Get Your Beats Jumpin!

One mixing and production technique that will be present on the vast majority of records you own, especially those recorded in bigger studios with professional engineers, is that of buss compression. It can be hugely useful, both from an artistic and an engineering viewpoint - whether you want to go for that big, pumping, filtered disco sound, or just make sure your track is as fat as possible, buss compression can do wonders for your mix. But can anyone get involved? And how do you get started anyway? Let's look a little deeper....

The pumping disco-house sound, as pioneered by the likes of Daft Punk and their French cohorts, is all about buss compression. A classic example would be 'So Much Love To Give' by Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon. You can hear in this track how different everything sounds when the kick comes in. There is life in the the backing samples and loops when the kick drum is not playing - they have headroom and dynamic range. Then the kick thumps in, clobbering a compressor that sits across the whole buss, and the sheer volume of it forces everything else out of the way when the volume reduction kicks in.

To hear this technique really used to its full potential, listen to 'Barbara Streisand' by Duck Sauce. No matter what your opinions on the track itself, the buss compression is something to behold; it uses the compression and release technique outlined above, but also manages to achieve transients on the backbeat to give definition and a crisp top end. This is through a clever combination of a good buss compressor (perhaps the Waves SSL or UAD 4K for instance), and timing – adjust the attack of the compressor very slightly so that it allows some of the transient on your clap or snare through, and consider pulling the note early so that it has slightly more time before the compressor slams the door on it.

Buss compression isn't all about getting a massive house track pumping though. You can use it on any style of music as a central part of your mixdown. Many experienced engineers will put a compressor on their master buss before they even start mixing down. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it is common practise in many studios. It has many advantages - mixing through a compressor means you need much less compression at the channel stage, and thus can bring a mix together much more quickly. It's also often appropriate for dance and rock music in particular (anything with a strong groove and a lot of energy) - as it changes the way you approach a mix, focusing more on drums and bass, then fitting the other elements in around them. For very audible examples, check out some of the late 90's and early '00s techno releases by the likes of Ben Sims and Marco Carola; the intense percussion sounds bounce off each other as they jostle for space, constantly butting up against the threshold of the compressor. It creates an exciting and lively overall sound, less controlled than compressing everything individually.

It needs to be said here that this isn't something you can just try occasionally - it takes time and practise to get used to mixing through a compressor. To get you started, a general rule of thumb for compression settings would be a short attack (less than 10ms), medium-long release (maybe 200ms depending on the tempo of your track, longer if it's a slow track) and a threshold that takes off 3 or 4dB. Put the compressor on before you start mixing, and then don't take it off again!

Your first few mixdowns using this technique may not come off well, but practise makes perfect - it's a little like learning a new set of monitor speakers. Reference your mix often, take plenty of breaks, and persevere to be sure of really getting a handle on it!

Buss compression is a useful tool for all engineers, and you can get on board with it too - it just takes a little time and a good quality compressor. So get yourself a decent plugin, open up that mixdown, and see if you can't make those tracks jump out of the speakers even more!

Stir Some Syncopation Into Your Mix!

Syncopation is one of the basic ingredients of rhythm. It's what makes the difference between a straightforward,stomping beat, and something funky, fluid and interesting.But what is it? Can anyone get in on the act? And can you use it for other things than drums too? Let us shed some light...

Syncopation is, basically, just putting things in the gaps between beats. But not just on 8ths; as this can sound pretty straight too; so use 16th note shuffles to accentuate and emphasise the main beats. The simplest way is to try a quiet snare drum (known as a 'ghost note') just before or after a main kick or snare. See how it leads into, or jerks out of, the beat? It's a technique that most hip-hop or jungle producers will be familiar with already. You can enhance the feel of this even further; for instance if it's a snare preceding a kick, try delaying the kick by half a beat. Now the main beat is displaced by an 8th note too; the listener's attention is grabbed further by the fact that it wasn't where they were expecting. You're creating a 'tension and release' moment.

This technique is common in breakbeat-based music, but that doesn't mean it can't work in house and techno too. A common rhythm heard in Detroit techno, used by the likes of Juan Atkins, is pulling the 4th kick of the bar earlier by a 16th note. This adds a degree of funk to the beat, and sets it apart from the standard 4/4 stomp - but when teamed with the usual hats and claps can still keep the steady groove of house and techno. This kick pattern is also the bedrock of Baltimore Club music, as pushed by Scottie B et al. But it can be switched up - you can pull any one of the kicks off the beat, to add some shuffle to your track while still leaving it straight enough to play in a regular house set.

Ragga and dancehall music is very syncopated; to the point where you could argue it's just a polyrhythm (but that's a discussion for another day). The beat is usually sub-divided into lengths of three 16ths, or if you're looking at it on a grid format, it hits on 1, 4, and 7 (and then repeats on 9, 12 and 15). It makes for a very distinctive groove; team it with a kick on all the fours and you'll have an instant African vibe (or indeed UK Funky).

This isn't all about drums though - you can syncopate anything to make it sound more interesting. To take the dancehall-style rhythm above, a popular groove in dubstep is to have the classic halfstep drumbeat, with a sub-bass hitting on every three 16th notes. Or leads and main riffs - see Redlight's recent hit 'Get Out My Head', where the piano chords switch from being on the beat for the first half of the bar, to a syncopated rhythm in the 2nd half of the bar.

Anything you have that falls on a straight rhythm, you can give consideration to pulling it back and forth off the beat to make it more interesting; as countless jazz and blues masters have said over the years, it's all about the spaces in between the beats. And if you can make these spaces surprising, attention-grabbing, or even just more varied, you'll be half way to making your track a much more interesting listen overall. Whether it's a synth arpeggio, sub bass thump or brass stabs, the rhythm can make all the difference.

So work as hard on the rhythms of your track - from drums and bass to pianos and lead lines - as you do on the melodies and harmonies, and you'll soon find that syncopation can bring life to loops that previously sounded dull and predictable. And you'll be a lot closer to having a groove that's ready to make into a full arrangement!

Fire Up Your Beats!

After the kick drum, in dance music the most important part of your beat is arguably the 'backbeat'. This is what falls on beats two and four of the bar (while beat one is called the 'downbeat') and usually features a snare, clap or similar. Getting the backbeat right can really enhance the character and groove of a good beat, but so many people fail to maximise the potential, opting for a dull, or rigidly quantised sound. So let's consider some of the options you can use to make sure your beat really shines...

First though, there's the issue of what you need your backbeat to do. In general, the bigger your tune sounds, the less room for manoeuvre you have in this area. A raging DnB or dubstep tune will need something correspondingly massive to cut through the mix, and thus often make use of what is known to many as the 'Pendulum Snare'. This is basically a rock-sounding snare with loads of weight, a big EQ boost around 200Hz, next to nothing in the way of transients and perhaps a gated reverb to boot. It's not particularly interesting, or original, but it certainly will dominate a busy mixdown.

If you can afford more space in your mix then you'll have a lot more options. Claps are a lot of fun; get hold of a good sample pack (or even take a mic and record some yourself) and get them into a sampler. Make sure they're not just the standard drum machine jobs - organic, live sounding claps are the way forward here. Now stack up three or four or more to all play at the same time, and start to tweak the timing - pull a couple of them early, before the beat, and have a couple starting a touch later. Combine this with some tight reverb and subtle panning (or a slight stereo-spread plugin effect) and you'll have a clap that really catches the ear, with a fresh live sound, ideal for hip hop, funk, deep house and more. Check some early 2000's era Timbaland beats if you want to hear how this technique can really be used effectively.

Rimshots are another essential tool. The classic Roland 505 rimshot sound is a staple of garage records, but the rimshot has many other uses in dance music. For instance, it can be pitched down and used atop a kick drum, to give a crisp, woody sound that emphasises the beat without jumping out of the mix - as DJ Sneak shows on many of his house tracks. The short duration of a rimshot means it's great for adding dynamics to a lifeless sound - if a snare sounds overly crunchy and flat, try high-passing a rimshot and layering it on top to get a transient on the snare without altering the character too much.

Another way of making the backbeat stand out, especially in a crowded mix, is to layer some finger snaps on top. These can be high-passed at a fairly high frequency so that they don't clash with the main character of the snare or clap, for instance 3kHz, and when combined with some careful reverb can give an impression of space and definition. Layer up two or three such samples to add interest, and again, adjust the timing of each so that they spread out across the beat and give a looser, funkier feel.

Of course, there are plenty of other sounds you can use to make your backbeat distinctive in a busy drumbeat; a vocal sound (just a syllable, like an 'uh' sound for instance), a metallic hit with a slapback delay, the sound of breaking glass - the world is your oyster. The more unusual you can make the sound, the easier it will be to make the mixdown work too - as the texture will stand out naturally, without having to compete for volume.

In all of these examples, playing with the timing and pulling your samples off the quantise grid is essential. It can totally change the feel of a beat, and you'll be surprised how far off the grid you can come before it sounds wrong - pull a sound a long way forwards and it will become what drummers know as a 'flam', while pushing it later will give a lazy, languid feel, ideal for disco and funk. It also helps with maintaining a solid, loud mixdown - something that plays fractionally before the beat will be audible at a much lower level than something that has to compete with the kick and everything else that's playing exactly on that beat. So it makes good engineering sense too!

All in all, the backbeat is an integral part of dance music, and one that can fundamentally influence the feel and groove of your track - so it's worth spending some time and exploring all available options to make sure it's really right. Hopefully these words will have given you a few new ideas, so fire up that beat and make some noise!

Get Your Music Heard!

We've said on this blog plenty of times that you need to be getting your sounds out there as much as possible - sending your tracks and mixes to blogs, labels, DJ's that may play them out, and so on. But we've not spent much time delving into what you should actually say in these mails. And it makes a big impact - sending the wrong email is no better than sending nothing at all. In fact, it could even be worse if you find yourself on someone's spam list. So lets take a look at some of the do's and don'ts of this tricky area...

The most important aspect is to get to the point. The first couple of lines of your email should say what the mail is and what's contained within it. Bloggers and DJs can get dozens of promo mails a day; more than they could realistically listen to, and a huge proportion are completely irrelevent - indie-pop bands sending promos to dubstep blogs and so on. So straight away, your mail should set out exactly what's contained; what the music sounds like, any DJ's that have been playing it out, and so on. Leave the bio and other information until further down.

The next big issue is to have a streamable link, preferably that the user can skip through. Soundcloud is perfect for this type of thing, even a Youtube link will do. This really can't be emphasised enough. Connection speeds are getting better, but still nobody wants to be downloading a 15MB file before they can give it a quick spin. And making the recipient jump through all the hoops to complete a MegaRapidSend download could put them off altogether. Make it as easy as possible for the recipient to preview the track and there's a better chance they will actually do so. Email attachments are not much better - many people have settings that will block attachments over a certain size, precisely so they don't get spammed with mp3s.

You should also personalise your email as much as possible. No-one likes to see a blatantly generic mail, and especially if you're looking to get signed or get a DJ to play your tracks, you should explain why they might be interested in you. This brings us on to that classic promo error - the BCC fail. Your author receives at least one mail a day which is CC'd to about 300 other random addresses, from magazine accounting departments to PR companies, and the first reaction is to consider it a low priority - with all those addresses, if one recipient doesn't deal with it, someone else might pick it up. It also annoys people to see that their email address is being sent so far and wide - so make sure you at least use the BCC function!

Fortunately, in the internet age, it's no longer really necessary to have a huge and impressive looking introductory mail. A big HTML email may look clever, if it displays properly, but in these days of instant information, people just want the facts. A jazzy press pic, a lengthy biography explaining how you got your first set of decks aged just four, the reasons behind why you made this or that track - all basically irrelevant. You can cover all that with a link to your website (where, of course, all this information should be easily accessible). It's highly frustrating to be scrolling through an email full of information looking for the one piece that really counts - where you can hear the track!

So what an email should look like? Well, it should be short, concise, and well-written - you don't want people thinking you're as slapdash with your music as you are with your spelling. It should include a brief description of what the music is like, and any recommendations that you can think of - DJs who are already supporting it, labels that have previously released your work, etc. It should include links to stream and download the music, perhaps a recent mix, and links to your website or facebook page where people can find more information if they choose. If you can include any personal gambit to the recipient, to make sure they realise you're mailing them directly instead of just spamming a list you found on the internet, then so much the better. And last but not least, be polite!

It's really not rocket science, but it's something that so many people get wrong, so often. Waffling emails, sent to someone who wouldn't be interested anyway, with links to some pop-up farm download site... they all make the promo experience dour and tedious. Follow these simple rules and you may find you start getting a much better response from your mailouts. So next time you're composing a promo mail, bear some of this in mind.... and good luck!

Hack Some Toys & Make Some Noize!

We've often discussed ways on this blog to make your sound a bit more original and individual. But if you're looking for the ultimate fix in getting a sound that you can be sure no-one else has, there can be few methods more assured than hardware hacking, or 'circuit bending'. Customise your own equipment! It takes you out of the realm of the computer too, which is always a good thing in the quest for individuality. But what is circuit bending? And can anyone get involved?

Briefly, circuit bending is the art of taking apart something and tweaking the circuitry to change the sound. It can be anything from a child's toy right up to an analogue synth. It's extremely popular in many fields of electronic music, from chunky glitch-hop to experimental and chiptune stuff. It's probably no surprise that it's popular especially in glitchy fields of music because this is the easiest sound for a beginner to get out!

Why should you care though? Well, as we mentioned at the beginning, circuit bending is a great way of getting unique sounds to work with. If you've made or modified an instrument yourself, then obviously no-one else has access to it - so the crazier and more out-there you can get with something, the more you can use it for original and distinctive sounds. But you can use them as performance tools too; anything that moves can be used as a controller, from a Guitar Hero guitar to those waving cats you see in Chinese restaurants. Swedish Skweee group Flogsta Danshall pride themselves on playing live sets without a single laptop on stage - it makes for a much more interesting live experience!

You maybe thinking that this kind of stuff is for experienced tech-heads only. Opening things up? Tweaking circuitry? That's where you'd be wrong. OK, sure, opening up a classic analogue synth if you don't know what you're doing is probably a recipe for disaster, and best left to the pros (check out the 303 'Devilfish' modification if you want to see how this can be done really well) but the basics can be done with very little electronic knowledge. In fact, it's a great way to learn!

Start with a battery powered child's toy, which you can pick up from a charity shop for next to nothing. It's extremely important that it's battery powered - hacking things that are plugged into the mains is for ninjas only.
Take the back off the toy and you'll see a small circuit board. There'll be a few components, and several blobs of solder connecting those lines running across the board. Get the thing to play it's demo sounds or whatever it does, and then just get a piece of wire, and start touching the ends across various points on the board. Presto! You are re-wiring the circuit! See how easy this is?

So, start mucking about with various combinations, and sooner or later you'll start making a difference to the sound. If it goes quiet, you've probably crashed it (honestly...) and will need to reboot the toy by removing the batteries for a moment. Once you've found something that affects the sound, then here is your chance to really get into it. It's also the point at which your electrical requirements will increase; besides the piece of wire you'll now need a soldering iron (and solder) to make connections and things to change the behaviour of the circuit - for instance a resistor or a potentiometer. Depending on what you've found, these could control the pitch or duration of the notes, for instance.

This is the point at which this blog runs out of space as far as detailed instructions go; there are a whole load of step-by-step tutorials and youtube videos showing exactly how to do this, and how far you can take it - hardware hacking guru Nic Collins' website is a particularly authoritative treasure trove of hacking advice and tutorials. Alternatively, get yourself onto google and have a look around; just seeing some of the things people have come out with will make you marvel at the possibilities!

If it all seems a bit much, then you can buy ready-hacked bits of kit online, from sites like Bogus Noise, who make videos to show exactly what the toys will do. It's a quick way to get that circuit-bent sound without having to get your hands dirty.

But if you really want to get into the spirit of things, it's all about the DIY attitude - for the price of a couple of chocolate bars and an afternoon with a soldering iron you can have sounds that nobody else can get. And maybe even a new hobby into the bargain...

Creative Distortion!

Back in the olden days, when music was still in black and white, and 'dubstep' was a type of chain mail armour, noise and distortion were the enemy - vast sums were spent coming up with the newest and best equipment to minimise any kind of hiss or unwanted clipping. Valves, gold plated contacts, the works. But now, since we can run synths into EQ's into Busses without ever even leaving the laptop, noise is no longer an issue. The perfect mixdown is finally possible. But noise and distortion are fun! Clicks and hiss can mitigate the boredom of the digitally sterile soft-synth! If you're really determined, you can even make an entire tune out of it. So let's take a look at some ways to dirty things up and maybe find some new sources of inspiration into the bargain.

The real fun here is to be had pushing things as far as you can until something interesting happens. It's the opposite of the perfectly controllable digital environment; you never know what you'll end up with, and as a result you can end up with loops and sounds you would never have written otherwise.

Try, for example, taking a simple percussive pattern or loop a couple of synth notes, and run them hard through your mixer (even a DJ mixer will do). Record them back in, and you'll have a nasty distorted mess. Don't mind that though - take this mess and run it back through the mixer, and record the results again. Now run that back through the mixer, and keep going through the process of re-re-recording until your loop has been through the mixer ten or twenty times. It will have picked up a load of hiss along the way, but it will also have started to click unexpectedly as drum transients attempt to pierce the background noise, or created weird tones as synth harmonics mush up against odd circuit resonances feeding back (or even bleeding across channels).

Take these sounds and you have instant FX loops for your track, perfectly tempo matched, and ideal for applying delay and reverb to layer up in the soundscape. Or, chop out some distorted clicks to use as a unique percussion loop in your beat, or take the distorted synth notes and make a sampler intrument out of them, or just layer the whole thing quietly in the mix to give a bit of character. Artists like Oneohtrix Point Never are masters at this kind of thing.

White noise itself can be incredibly useful - just look at Emptyset, who make whole techno albums out of it. Theirs is the sound of hiss and pure tones being jammed hard through desks and compressors, and it's loads of fun playing around with this kind of thing. Instead of just running the same thing through a desk over and over, try pushing some noise as hard as you can into a compressor and then whacking it with something like an 808 kick, and listening as the noise is forced out of the way by the huge boom. Compressors can start to behave very strangely when pushed to their limits, and you'll get strange transients, textures and sculpted sounds as the volume envelopes struggle to cope with the ragged noise they're having to deal with.

Once you've got your bizarre noises and clicks as audio into the DAW, there's still a lot of randomness to be enjoyed. For instance, put a noise gate with a sidechain input on the distortion channel, and then set the input to be something a little more percussive to give interesting rhythmic effects. Or do it the other way round, and have random noise clicks triggering a pad or synth. Autofilters can give similar, random vibes, or you could go the whole hog for glitchy madness and apply a beatslicer plugin onto your distortion to really get things percussive and choppy.

It's difficult to give tips on how to get the best results out of distortion, as the whole point of it is to make machines do things they weren't supposed to do, break the rules, and just tinker around until something exciting happens. Which means there are a million different ways to approach the whole process. But that means that you can just have fun with it - there is no wrong way. So hopefully this article has given you some tips on getting started - now crank that mixer up to eleven and let it take the strain!

Love Your Ears!

In recognition of the recent National Tinnitus Week, we're going to get a little health and safety on you in this column. We know - it's not the most glamourous subject, especially when compared to a flashy new synth. But hey, what's the most important piece of gear in your studio? That's right, it's your ears, and you do rather need to take care of them. Because nobody wants to get to 30 and be forced to quit production because they can't hear well enough anymore. So read on for some tips on how and when to protect your ears. This stuff is important!

We'll start with probably the most damaging environment for any DJ or producer - the live arena. Clubs and gigs are hugely loud, and it goes without saying that these kinds of volumes can really damage the ears. It's worse if you're DJing, as you need to crank up the cans and booth monitors to drown out the rest of the club, too. So; earplugs. The most essential part of your going-out gear; I literally don't leave the house without mine. The difference they can make to your night is remarkable; contrary to popular perception you can actually hear the music better with earplugs in. You can hear more detail, the harshness is reduced, you can actually have a conversation on the dancefloor, and it doesn't affect the 'vibe' at all - when the bass is punching you in the chest, putting something in your ear won't change that at all.

No, they don't look cool, although in the years that I've been clubbing they've become increasingly common; back in the day bouncers would laugh at you as they searched your pockets, while now loads of clubbers rock some plugs. The bottom end of the scale are those brightly coloured foam jobbies. They're ok in a pinch, but they look garish and cut out a lot of the top end of the frequency spectrum, affecting the music. The next best option is to go down to your local music equipment shop and pick up some plugs from there. They'll normally be about £15, come in a range of sizes and colours (including transparent) and sound good in the club. They won't be perfectly fitted obviously, which can mean they're not comfortable to wear for 8 hours at a time, but they're a good and cheap solution.

The best option is, of course, proper moulded plugs. You make an appointment, a doctor pours liquid goo into your ears (a very odd sensation) and a couple of weeks later your own earplugs arrive. They're a revelation - comfortable, almost invisibly small, and make clubs sound just plain better. At prices of £165 and upwards they're not cheap - but if you consider how bad it would be to lose your hearing (and, by extension, your production career) and how much you'd pay to get your hearing back if it was possible (a lot more than £165, I'll wager) - it suddenly puts a different perspective on things.

So that's gigs (and bars, all too often) - but you can damage your ears without going anywhere near a sound system. The prime culprits are headphones; whether writing or just on the bus. Earbuds are especially bad; they don't block out much sound so you need to crank them up to drown out any background noise, they don't put out much in the way of bass so you crank them up even further to get the impact, and their output is concentrated in the higher frequencies - where your ears are the most sensitive. So start by getting a pair of good, closed back headphones with decent bass response. You can then have them at much more moderate levels when you're out and about.

When you're in the studio, writing on headphones is a real risk - the desire to turn up the cans to really get into the vibe is a strong temptation and you can end up battering your ears for hours at a time. A good tip to make sure you're working at a sustainable level is to get hold of a cheap decibel meter from an electronics shop. Then tape some CD's to your earphone, and put the decibel meter by the hole (this simulates, crudely, sound going into your ear canal). 90dB is the level you should be aiming for; that's what current health and safety guidelines suggest you can listen to for eight hours without damaging your ears. After that it halves for every doubling in SPL; 93dB for four hours, 96dB for two hours and so on. Mark your headphone amplifier or soundcard output with a permanent pen to make sure you know where this level is in future.

Music production provides plenty of excellent opportunities to damage yourself, in fact, and the more extreme you go, the more you need to be careful. Always, always, turn your speakers right down if you're plugging and unplugging things, experimenting with feedback or harsh EQ sweeps, and so on. Jungle legend Optical famously had to take an extended sabbatical from production and DJing after he blew a speaker while working on a trademark gritty bass sound.

Tinnitus affects most DJs and producers, and hearing loss affects a significant few too. The effects can be devastating, so make sure you avoid the worst of it by protecting your ears! It's an investment that you'll never regret.