You've got your hook, your catchy eight bar loop, and your drums are sounding big. You've laid out the arrangement of your track, and all you need now is a few fills to keep things interesting. Let's take a look at some options...Before we get stuck into that, though, let's just consider what a fill is for. It's usually something you'd have at the end of an 8 or 16 bar phrase, maybe to lead into the next section, or perhaps just to add variety as your track rolls through. In either case, though, it's something that adds a nice little detail or element of anticipation to an existing idea. What it shouldn't need to do, is add life to a boring track. If your track isn't much good without fills, then adding a crash every 8 bars won't make the difference. You'd be better off re-visiting the arrangement, and possibly getting a couple more musical ideas in there. For this reason, it's usually best to add your fills at the end of the writing process; so you can be sure that you're not just compensating for a less-than-fully-featured tune.
So, what can we add in? Well, the word 'fill' is most commonly applied to drums, so let us start there. At the end of an eight bar phrase, you can add in some drum variation in a number of ways. House and techno fans may wish to go for something as simple as a kick roll or a snare roll. Even claps! A gradual fade-in, on 8th or 16th notes will do the trick. It's a straightfoward manoeuvre, but classic, and with good reason; it certainly builds up anticipation for the next section.
Anyone writing more natural sounding beats could re-arrange their drum hits to suit; if you're layering several hits to make a snare, then taking some of these sounds and using them in a fill will enable you to write something that keeps the character of your snare, but has less weight, so you can be a little more dextrous with your programming. Bear in mind at these points to think like a drummer; a real drummer can't hit three drums at once, for instance, so if you want a natural sound then try to imagine how it might be played. Of course, if you don't want a natural sound, then let rip...
Alternatively, you can bring in a completely new drum loop for one bar; a big, bashy funk loop, or a sharp, clipped electro loop, something that will contrast with your drum track. Drop it in for one bar and cut out your old track; it will seize the listener's attention at the same time as creating tension while they wait for the beat to resolve back to the original sound.
Don't forget about resampling your drums. We'll touch on this again, but by bouncing down your entire drum track, you can load up a bar as audio and then chop it around in the arrange window of your DAW. It's a quick and easy way of reprogramming your beat, keeping the feel of your main drum track but allowing you to chop things around like you might with
a classic break. This is something that's best done pretty late in the
production process though – if you resample and then completely change the sound of your drums in mixdown, it won't sound too consistent.
There are plenty of other ways of generating interest, though. One of the most popular is to get a 'riser' into your track. This could be something as simple as a rising tone (just pitchbend a sustained synth up for a few octaves over the space of a bar or two) or the classic white noise – get some white noise, low pass filter it, and open the filter as you come to the end of your phrase. Similarly, you could take an interesting droney FX sound and just fade it in.While we're on the subject of effects, lets not forget the classic dub styles of temporarily sending things to an effects channel. You'll need some automation for this, but you could consider sending your snare sound to a big delay for a couple of beats, or possibly grouping a few things together, and automating a send to a tight reverb, to make everything sound a bit loose and spacious. Then, at the start of your next phrase, everything slams back into focus.
At the start of a phrase, many people like to use a crash cymbal to signify that we're moving to another section. This works, and it's a classic option, but it can be dull to hear every 8 or 16 bars. So why not try to vary it up a bit? A big noisy FX sound with some reverb and delay can have more impact, or some sharp filtered bleeps and bloops from an analogue-sounding synth can be much more interesting. It's also good to remember that you don't always need to emphasise beat one; try putting your crash on beat two or three of the bar, to catch listeners off-guard. Often, you can leave the drums out for the first half-bar or so of your new phrase, to give it more energy when it kicks back in.
One trick for the IDM-influenced heads out there is to return to our question of resampling. Why not resample the entire track? Get it back in as audio, and you can chop it down as crazily as you like. Or, fire up a plugin like dBlue's legendary 'Glitch' and let it rip. Loop the track for 10 minutes, bounce it down again, and you've got yourself 10 minutes worth of clever 'stutter' edits that you can drop into your track at will. Resample these, vocode them, reverb them, do whatever, and you're now halfway to writing an Aphex Twin tune. But remember – it is possible to have too much of a good thing! If you go too complex, people can start to lose the groove. And that's not cool.These are all production tips - it's a production blog after all - but there are, of course, plenty of more musically oriented options too. You could go for a quick chord change - try moving to the 4th or 5th of the scale for a bar, or maybe an inversion; make your lead melody go up for a bar instead of down.
So, we trust this has given you a useful overview of some of the options out there for you; now get working on that track and give it that last few percent of detail that will lift it above all the others out there!
