unbelievably fascinating.

But really its all in the shakers/hi hats, they are the stitching that ties the rhythm together, it stands or falls on how well they interact with the rest of the beat, giving it space and a sense of drum-narrative, connecting the kick to the snare in that extra-itchy manner... Theoretically a half step pattern ought to give even more space and room for hi-hat patterning (given the additional space involved) but not many have followed up this angle...

Im loving this thread by the way.

borderpolice said:

i doubt that much 2-step rhythm is Re-Cycle'd from other music. The rhythmic feel of the genre is decidedly non-human.

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I'd say that it's the sounds rather than the rhythms that give this impression. 2 Step drum sounds are usually pitched and cropped in un-natural ways. Fills and ghost notes might use completely different sounds to the main snare sound in 2 Step, for example, whereas a drummer would have to stick to using one drum.

I reckon that most 2 Step drum patterns would start to sound a lot more human if you switched the kits with real world drum sounds. It would probably sound rubbish, mind.

gek-opel said:

But really its all in the shakers/hi hats, they are the stitching that ties the rhythm together, it stands or falls on how well they interact with the rest of the beat, giving it space and a sense of drum-narrative, connecting the kick to the snare in that extra-itchy manner...

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All true. One ought to mention the role of delay as well. It gives the rhythm track that extra bounce and -- through its regularity -- a certain structure that allows other elements to go crazy. Of course the delay parameters can be fixed so as to give interesting and subtle syncopation/swing.

hint said:

I'd say that it's the sounds rather than the rhythms that give this impression. 2 Step drum sounds are usually pitched and cropped in un-natural ways. Fills and ghost notes might use completely different sounds to the main snare sound in 2 Step, for example, whereas a drummer would have to stick to using one drum.

I reckon that most 2 Step drum patterns would start to sound a lot more human if you switched the kits with real world drum sounds. It would probably sound rubbish, mind.

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a 2-step drum kit sounds distinctive, that's true: bass drum with almost all bottom eq'ed out, snare & hats enveloped for maximal impulsiveness. The airyness and sense of space mentioned upthread. It would be easy to take a good 2-step pattern and let the drum computer use "soft rock sounds". any of the resident producers wanna do the test and tell us of the results? [I can't because can;t do decent 2-step rhythms!]

Here's a quick example of what I was talking about, although it's d'n'b:


The reason that this guy is successful is not necessarily because he is able to play the rhythms (although that still takes skill), it's because he's clearly spent time putting together a kit which sounds "right" playing d'n'b - small and tight drums and cymbals with sharp attacks and very little sustain go some way towards mimicing the pitched-up, un-natural d'n'b breaks.

hint said:

Here's a quick example of what I was talking about, although it's d'n'b:

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Very impressive!

woah that vid is fucked.

hint said:

I'd say that it's the sounds rather than the rhythms that give this impression. 2 Step drum sounds are usually pitched and cropped in un-natural ways. Fills and ghost notes might use completely different sounds to the main snare sound in 2 Step, for example, whereas a drummer would have to stick to using one drum.

I reckon that most 2 Step drum patterns would start to sound a lot more human if you switched the kits with real world drum sounds. It would probably sound rubbish, mind.

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However a real-world drummer can alter the timbre as well as the decay and volume of his beats depending on how he hits the drums...

Qn to the massive: are there any 2step compression secrets? I know that you can get an awesome garagey woodblock sound by mucking around with this...

gek-opel said:

Qn to the massive: are there any 2step compression secrets? I know that you can get an awesome garagey woodblock sound by mucking around with this...

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I'm not sure about this. 2-step producers tend to be old junglists and their productions are based around lots of samples, and not high-tech trickery.

anyway, compression is really a subtle way of altering dynamics. to be sure, if you crank up all parameters to the max, you'll get new audible harmonics added to your audio, but i doubt that this is very good. If by "garagey woodblock sound" you mean the bass drum, then it's just eq'ing away the bottom of standard bass drums.

No no no- I mean that kind of distinctive snare sound, like a woodbock with the decay truncated...

Blackdown said:

2step (garage) takes the general kick snare kick snare pattern but it's the detail and embelishment that make it funky. firstly [...]

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I've been thinking a lot about this recently and last night i decided to go to the bottom of the issue. i loaded some well-known 2-step tracks into a wave editor and worked out exactly what's going on regarding the placement of drum hits. it's quite simple really, two tricks that i had already suspected were at play, but it had never occured to me to use both at the same time. It's got nothing to do with "swing", everything is exactly on grid (of sorts), it's just not the grid one expects.

(1) Beats are based arount triplets! in other words: rather than subdividing a bar into 16 units (semi-quavers), you divide it into 24 units. of those, only 8 coincide with units like semi-quavers or indeed anything that's divisible by 2. Hence, if you analyse it assuming the bar being subdivided by some power of two, as one usually does, everything appears "swung".

(2) shifting all beats execpt the downbeat, so they are a very very tiny bit early. This is a well-known trick to produce a somewhat hectic/restless feel.

Does that make sense?

borderpolice said:

(1) Beats are based arount triplets! in other words: rather than subdividing a bar into 16 units (semi-quavers), you divide it into 24 units. of those, only 8 coincide with units like (semi-quavers) or indeed anything that's divisible by 2. Hence, if you analyse it assuming the bar being subdivided by some power of two, as one usually does, everything appears "swung".

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Is this true??

gek-opel said:

Is this true??

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for the tracks i looked at. I'm sure there are many exceptions to this, that relate to 2step through some other family resemblance. why don't you check it yourself? Easy to do!

borderpolice said:

(2) shifting all beats execpt the downbeat, so they are a very very tiny bit early. This is a well-known trick to produce a somewhat hectic/restless feel.

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well, swing is doing this for certain ones, but you could shift them all if you wanted.

one great trick for original beats is SWITCH THE GRID OFF. works for Burial...

gek-opel said:

Is this true??

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that's what I've always understood by swing - from jazz to hip hop and electro to UKG - triplets, or somewhere in between the 3 and 4 division.

Yes, dividing the bar into 24 allows you to use 4s and 3s simultaneously. In fact the most basic definition of swing just involves placing alternate beats on the triplet position before the expected beat. With fancy sequencers and all that of course you can have many other kinds of wonky quantise grids.

dHarry said:

that's what I've always understood by swing - from jazz to hip hop and electro to UKG - triplets, or somewhere in between the 3 and 4 division.

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That's pretty interesting if so. My previous understanding was "swing" was more of a "feel" thing, which in real terms of percussion placement meant giving a sense of live-like ebb and flow to the beat by scrunching some percussive elements up and stretching some out (in relation to the others) often by tiny amounts (ie- probably less than a triplet measure). This may all be complete bollocks tho...

gek-opel said:

That's pretty interesting if so. My previous understanding was "swing" was more of a "feel" thing, which in real terms of percussion placement meant giving a sense of live-like ebb and flow to the beat by scrunching some percussive elements up and stretching some out (in relation to the others) often by tiny amounts (ie- probably less than a triplet measure). This may all be complete bollocks tho...

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It was originally totally a 'feel' thing, I think someone actually did an analysis of what jazz drummers were doing and came up with some definitions.

Edit: This looks cool. A Technical Look At Swing Rhythm In Music http://www.tlafx.com/jasa06_1g.pdf

The term swing is used in many different ways. Wikipedia says this: