Ableton Forum

Hello,

After several years of only ever doing house/techno type stuff, I'm looking at having a go at drum 'n bass. And I must confess I'm struggling somewhat to get that classic drum n bass drum loop and percussion.

I'm no noob to production or ableton but I'm hoping some of you can share your secrets to help point me in the right direction.

Typically I create all my drum loops from scratch, I rarely use pre-made loops. Is this where I'm going wrong? Are drum n bass drum loops usually built from existing loops and chopped up? Or is there no reason why I can't build it all up from one shots?

Any tips, secrets, advice on the art of creating drum n bass loops would be brilliant!

Thanks in advance

Greg

You can build them up from scratch.

There's lots of short video tutorials on building your drum patterns up just for DnB. I'm sorry I can't think of any links at the moment, but a quick search on youtube should get you there quickly.

GHOSTNOTES!!!!

+1 for ghostnotes.

Also there are various kind of jungle/dnb.
from the good old dirty groovy choped rearranged real drums loops to
purely synthetic modeled and midi programmed gated loops, with all in between, that all depends on the sound you re after, there are no rules.
some will prefer usual acoustic drumkits, other synthetic, like ie interlope.

personally i like use booth, program my own synth BD, SD, HH simple paterns for a first primary 'modern' power layer,
and then have a background chopped/rearanged/idle 'real' wav loop for the human type groove, wich i arrange to not be in conflict
with my main layer, mean more mid/hi hh/oh rim/sd roll stuff while main layer is BD/SD low/mid i like jonny L old stuff in this regerds.

im actually pgming a tool to make dnb loops stuff being made in few seconds, without bothering rex/midi pgming.
i just need time to make the real time transient detecttion, and let it insert as a vst in live,
then i could make instant variations of a dmloop and trigg them via midi, or resample in live,
but if wanna give a test, it's a free addon for usine pro, a powerful modular environment.
here a quick test:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fGRhZEjJns

otherwise the equivalent method in ableton is to right clic on a wav loop clip and slice it to midi. it will create a new track with all slices spread on a drum rack so you can rearange the slices or make new sequences via midi.
but i went to this because i find it's boring long to to that via midi editing, here just draw few steps..