Post
by 9pod9 » Wed Jan 09, 2008 9:11 pm
My thoughts:
You say you love making your own beats, so stick to that. Do what you love.
If you use loops, you're bound to sound like other people using the same loops. I avoid loops like the plague. I don't even chop them up and reprogram them.
If you've got a decent sense of time and a machine with low latency, program your beats with drum pads or keyboards but don't quantize them. That's much easier than going back to your drum pattern and manually shifting beats to give it a live feel: do it live. (It's also a heck of a lot more fun.)
If you're programming with mouse clicks or a step sequencer, make sure you vary your velocities! Nothing makes music sound more mechanical than when your beats hit at the same velocity throughout the song. It's extremely time-consuming to go back and drag your velocity sliders after you've programmed something, but it'll pay off. You just have to be thoughtful about where you place your emphasis.
Compare your songs with each other to make sure you're not repeating yourself with "pet" beats. Repeating stuff from one song to the next will also make your beats sound canned.
Not having the beats exactly in time might make it sound more organic, but it also might make it sound sloppy and incompetent. Be careful! It's not a bad theory, but it can be a horrible practice.
Try programming a solid 8- or 16-measure loop. When you're laying out the track, rather than dropping it in the timeline and dragging the edge to get your repetitions, paste it in all the places you want it, then go into each occurrence of the loop and make minor changes: an extra snare hit here, a triplet there. The variation will help keep your beats from sounding mechanical.
To liven it up even more, program several 1-measure and 2-measure fills, then drop them in at various logical breaks that occur in your song.
BOTTOM LINE: You are most definitely okay making your own beats from scratch, and your music will be better for it. Go do something new!