Drum Programming - Keep it Real!

The bedrock of almost all good underground music is the drums. From hip hop to jungle, garage to house, a solid and interesting drum track is one thing that you simply can't do without. But it's also something that a lot of people skimp on - simply programming a straightforward drum track and hoping it will be enough. But by picking up a few crucial basics, you can learn how to program beats that are more interesting and realistic, and will make your tracks funkier, more fluid, and more fun.

Now, we understand that most readers of this blog will be concerning themselves with dance music, in which so many elements of the drums are inherently unrealistic - for instance the layering up of breaks in Drum & Bass, super-heavy compression and so on. But still, these tracks will have a main set of 'hits' for the kick, snare and fills, and it's these which need to be programmed cleverly.

So, the first thing is to think like a drummer. The best way is, of course, to have some lessons - as this will give you a whole new set of ideas on rhythms and fills. But this isn't practical for everyone. The obvious consideration is that a drummer has, clearly, only two arms and two legs - and thus can't hit three drums at once. Instead, try to imagine how the drummer would sit in front of their kit, and when playing a fill or a roll, which hand would hit each drum.

Next, a real drummer can't hit the drums exactly the same way every time, so take a look at the velocity of your notes. Most sequencers will have some kind of a 'humanise' function in their MIDI capability, which will subtly tweak the velocity and quantisation of each note, and make it sound less machine-like. This is handy, but in addition to overall randomness, a real drummer will have certain other quirks. For a start, they will favour one particular hand, and that often leads to hitting the drums slightly harder with that hand, as well as starting a fill or a roll with that hand too. So on a 16ths pattern; for instance on hi-hats, the first, third, fifth (etc) hits will be very subtly louder. They're also likely to be more rigidly in time; sometimes the alternating hits (i.e. 2, 4, 6...) may be very slightly late. With both of these tweaks, they should be subtle enough that you can barely hear the difference; however the ear will pick up on the variety and natural sound.

Shuffle is another option to take things off the strict quantisation grid. Putting a shuffle quantise across your whole drum part can often sound a little extreme, but applying it to just the hi-hats or background percussion can add a sense of groove without overpowering the overall rhythm.

It's also a good idea to have a selection of drum hits available to you - in practise, hitting a drum with different levels of strength will create different sounds, not just different volumes. So a good set of kit samples is essential, and will usually come included with a good sample pack. Or, you can sample a real loop - but when chopping it, make sure to be aware of the rules above: although the drummer will have played naturally, you can't have the same hit twice in succession for instance, as it will immediately sound strange and unnatural. An expensive alternative would be a modern drum library like BFD or Addictive Drums. These plugins have gigabytes of multi-sampled drums and enormous variety; frankly they would possibly be overkill for a lot of dance music producers, but do give you a lot of scope for programming real-sounding drums.

Something else to be borne in mind is the production of your drums - you should remember that a real drum kit occupies a real space. As such, all the drums are in slightly different places, and you could consider moving the hi-hat slightly off to one side, with the toms and ride cymbal off to the other side - in a similar fashion to the way drum kits are normally set up. Reverb too - a drum kit can't exist in a vacuum, so a gentle room reverb, in combination with pan, will give a real sense of listening to an actual drum set-up.

Programming drums, then, is something that you can go very deep into - and this author would recommend that in addition to following the tips above, you get involved with a whole lot of trial and error; nudging hits early or late, skipping them altogether, and so on, to give maximum variety to your beats. And don't think that there's no point in doing this, when you're just going to compress the life out of the drums later - those subtle variations will still ring through loud and clear once you've put everything through the mixdown wringer. So solve your drum woes by rolling up those sleeves and getting busy with the programming - you'll be amazed how much difference it can make!

Get Pumped! Side-Chaining Explained

Side-chaining - that's what you do to your sub-bass to stop it clashing too much with the kick, right? Well yes - but there are a whole host of other ways you can use it too, from de-essing a vocal, to helping a melody line cut through a mixdown more easily. So let's go in deeper on this simple, but hugely useful technique.

Most people, when they think of side-chaining, consider two main uses; there's the dubstep and jungle classic, of ducking the sub-bass as mentioned above; and then there's the "French House" staple, beloved of the likes of Daft Punk, in which you help create the world's biggest kick drum by sidechaining almost everything off the kick. Synths, strings, sample loops, the works. It creates a strong "pumping" sound and gives your mix movement, although it's not exactly innovative these days. But it certainly works.

To do this, you simply need to set your compressor's side chain input to take a signal from your kick drum. However, this method can cause problems - for example, if you want the "pumping" sound to continue when the kick is not playing - so in this case, it's useful to set up a new channel with no audio output. Then put a kick drum on this channel, so you can have full control over when the compressor is triggered or not.

That's the obvious use, but what else can you do with a compressor and a side-chain input? Well, if we consider that the main effect is to make something get out of the way of something else, it becomes extremely handy in mixdowns. A very common area for treatment is the vocal. This will normally be one of the most important features of your track, so it needs to come through clearly. As such, it's worth setting up a compressor on pads, strings and synths, and sidechaining that off the vocal. Nothing extreme - just take off 2 or 3 dB, but it will help make space for your vocal.

Or take effects tails - reverbs, or delays. These are great for giving space to your sounds, but aren't really featured sounds in themselves. By gently sidechaining them off your drum buss, or synth line, you can make sure that they simply add atmosphere, and not mud.

Returning to vocals, there's the de-esser trick. As you may know, a de-esser is essentially a frequency-specific compressor. You choose a frequency, and then whenever that frequency strikes, the de-esser ducks the volume. But many de-essers can be somewhat basic and difficult to configure. A more sensitive solution may be achieved by duplicating your vocal track and putting it on a channel with no audio output. Then filter it so all that's left is the frequency range you want to remove. Now put a compressor on the original audio channel, with your band-passed vocal as the side-chain input. Ta da - you now have a de-esser with high controllable threshold, release and ratio controls. A true pro might say that you should be avoiding all this stuff with a good recording - but then a true pro probably didn't have to record their vocal in the wardrobe of a bedroom studio late at night to avoid the sound of traffic outside.

These are a few tricks - but they're just the ones that involve compressors, and there are a lot of other effects that can make use of a side-chain signal. The other main dynamic effect would be a noise-gate. These can be a great way of making a dull synth chord sound much more vital - try gating your synth and then setting the side-chain input to something like a hi-hat pattern, or a drum buss. The effect will be a stuttered, rhythmic synth pattern. Or you could lock a channel down to your main groove - for instance, sync a pad sound to your kick to glue the rhythms down and tighten up the pattern.

Similarly, you can create crazy new rhythms with a side-chain filter. Put the filter on a vocal, bass or synth sound, and set the side-chain input to something rhythmic, though not too detailed - a snare or simple bongo pattern. Then you can tweak the attack and release of the filter to make whole new sounds, movement or just more interesting tones on your original track.

These are just some of the uses of side-chaining, then, and we haven't even covered vocoders (stick a vocoder on your vocal track, set the side-chain input to some crazy sound) or synths with inputs (set the oscillator to "external" and feed whatever signal you like in there, to modulate it with the onboard filters).

As you can see, side-chains can be used across the board - from useful mixdown tools to help give subtle tweaks to your instruments, all the way to sources of creative visions that can help you come up with riffs, sounds and ideas you'd never have thought of otherwise. So load up some of those boring old plugins, and start combining your sounds for maximum inspiration!

Work that Wobble !

Some of the more veteran dubsteppers amongst the readership here may remember the fateful day - probably in early 2007 - that they heard Coki's track "Spongebob". Arguably the first "wobble" track, it divided opinions in the scene, but it ushered in a sound that was here to stay. These days, when people say "dubstep" they're usually thinking of that high pitched squeal - "filth" to many. It's an essential part of the sound in 2011, and in the UK there have even been chart hits featuring it. So lets take a look at this mainstay of a scene...

The wobble, or filth, sound is now fully established in many genres besides dubstep; from drum & bass, to moombahton, to electro house and breaks. It's characterised by a harsh, distorted, high pitched lead type noise. The classic wobble was created by assigning the cut-off of a filter to a bass sound. Simple. Modulate the cut-off frequency, and you have a basic wobble. But this has been around for a long time, and has been taken to the next level by the new generation.

There's little point in explaining in detail here exactly how to make a good wobble - simply google for "how "to make a dubstep bass' and put in your favoured synth. Ableton's Operator, Logic's ES2, N.I. Massive and plenty more are perfectly capable of making these gritty squeals, and there are tutorials for all of the above on youtube - simply put in your DAW of choice and get searching. It's not about which synth you've got! What they don't do is tell you how to use a wobble once you've made it.

One thing to note is that a wobble doesn't really have any bass in it. It's all about the upper and midrange squeal, with a sub layered underneath. This makes it a lot easier to work with; just filter off anything below about 150Hz, and once you're done, add in a simple sine tone under the bassline. This will help you avoid any clashing caused by extreme processing, resonant peaks and so on.

The next big factor is that a simple squeal gets very boring, very quickly. Listen to some of the masters of the sound (the likes of Reso and Datsik) and you'll hear that they don't just use one sound - instead, there are several (dozens, even) of wobble sounds used in a track, and this helps keep a track interesting, hyped, and full of energy. Notice too how they can quantise the sounds to a shuffle pattern, and really get detailed with the rhythms - this gives the track lots more energy.

To vary up the wobble sounds in your track you should be using lots of synths, duplicated across several channels, each with different filter and distortion settings. Then you can use a different channel for each bar, or even - if you want to get technical - each note. The alternative would be to bounce a note of each sound down to audio and work with that instead. This can reduce flexibility when it comes to mixing down, but it can also speed things up too; you're less likely to spend lots of time tinkering with each sound and can get onto the next thing quickly. Or, you can load your bounced audio into a sample, then you can filter, loop, retrigger and repitch your wobbles to create some truly hideous noises - ideal for the dancefloor!

When mixing down, you need to remember that if it's going to melt anyone's face off - as they're particularly keen on, Stateside - then it needs a lot of screamingly harsh top end. 4Khz boosts will help here; as will more distortion, exciters and even sending your sounds off to a high-passed buss in parallel. But just as you normally may need to sidechain a sub-bass to avoid clashing with a kick, so with wobbles you should consider sidechaining the wobble off your snare to let it slice through the mix effectively. It may even be worth doing the same with your vocal sample too. You could, however, just cut out the audio from the wobble sound so that it's not playing when a snare hits - often this can heighten the rhythmic aspect of the bassline too.

So, writing a filthy dubstep tune can have some depth after all - Lord knows, this author gets enough identikit demos with boring one-note wobbles, but if you follow some of these tips you can be writing energetic dancefloor bombs like the best. So fire up your favourite synth, check out some tutorials, and have this article to hand as you crank up the distortion!

Mixing Made Easy!

Struggling with your mixdown? Do you find yourself getting lost in the million possibilities for changing the balance, levels, and sound of your beats? There is another way! Read on for some tips on how to make things much more straightforward as we delve into one of the trickiest topics in production - the mixdown.

This blog often returns to the idea of keeping things simple and straightforward in your work, and mixdowns need be no exception. Modern production capabilities mean that even with a relatively basic laptop and a DAW, you can still end up with dozens of channels - drums, extra percussion, FX, layers of synths and more. This is something that didn't happen so much 10 years back - people just didn't have enough hardware to cope with all that stuff. A 50-channel mixdown was solely in the realm of mega-money studios. Now we're all trying to keep up!

So what can you do? The obvious suggestion is to use less channels - and that's exactly what you should be considering. A 'stem mixdown' involves bouncing down some of your myriad channels into groups, then opening a new project file, loading them up and taking it on from there. Ideally, you should be looking to work with a selection of channels that strikes the right balance between flexibility and efficiency. Ten to twelve is usually a sensible amount.

There are a number of reasons as to why this is a good idea. As mentioned, the most obvious is to simplify the mixing process - working with groups can be much simpler than many individual channels. On top of that, there's a psychological aspect too. You might have heard the old producer's mantra that you should never spend more than 20 minutes working on a sound (if you've got a sound in the right ballpark in that time then move on and come back to it later, to keep the creative flow going; if you haven't, then bin it because it'll probably never work) - well, this applies here too. By bouncing your stems and setting them in stone, you're moving on to the next stage. You're less likely to get bogged down in trivial details, and you'll find that many issues will be easily solved by treating the whole stem. Also, by narrowing down your options you'll be less likely to suffer the classic paralysis induced by too much choice.

So how should you go about it? Well, precedence should be given to anything that needs to be a major feature of your mix - vocals, leads, basslines. These things can be given their own stems. Drums can largely be grouped together, although it's often useful to bounce the kick separately to the rest of the percussion, to make subsequent side-chaining easier, for instance. Similarly, it is wise to treat the bassline and sub bass as two different entities - for side-chaining again, and also for reverb and other effects which may want to be on the top section but not the sub.

Anything that involves several instruments playing the same thing (for instance when you have synth parts doubled up for a bigger sound) can be bounced down to a single stem, and with vocals you can perhaps have a lead vocal stem, and one stem for adlibs, backing vocals, and so on. Incidental effects too - make sure that you've got the panning sorted first (but even this can be expanded or contracted later on), and then bounce to one stem.

Reverbs and group compression should be left off until you're mixing down - it doesn't matter so much with background FX, but drums and featured elements should be kept fairly clean so that you can process them more effectively in mixdown.

Once you've done all this, and loaded it into a clean project, it's a lot easier to hear what is going on. You're less likely to be distracted by things you've already done - for instance, sometimes when you think a part needs a treble boost, and you see that there's already an EQ with a treble boost on it, you can be inclined to just leave it - as it's an issue you've clearly already addressed. When you've bounced everything, however, it becomes much more straightforward - if a part needs a treble boost then you simply apply one without worrying about it.

Of course, nothing is ever set in stone - and if you really need to go back a stage and bounce two elements separately then it will only take a few minutes to go and do so - but the hassle factor of that means that you'll most probably try and solve the issue without breaking up the stems. And in most cases, you'll usually be able to do so.

So, as we know, mixing down can be a complex and tricky process. But by narrowing your options, you can find that the choices you need to make can be reduced, without having to compromise on sound quality. So next time you're facing a big, multi-channel affair, try bouncing down to stem level and starting again. You may be surprised how much difference it can make!

Keys to Success!

One of the most common phrases you hear from people producing dance music on their laptops and home setups is, "I love writing beats, but I'm just no good with music theory". Luckily, you don't need a music degree to write good beats, or even chords and harmonies. But having a basic knowledge of these things can help you out a lot - when you know what key something's in, you can try lots of simple ideas quickly, and so you might hit on a great loop much earlier on. So let's take a look at the principles, and how these will help you find your way!

What is a "key" anyway? A "key" is essentially a set of notes, used in a scale. It tells you which notes will fit together, which notes are in the scale, what harmonies will sound pleasant or dissonant. All the basic keys are much the same, just moved up or down the keyboard. The key of C is pretty much like the key of F. But you need to know the difference. For the purposes of this article, we'll use the key of C for everything, as it's just all the white notes. It keeps things easy!

So, start on the note of C, and just play up to the next C, all the white notes. That's your C major scale (C is called the "root note"). If you're in C major, any of the white notes will work in a melody. Want to know what the difference is between a major and a minor? It's basically the third note of the scale (so that's E). In a minor, it's moved down a semi-tone. So play the same scale, but with an E flat (black note below E). It's as simple as that.

How to write a melody in a key then? Let's take a look at a good recent example - dubstep star Joker's track "Digidesign". It's in a minor key, so the third note (of the scale) is flat. You can hear that the melody starts and ends on the root note (and returns to it a lot in between), and it just uses the first five notes of the scale - usually in order, too. Check the descending run at the end. If you play the melody yourself, you can see that it pretty much goes up and down the scale – there's nothing technical or advanced, but it's still a very catchy and memorable hookline, and it totally makes the track. Come up with a melody like that, and suddenly your productions can be a lot more simple while still keeping your listeners engaged.

A chord is just several notes played together. The most common type is a "triad" which, as the name suggests, is made of three notes. The simplest, in our key of C, is to play C, E and G together. That's a C Major chord. (Now try playing the minor version, and see how it sounds different). They don't all have to be next to each other though - you could play a G further up the keyboard, or an E on an octave below. The chord will still work, but it will sound subtly different.

It's a bit more advanced, but these chords can all be built up further– see how you're playing every alternate note in the scale? Well, try going one further by adding a B on top. That's called a 7th chord (because a B is the 7th note in the scale) and you'll hear it's got a slightly jazzy flavour. You can keep going up as far as you like, although it starts getting complicated soon after that!

Going simpler, try playing just C and G. That's called a fifth interval, and you'll hear it sounds kind of strident, and you can't tell whether it's major or minor. Fifth intervals always sound solid, as these are the bedrock notes of any scale. You can play a fifth any time (try E and B, or G and D, and so on...) and they'll always have a strong relationship with your main key.

Hopefully you've noticed, then, that two of the most important notes in a scale (after the root note itself) are the third and the fifth – or in our key of C, they're E and G. So if you want to harmonise a synth line, try putting something a third (four semitones for major, three semitones for minor) or a fifth (seven semitones) above it, or below it. Likewise if you just want to make a chord.

Scales and harmonies can get super-complex, but really they're just the same thing repeated across the keyboard. A bit like the way a mixing desk is usually just one channel repeated 24 times – it looks complicated at first, but when you can work one channel you can work them all! On this note, in fact, if you haven't seen a harmony wheel, try googling for it – they're just a small tool to remind you which keys work well together. Basically, they tell you that fifths sound good next to each other, which you now know already, but they can be a useful visual aid anyway.

This has been just a simple intro to the world of scales and harmonies, but when you know the basics, you can really save time and hassle for yourself by knowing where to start, and which basic ideas might work, and which won't. So jump in, dust off that controller keyboard, and get harmonising!