give us a break !!!!!!!

J

JimmiJ

Guest
I need some help making my breaks sound a bit more intelligent ??

I am working at 120BPM and can lay down a bog standard break. I also have tried to reverse some of the snares and adding extra kicks which all sounds ok

Basically I am looking for other methods to keep the beats interesting

A little ear candy is in order me thinks ?!

all comments welcome !
 
If you already do all of this stuff sorry but it's stuff that I find works.

This happened to work, with a little bit of tweaking, for me just last night (weird coincidence or what?):
As a complete fluke I had a whole bank of hat sounds on midi channel 2, which happened to be muted. It should in fact have been a bass part (must have loaded up the wrong thing into my sampler somehow) Anyway, when I unmuted the channel all these hi-hats started playing and sounded.....great!:D Just try putting another part from your loop (something rhythmic like the bass or whatever) onto a bank of hats - it's cool.

As for ear candy try this:
fx send from hats and snares (or the whole kit if you don't have that kind of flexibility) into a delay set to quavers (8th notes). Feed the outs of the delay into a filter unit with an LFO sweeping the cuttoff. Then feed that back into another channel and sweep the bass right off it Set the channel level low and it gives an ambience that's a bit different from just a delay over the hats or whatever.

Hope this helps
KasioRoks
 
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You probably know this, but here goes..

Do something different to each snare, not too much though. Instead of changing the bass, change the hats up. That's me though, I like to hear the hats doing something on every bar. Make the first kick stronger with a longer decay... Simple stuff.
 
Nice long open hats that get cut off by a closed hat between 2 and 4 notes later for that sizzling pshhhKah sound.

Try adding a bit of shuffle quantise, it'll make your **** more sassy.

Add fast straight-up 8th note shakers or tambourines with an extra hit between em for emphasis around your snare breaks.

Another cool trick which is being used in a lot of hip hop now is audible compression. Pump the **** out of your compression ratio and hear the bass drums boom, then the hats jump out and sizzle until the snare takes over, then bass drum, then the hats... It makes for a nice pumping vibe if you do it right cause even though the sounds are layered, one of them dominates the mix at any given time.
-mj-
 
ok, dunno where you're at but here goes (again apologies if you do all this stuff already):

vary the velocity of your hits.

If you're using a longish hi-hat sound vary the length of the notes.

use 'ghost-notes' ie hits with really low velocity just before or after your (actual) hits. For instance if you were hitting the snare on the 2 you might have a really low velocity hit just after that.

Try and sit down with an actual drummer to see what he/she does (NB no need to worry about his/her excessive intake of alcohol or poor personal hygiene).

Don't just use a grid to write your beats in, try playing them in from a keyboard as well.

Played with a new drummer tonight and he did a cool thing which was to have a very light roll on the snare for about 1/2 a beat or less just before the kick.

Use different sample sounds for different hits (so that light kicks and snares sound different from hard ones).

use the 16th triplet grid when drawing on a groove (for that new jack swing vibe)

that's all I can think of right now.

KasioRoks
 
enough to keep me bussy for a while.

It kinda cool to see all the different ideas

Cheers
 
my best advice is : just F*** around and experiment,
there are no rules for what u can do, simple advice but hey, IT WORKS!!
 
what i find that adds a bit of character to an otherwise insipid break is taking a sample of ambient noise (no sounds, just incidental ignorable stuff) and slicing that all up, placing and layerieng it out of order the course of the break. by doing this, you can really give your different beats a new character- also, remember that sometimes going dirty is what you may want- maybe export to 8 bit for the loop or compress and mix with itself at lower volume. at any rate, good luck!

-lodger
 
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