We've chased the players, I'm sure you'll be able to draw as today we'll be showing you how we've made some beats for you guys at home.
Right, so we've made this beat from layering quite a few different drum hits and breaks, and basically we're going to break it down.
This is the beat in the pole, there's about ten layers of drums in there, and we'll just go through each layer individually building up from pretty much where we started, which would be the kick channel.
We do most of our beats predominantly in audio, we have two MIDI channels there, which are from Contact 2, which is a soft sampler, but for us and a lot of other people the ease in using audio for your beats is great.
This first sample here is a single kick drum, not layered with any other kick drums, from a nice sample CD, not much processing at all, it's a little bit of EQ to take out the very low end which would conflict with the bass, but aside from that the old phrase you can't polish is in use here, we try to keep it as flat as possible.
We use this special analyzer quite often just to make sure that the drums are using and hitting at the right frequencies. In drum and bass the optimum frequency for a kick drum is about 100 Hz, so here you can see it's peaking at around 100, which means it will cut through nicely on a big system.
So we've got the kick drum, add a snare to it, simple really tight punchy snare again, no low end in there, and you want the snare to cut through at about 200 Hz as well.
Again, we have no compression on it, no processing really, no fancy trick, just a nice clean sounding snare that we've found, hitting at the correct frequency, and we layer that with another snare probably hitting a bit low on about 180 Hz to give it a bit of low end to the snare.
Again, pretty much on process, we've decided to have this off as a clean as we can help it.
Also, don't really use any reverb on the main kick and snare just because there's so little room, the music's so fast and there's so little room for the frequencies to breathe.
So we find putting reverb on the main crunch of the beats sort of muddies it and takes up too much room. So main kick and snare there, add some hi-hats.
Again, with these hi-hats, they're just off an old hip-hop sample CD we've had for a long, long time, and they just happen to sound really nice, they've got a nice sheen, nice high end to them.
Again, no EQing, no processing, just a bit of low cut on them so there would be no rumbling frequencies to get in the way of bass or the kick drum.
Let me just add another break with a bit more release on the snares, a bit more rugged sounding, it's just an old drum and bass break off a sample CD, kind of gives it a bit more grip, sort of takes away from the sort of clean sort of noise.
Also just has a couple of hats in there just to sort of take away from the kind of continuous hat that we originally put in there.
And then we often add a light break with a lot of reverb on it, it's just high-passed quite a lot just to sit behind the beats.
Also if you break to add to a kind of shuffle, we've shortened some of the snares to a very short size and we've written them in a shuffle position and just adds more groove.
So yeah, add some shuffle, kind of like room shots on the off-beat, do you know how to have it continuous or sort of sporadic?
Sporadic. The shuffle here is usually our usual two tunes, originally with a full break that we EQed, pitched and on the AVSR function, the short of the release was okay, so they had a constant shuffle to it basically.
And then the all-important splash of the drum bass sounds really kind of empty without more kind of splashy live sounding drums behind it that kind of helps pick up the energy and add some of the sheen.
So we actually use quite often a rock break, sort of famous rock song.
High-pass it.
And yeah, again you can see that we've pretty much taken out all the bass up to around 1400 Hz, or really, really high-pass the break.
So if you take it out, you lose it off the wind, it pulls it.
So yeah, those are the main parts of the break.
Then add a little bit more splash, just kind of often put in a sort of cheap sounding aim and always good just to kind of fill out the frequencies, kind of give it a little bit more energy, so something like this.
Also just taking out all the hats, all the kick drums.
It's good often we find that if you layer kicks, you sometimes lose the original energy of the initial kick, so you might have your kick sounding really punchy and then you'll just add even a really high-passed kick like the one originally on this aim, it just kind of cancelled out the attack of the original kick.
So just copied and pasted the sort of hats from it, again really high-passed and yeah, kind of adds to the...
Also it helps to get a sort of dirtier noise, it's quite easy to sort of end up with a really synthetic, sort of clean sounding, which isn't really what someone bases it all about, so it helps to keep it a bit more organic.
And then yeah, next layer here, we add some more splash, the one in question here is largely used from an old track of ours on Bingo called The Druids, which is a combination of the Trayman break, another old school aim and break, and I think the Fink break, if I remember correctly, high-passed again and just going behind it just to fill out even more.
We often find that beats with drum bass are one of the most important things, is how the bass resonates and works with the kick drums.
So we look at the kick drums, I just got that a few percent.
When we look at kick drums, we often test them out with the sub, because if the sub works well with the kick, half the battle is there.
If it sounds flabby, which Future got taught us, thank you very much for that boys.
It doesn't sound, it doesn't sit nicely, so it's important to get the kick and the sub working well together.
Final layer, pretty almost sort of inaudible, again just some really sort of bright, airy hats.
That's a bit of sheen to it, a nice high-end sheen, which we used this sheen before, the recent release on a round called Disco, and it just adds some nice pops to it.
That's pretty much layers of the break, really it's all about getting the kick and snare punchy and then just filling out the frequencies with some sort of nice splashy kind of break.
Kick, if you wanted to punch it around 100 hertz, snare at about 200 hertz, as you can see here, snare is quite prominent, so sticking out there, there's not too much surrounding here.
Nothing also is coming above this 10 dB line, which we've just found using this particular analyzer, which is probably the best one out there.
If any of your frequencies tend to go above this line, we find that's the sort of limit on a club system where the limiter will sort of cut in.
You generally want everything in the mix sort of standing under there, and that's generally how we master the overall mix, as long as everything's kind of...
And then peeking at the 10 dB, the thing that's popping over it generally pulls back the mix.
But yeah, and also as you can see, lots of room in the middle here for your basses and your mids, and also a lot of room here for your sub bass, so this is the kind of look you want for your drums.
So taking up the sort of low frequencies for your kicks and snares, and then most high frequencies around 1200 hertz for sort of hi-hats and things.
And yeah, if you can get that right, you should have a start to a good track.
When it comes to writing beats, we just like to keep it real simple. The old phrase, less is more, really is apparent in not just writing the whole tune, but in making the beats.
People try and overcomplicate things, and have 4 kick drums, 16 snares, too much truffle. This stuff has faded itself out, and obviously when we first started, we were also guilty of having a ridiculously huge page of beats and layers.
And then we just realised we were muting half the things and weren't using three quarters of them.
And yeah, just keep it simple, don't overcomplicate things, and just try a few things out, try to see where the bass works, where the noises work well with the snares.
If you can use a break, like an old school funk break, or even we layer and aim and underneath it, retain the whole break there, because that gives it a full feeling.
If you have bits and hits and bits and bobs of different breaks, then the beats often sound all out of place.
If you have individual hits of synthetic drums, then organically, aim and slay underneath it, it brings you together quite nicely.
Also, I'd say be really accurate with the editing of drums, and if you're chopping up a break, really zoom in, because if I look at too many people, if I look at someone else's project of them, they haven't really zoomed in far enough, and they find the beat sounds a bit loose and not quantised.
And I mean, you know, you really kind of zoom in until the absolute nearest you can go kind of thing, and just make sure that, you know, take the snap off and really, like, get as much room as possible, really, like, crop everything really tightly, you know, use the envelopes to kind of shorten the release of drums and get rid of any unnecessary noise or anything like that.
So yeah, be super accurate, because it's such a fast music, you know, that the whole key is kind of making that room.
There's also a lot of talk these days with a lot of people using side chaining, which is cool. It sounds really good, but people need not to think that that is the only way to, you know, process your beats as well.
You don't need to have side chaining on your beats to make it work with a bass.
A lot of people, it works for brilliantly, and they have great effects, like, pension music, so side chaining on the pack of Wolves remix for Ram.
And you can really hear it, and it sounds fantastic, and New Guy culture shock, and there's tune bypass, you can really hear the side chaining, and the mix down is fantastic on that tune.
And Noisy as well, on tunes such as Subdue, and it's got that great swing feel.
But if you can't get into those side chaining instruments, some Cubase, there aren't many that really work with it, unlike Logic, and we find you can just do it on a volume automation, like drawing in the envelopes.
But you know, side chaining is excellent, but it's not the beyond end all, so if you can't get your head around it, or haven't got a good plug in to do it, all is not lost. Beats don't sound terrible without side chaining.
I think probably also an important thing to say is, a lot of people use ultra maximizers, and limiters, and all these kind of things that end in eyes that are basically to try and get their mixers sounding louder, which we always find,
one we've been told by the best mastering engineers in the country never use things like that, and we do find that it really takes away from the dynamic of the break.
To get mixers louder, if you've got the right balance of frequencies and nothing sticking out too much, you should be able to drive it on the master out as quite a lot without one part getting distorted.
A good way often is driving it really loud, putting the meter up to sort of full, and as you go higher, some of the break will start falling apart, like maybe the kick drum will start sounding distorted, so you know that if that's getting distorted way before the snares and etc, maybe that's a bit high in the mix.
So yeah, just to get our beat sounding loud, we just drive it high in the master out.
We never have a limiter or anything of the sort on the master out, or generally use at all really. Some people use it a lot for their sound and that's cool, but for us we find it's never applicable.
Also if you put a limiter I find, or maximise it on the final mix of the end, you lose all the shape of the low end as well. As well as the block being a square not having much dynamic, it really muddies up the bass and takes away the shape of it.
We learn that quite a while ago.
Let me do it. My bar is too big, too much.
