Help! New To Producing Question

[BreFields]

Hi guys,

I'm new to producing electronic music, but I been a musician for many years. I'm trying to re-create the bass line in the beginning of the track "Wild in the Night" by A$AP Rocky and Skrillex. I'm running into a problem:

I'm focused on the first 30 seconds of the song and the third and fourth note feels rushed. I have tried changing the length of the notes, the bpm, time signature and where the emphasis is placed on the beat, but I have had no luck. If I were talking to a real drummer, I would tell them to be more in the pocket and lay back a little on the beat.

I have the bpm set to 80, which is what it seemed like to me, although I looked it up on songbpm.com and it said 140. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions for resolving this issue? I would really appreciate any help that I can get.

[Shift Gorden]

Hello mate!

Sounds like you got a couple of things going on: the tempo and the timing.

The tempo thing - looks like the real tempo is double-time - pretty common in that style. So, it sounds half as slow as the actual tempo - so you really weren't that far off with your original guess of 80bpm. Obviously, since you've written for that temp things will sound nuts if you speed it up.

Don't worry - here's what you can do. Set the tempo to 140bpm. Now, go into each clip. See your first screenshot - you've got your clip properties to the left of the piano scroll. In the "notes" section near the top there is this :2 and *2 button - hit ":2". This should "slow" your clip down by half (by essentially doubling the distance of everything in your clip). Now your clip tempo should be normal even though you've doubled up on the song tempo.

Second thing: you said your notes sound too rigid/rushed. Yup, your thoughts are correct - needs to be more laid back. This is where "swing" comes in handy. You'll need to use Ableton's groove templates here - google that and you'll quickly find out how to do that. You'll probably need to experiment with multiple templates, but the MPC folder of groove templates is a good place to start. The higher the number in the template, the more swing is applied.

If you're really brave, you can import the actual entire song into Ableton, and tell Ableton to analyze the actual groove of the song and extract it. You can then save the groove hat and apply it to your own track. Sweet!

[inkjt510]

The track was almost definitely composed at 140 bpm even though you feel it in half-time. this is a pretty common trick when composing dubstep, hip hop, trap type music. You heard it at 80bpm, which is not so far off because it's felt at 70bpm.

Try this pattern at 140bpm:

[BreFields]

The track was almost definitely composed at 140 bpm even though you feel it in half-time. this is a pretty common trick when composing dubstep, hip hop, trap type music. You heard it at 80bpm, which is not so far off because it's felt at 70bpm.

Try this pattern at 140bpm:

Thank you for your help! I adjusted the bpm and copied what you did and it was correct.