methods for making beats

[The Carpet Cleaner]

facepalm 2

Yea and you side-chain the compressor with what ? a bike? a plane? no, a kick on another track... even if the kick is muted, the hi-hats are evolving against something that has a constant rhythm (the kick in your example).

Not everyone keys a side chain with a kick. Try a closed hihat for example.

You can take a single hit and easily make a groove out of it. There are so many hihat and shaker loops out there that prove this point.

facepalm 3
side chain with the kick or with whatever you want. You say you need only one hit, then you're talking about side-chaining it with something else... You still put two tracks, or two rhythms against each other... how can you be swinging, late or early, if you don't put it in comparison with anything ? it can even be muted.the metronome click is enought.

[beatflux]

Rhythm (from Greek ?????? – rhythmos, "any regular recurring motion, symmetry"[1]) is a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." [2] While rhythm most commonly applies to sound, such as music and spoken language, it may also refer to visual presentation, as "timed movement through space."[3]

[rpc9943]

Heh weird, I feel left out in the crowd. I simply play my midi keyboard like tapping on the steering wheel when I hear music. I personally prefer that and using any vsti such as ezdrummer and dr008 depending on what sounds I want. So yeah, I tap on the keybd, and quantize it, then if I want to add more precise beats, I click them in, etc. This way I feel like I own the beat, because it's doing exactly what I want... Maybe I'm not as cutting edge as you all. But its my workflow

Well that's my two cents.

RonC

[H20nly]

there's like 10,000 ways to do the same thing... lol @ anyone who gets bent cuz someone isn't doing it like them. extra lol if the only reason you do it that way is cuz you saw it on a tutorial instead of your own trial and error.

[The Carpet Cleaner]

there's like 10,000 ways to do the same thing... lol @ anyone who gets bent cuz someone isn't doing it like them. extra lol if the only reason you do it that way is cuz you saw it on a tutorial instead of your own trial and error.

Yeah, that makes me remembere back in school or in Uni. During a written exam of philosophy class, the subject what something like in this thread "How do you create music?" .
And my mate next to me, when the teacher is not watching, asking me quietly "hey, what's the answer" ?

[anybody human]

No one was using sidechain before daft crappy punk came out, and no one uses the stupid millisecond delay plug/slider. That is fucking messy.

You are clearly all trying to polish a turd.Choose the right source sounds!

The best thing to do is just use your ears and practice.

That's what is not being done and thats why this thread exists.

Actually Jimi Hendrix would side chain the guitar to the vocal, when he'd sing the guitar would duck in and then jump out (there was no automation then). Daft Punk, along with Casius and others, popularized a specific sound by making good records. It's amazing how influential some of those production techiques have been though, kinda similar to when parallel compression or the New York compression trick came around in the 70's.

Don't really use track delays, too rigid but for certain things it would get the job done I suppose.

Not sure i follow what you're saying on that last point. Choosing source sounds is obviously very important, but is not a technique for sequencing or programming beats, unless you mean using loops. Strange considering the title of the thread that there hasn't been more talk of actual workflow. Maybe it's just too obvious, and we all do the same things so it's not worth mentioning. I just listed a basic outline and quick keys cos I thought it might be helpful for beginners.

[leisuremuffin]

a technique i've been using a lot lately is tapping out simple 2bar loop, copy loop to slot below and edit. repeat.... so once i have a bunch of edits i throw follow actions on them and rearrange them till i have a good long evolving pattern. then, if i want, i consolidate to one clip.

but, daaaaamn, there's just so many ways to work.



.lm.

[milfhuntr]

I have been using the iPod app JR Hexatone. It has instant IDM beats and by shaking the iPod you get lots of variations. Then I simply record it and warp it in Ableton and cut it up to make it my own.

[Isturite-]

cool to see you are startin to make your own drums funken... it really starts to pay off

I didn't use to put my drums in different tracks because i like to map it all to my launchpad and use that as a a drum pad... then i faced this issue of needing to really separate my kicks, snares, and percussion because I need to for that snappy dubstep sound... I personally don't like hitting out each section as it's own loop because i make better beats when i use the whole drum kit...

to get around this i put my kicks at a certain point on the pad, the percussion on another, and snares on another... yet they were all in individual tracks, then I'd just arm all three and blam... it's like hitting the beats on one track, and mixing w/ three

I do draw a lot of beats in, but usually only when i'm going for a specific genre type of sound (i can't hit out a house beat lol)

[oddstep]

I feel the same about using a controller to give beats a played feel. In order to get control of eq and compression for different sounds I group up the hits within the rack... so all my kicks have a single bus, my snares have another and so on.. its good. I group them using the rack list rather than the pad view.