noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
So we are all correct.
Hooray.
Hooray.
Drum/rhythm knowledge rolling thread
- Thread starter baboon2004
- Start date
borderpolice
Well-known member
I sometimes do this when composing classical music. Correcting the badly placed notes by hand is a hell of a lot of work, at least for somebody like me who's timing on the piano is terrible. I also think that dance music requires a stable pulse somewhere, even if its subtle. a soft hihat may play that role.
What i really like is if the stable pulse is only implied, i.e. not played. Alas doing this is currently beyond my compositional means.
borderpolice
Well-known member
joe narcossist
Active member
I think you could scrutinise a good rhythm for weeks and there would remain an awful lot of crucial elemnts which are simply unquantifiable in any kind of scientific manner - things like accents, acute pitchbends, the tone and pitch of the various hits, blah blah blah..
I've been trying to get my head around 2step rythms for ages, its the thing that motivates me to make tunes at the moment. Its certainly a delicate art.
A lot of the rhythm in 2step comes from the sub i think, its presence emphasises whatever section of the bar it lies under and long attacks give afeeling of motion. The same with the smatterings of melodies and pad/vox etc. I get this feeling of being pushed and pulled along in a stange staggered fashion by the tracks - quite different from say Loefah's Mud in which all motion seems very forward and linear.
I've been trying to get my head around 2step rythms for ages, its the thing that motivates me to make tunes at the moment. Its certainly a delicate art.
A lot of the rhythm in 2step comes from the sub i think, its presence emphasises whatever section of the bar it lies under and long attacks give afeeling of motion. The same with the smatterings of melodies and pad/vox etc. I get this feeling of being pushed and pulled along in a stange staggered fashion by the tracks - quite different from say Loefah's Mud in which all motion seems very forward and linear.
borderpolice
Well-known member
- Carl Craig, Televised Green Smoke
- James Ruskin, Connected
- Kenny Larkin, Track
- Mario Piu, Communication
My all-time favourite example of this (call it metric ambiguity) is Diana Ross's "Upside Down". The Chorus doesn't kick in on the downbeat (or so it seems). Note sure what's going on exactly (i need to transcribe it one day), but the effect is just brilliant.
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Grievous Angel
Beast of Burden
Yeah, that's what happens when you have selected hihat beats swung to 8th or 16th triplets.
BTW - I remember garage producers back in the day talking about taking swung rhythms from funk and r'n'b. Speed up 90s r'n'b records and you will often make a 2step record. And I remember how popular the MPC grooves were when someone at Steinberg put them up as a download for cubase users. The grooves don't work as well in current versions of Cubase. A lot of 2step rhythm programming came from people with a background in r'n'b, where these techniques were used.
borderpolice
Well-known member
Aren't most garage producers old junglists? i certainly hear (or imagine hearing) lots of jungle influences in 2step.
Grievous Angel
Beast of Burden
Yes, but lots of junglists did r'n'b before.
Don't forget - if you were a black musician doing dance music in the late 80s and early 90s, you would have had a background in r'n'b and soul almost by default. Often reggae too, but r'n'b was pretty much universal.
Actually, the same was true of huge swathes of white dance producers - loads of old soul boys and casuals. I was there - I saw the transition, I was part of it!
Any more with tips on hihats? That's where the magic is...
borderpolice
Well-known member
You are right. And the sampled breaks came from funk tunes in the first place.
Use different HH sounds (and or pitch) so as to play tiny little micromelodies (jungle does this a lot). be very subtle. I say this as somebody who has not succeeded in making a good 2step track, so don't listen to my advice!
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Use different HH sounds (and or pitch) so as to play tiny little micromelodies (jungle does this a lot). be very subtle. I say this as somebody who has not succeeded in making a good 2step track, so don't listen to my advice!
This is very true. Using different pitched hi hats, also place them in the stereo field (sometimes I have three layers of hihats, two L/R, one quieter in the center). Also give each one a slightly different volume, that adds to the funk by putting more "feel" in, creating some that are "ghost" and some that could almost stand for snares...
hint
party record with a siren
Yeah - that's an interesting one.
There's a little 2 beat fill / bridge at the end of the chorus to lead into the verses, but then the 2 beats are "reclaimed" from the end of each verse (i.e. the chorus kicks in 2 beats "early", but ends 2 beats "late").
noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
Arthur Russell's a bit naughty like that. I tried stick that 'Skylight' track in to Ableton once - had to do some sneaky editing to make it work. Mixes amazingly with ACR's 'Flight' if you get it right though.
Just listened to a clip of this on Amazon - the chorus come in on beat 3 of the verse's last bar instead of waiting for the next 1 - a nice trick to make it pop in unexpectedly ahead of schedule, and establish a new downbeat.borderpolice said:
Led Zep's Black Dog is a track I'd like to analyze to see how it works - between the regular 1-2-3-4- acapella verses and the guitar riff coming in there's strange timing that messes with my head (or its clock)!
some / all of this may be obvious, but my 2 cents...
i find that a good way of getting energy in the hi hats is using a number of drum channels with the same hihat sample, with the length truncated differently for each copy, then thinking very specifically about how they're going to run into / out of any emphasised hat, to give a kind of stutter (but when used closely enough together / with the right samples, to give an indistinguishable dynamic shuffle)... if that makes sense?
compressing / processing together helps glue them together too, using subtle automated filter sweeps is a good trick if you're using fatter samples
but it depends on the type of sound you're after i think, the above is i think a bit more applicable to rolling / running hihat lines
but i agree very much with hint upthread in that its so much about developing the right samples / processing the samples well, you can have the rhythms perfect in terms of where you put hits in the drum machine / sequencer track, but if the samples aren't right in terms of dynamics and timbre then the rhythm won't sound like what you aim for... although if that happens to leave you with Burial's drums then thats not so bad i dont think!
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I think the magic is to let the hihats (or basically any percussive element) speak with the other drums. They aren't channels running parallel next to or on top of each other, they have to have a conversation. They are played by different hands (or feet) which are all connected through the body of the drummer, just thinking of that helps me to program a beat.
I have this little fetish to concentrate on drummers when watching a band perform. The fluid movements of a good drummer's body are a beautiful sight.
onthefuckinmoney with this one. knowing this allows you to explain why burial/el-b/2step/early jungle drums are so great and things like forumla house, electro, new school d&b and techno are so boring, as there's no interplay between them, they just continue on in their own, isolated lines. great drum programming is a formula for patterns for the body to move in and all the drums have their own place yet works as a whole.
bnek
Well-known member
great thread!
i think technology has a part in this also. i mean, if you cant edit samples so precisely (as on early samplers) you will end up w/ some 'swing', as the samples wont hit exactly on-beat, even if the sequence is 100% quantized. also if you were just looping, or reorganizing sections of breaks (as opposed to cutting them into individual hits) the 'swing' or 'funkiness' is inherent in the sampled material. i suppose the lower resolution of early sequencers has some effect too, perhaps not sounding so stiff or clinical - 808/909/606 etc. are all pretty funky by default.
i think technology has a part in this also. i mean, if you cant edit samples so precisely (as on early samplers) you will end up w/ some 'swing', as the samples wont hit exactly on-beat, even if the sequence is 100% quantized. also if you were just looping, or reorganizing sections of breaks (as opposed to cutting them into individual hits) the 'swing' or 'funkiness' is inherent in the sampled material. i suppose the lower resolution of early sequencers has some effect too, perhaps not sounding so stiff or clinical - 808/909/606 etc. are all pretty funky by default.
bnek
Well-known member
indeed, though if youre going free/no quantize you do need a good sense of timing (not something i claim to have), i find its best to leave the kick always on beat and leave some of the hats and snare/s unquantized...
also i think jay dee/dilla needs a mention here as well. he was a master drum programmer. alot of people try to imitate that offbeat style but nobody really gets it right. his drum selection was crazy too, extremely varied and always funky. sadly missed
also i think jay dee/dilla needs a mention here as well. he was a master drum programmer. alot of people try to imitate that offbeat style but nobody really gets it right. his drum selection was crazy too, extremely varied and always funky. sadly missed
borderpolice
Well-known member
The way i hear/feel it is more like: the bar before the chorus goes at full length through 1 2 3 4, but at double speed, thus giving the chorus a massive energy burst.