Trying to dip my feet into the dark arts with some Drum and Bass/ Techstep! The sound might age me a bit, I was aiming for that late 90s/early 2000s brutality, but we like what like:)
Digitakt: one shot drums, breaks (rolled in NI Studio Drummer), reeses (processed and screwed from Serum), misc vocal samples/sfx
Digitone: sub, background sfx
A4: hi hats, white noise wash, wonky atonal hornlike stab thing
Virus: supersaw pad (of course lol)
There are aspects of the mix I don’t like (partly because I simply tracked and mixed a stereo file) but it’s only going to Youtube so it is what it is…
Would you mind giving some more info on how you programmed the drums here - particularly how you combined the breaks and one-shots on the DT? I’m a new DT owner and I’ve struggled a bit with programming more D&B style drums with it vs more four-to-the-floor stuff?
First I programmed several breaks in Live at 172 using Kontakt’s Studio Drummer (which is basically meant to mimic a real kit with different mic settings and multi mapped velocity sampling etc.). It’s such a sweet tool for programming shuffles because of the multisampled velocity response and preset kits. After I made a few grooves and fills I isolated a mono channel, processed the heck out of it using transient master, saturater, and glue and hi passed most of the low end under 60hz (should have swept even higher but oh well). Next, I sampled about 5 or 6 one bar variations into the DT (hi hats only, main break pattern with a couple different kits, and 2 or 3 fill patterns).
Once in the DT I loaded a kick and snare from Wave Alchemy and layered under the breaks. To create variations in the fill that happened every 4 bars I applied one break to the first step and another to the second which was then offset as close as possible to the one. I then used probability trigs to alternate the triggering (1:2 and 2:2 respectively). One tricky thing is that the break which was offset would phase weird with the one shot kick so I had to apply the same trick with my first kick at the beginning of the 4th bar.
The last part was selective muting and adding an additional hi hat groove from the A4.
There are way more tricks up the DT’s sleeve such as using fills and chains, or taking longer samples and p locking the start point but that’s a whole other rabbit hole:)
Hope this made sense!
Oh, and PS, depending on what types of D and B drums you’re going for I think it would be possible to get a lot done in the DT by itself only using one shots and resampling.
Ah awesome, thanks for the detailed response. I was mostly trying to work out how you’d got the great shuffles in there, programming them in a more realistic drum simulator and sampling them in makes sense, then layering with the one-shots (which is kinda how I’ve done this ITB before but for some reason didn’t occur to me here - I tend to mentally map the DT as ‘drum machine’ and forget to think of it as ‘sampler’ :))
The conditional trigs and time offsetting I’d read about but not tried before, and it helps to hear it actually in use like this, so that’s really handy.
That all made lots of sense, really appreciate you taking the time!
Yeah, I’m sometimes conflicted about how much I should sample whole parts; not really interested in using the DT as a “stems player.”
I think you could achieve some quality shuffle inside of the DT using the right sounds and p locking velocity. Tight hat on the 8th notes and shuffle hits on the 8 and 10 (not sure how else to say that lol). If you sound lock on the same track sounds will cut each other off which can be useful. Play with micro timing and I bet you could get some more than satisfactory results.
Yeah, I need to experiment more with programming shuffles too - I suspect you’re right that a lot of it will be in what samples you pick, having something that’s a more realistic ghost hits vs just turning down the velocity/volume on the same sample.
I’ve tried some of the ‘linear drumming’ style of sound locking it all on the same track before, which has a certain sound to it that you’re right might help here.
