Not as intricate as a tracker, but a lot of jungle/d &b was made on MPCs by mashing buttons with note roll on. You could assign pad pressure to filter cutoff, mash some pads, set the roll rate to a different value and then mash some more on top of what you just later down. With tasteful editing you could get great results
I get some fairly IDMesque textures from my beatbox loops by having two tracks playing the same beat, and muting one on each side of the fader.
One loop plays normally, the other is sliced and has an LFO scanning the slices that has its depth and rate mapped to the fader. Add in a delay fx on that sliced loop with the delay time and mix mapped to the fader as well. Glitchy insanity ensues.
You donāt need any special tools to make fast, complex beats/breaks. Just a bit of patience and focus.
In general it really is just about getting in close and programming the damn beats; keeping 1 or 2 elements (often kick and main snare or straight hats in the background) relatively repetitive while varying other parts, plenty of rolling, retrigging, stretching, pitching, reversing + short delays for those metallic/comb filtery bitsā¦filtering too especially in the earlier stuff.
Hangable Autobulbs & RDJ sound like they have lots of midi-note-repeater or arp generated beats; holding down a note or 2 while modulating the speed of the repeater/arp & plenty of resonant lp filtering for more movement.
Drukqs was programmed by hand in PlayerPro, an old tracker (using samples of breaks + his analog gear amongst other bits). Trackers have a really great workflow for this stuff because you can non-destructively retrig, pitch, reverse, pseudo-time stretch samples with simple key commands VERY quickly. Theyāre amazing for rhythmic composition but pretty hard to visualise harmony on.
Anyone can get some glitchy beats by whacking on a plugin these days but if you want your complex beats to fit with your track properly you have to do the work.
No special gear needed, you could make super complex beats on a Pocket Operator if you were so inclined.
thatās true. You hear the difference most of the time
When listining to the druqks breakcore like tracks, itās nocticeable that he often uses a huge amount of different sounding drums per track. Several breakbeats alternate with Roland Tr sounding beats all differently programmed.
Something like Ultraloop could be great for this job, where you can load a whole map of loops and mix up different sections of them. There are also great glitchy fx in there.
Iām always too lazy to make a whole map of my own loops. I tend to program beats while writing the track, so program it in a way they suit the track. But should be worth to have your own collection you can use, you can cut them up anyhow. But yeah, these druqks tracks sound quite loop heavy and these loops cut up and crazy fxād in the tracker.
The break in vordhosbn sounds amazing, cause the beat sounds completely originally programmed. Such a great groove, so many changes and details.
I think itās a bit easier to work with funk breaks, since even chopped up they contain a bit of the groove the real drummer played originally.
I just listened again to Drukqs, and there are some stinkers, but the gems are real works of art. Ziggomatic 17 might be my favourite, the drum programming is so friggin awesome and it seems almost impossible to do that stuff in such a precise manner. Heās got some chops that guy.
He added āMangle11ā to Druqks on his page. Insane drums again.
didnāt know it. It was already released on a Rephlex compilation.
Mental.
This is a rich topic for me. No pun intended.
So many ways to approach chopping on the Octatrack that itās hard to know where to suggest starting. Iād say slice a loop, place some trigs, create linear locks, then start editing those locks into something crazy but musical. Copy to new patterns and keep making changes. Introduce more loops as you go.
My personal fav right now is load loops and trigs into track one, then resample into track 2 with recorder buffers/trigs to mangle more.
Hereās something to try.
Conditional Amen Break Glitching Octatrack = Ned Rush https://youtu.be/bXUn8D9TR4g
Similar approach:
I recently splurged on some rawcutz (thanks @v00d00ppl). The 3k hits are just thrown together in a folder without rhyme or reason. So i ended up doing 64 chains of whatever kicks and snares ect.
I loaded one track kick chain one track snare chain and one hats. Then i just started tappin away. Process them all differently, cue all to a track recorder and record a loop.
Insta jungle / glitch / mid aphex. Slice it up for further madness.
What puts some above others imo is editing fit musical purposes. The above bit is easy. To make it musical is work.
The thing about aphex drum programing indeed is that it doesnāt sound random at any point. No probability, random slice triggering etc. It all sounds planned. ever changing but always perfectly fitting the moment of the track. it sounds done by hand at thatās what impresses me so much. Cause I imagine that takes a lot of time and compositional talent.
making crazy glitch drums for the sake of sounding glitchy and random is not so difficult imo
I assume trackers are really good tools for getting this done faster by hand
I used to make beats in Fruity Loops then spend hours and hours chopping them up in Acid. It had a nice workflow for that. I think the most similar in a modern DAW is probably editing audio inside an audio clip in Bitwig, but it just isnāt as quick and fun (not do I the inclination to spend the time anymore).
Actually, Reaper isnāt bad for chopping up audio on the timeline.
Used to slice up breakbeats in fruityloops and create similar sounds. Without all those glitches though.
Ultraloop by Twisted Toolsā¦
Thanks for that! Seems very efficient, almost too easy! It gave me cool ideas for Octatrack!
itās pretty genius. but yeah, feels a bit like cheating
I mash loops (my own) up in Ultraloop then drop the results into the OT.
And donāt be fooled, drop anything into UL, drones, field recs, old breaks, snippets from TV, and just flop back in your seat as it spits more gold than the Pomrenke family!
Donāt even edit the source into loops and still you are mining.
Itās just a tool, and if your source is 100% original then whatās the big deal?
After all we are using machines, algorithms etc and reacting to their output and tailoring the results to our needs.
You still need to have the āearā to produce something worthwhile.
Not digging you out man
EDIT, Gotta say, you can randomise all day but the real stuff is when you meticulously set all the myriad options to shape a loop or groove or whatever to do what you want when you want.
For me, UL has everything, and when you spend a few days with it, with a goal in mind, you really canāt fail.
you are totally right.
But you know what I mean Itās just - this thing is so good, you canāt do boring beats with it
The principle seems to be a kind of sequencer with several tracks with different settings, isnāt it?
Octatrack : 8 tracks with different settings, same loop, quantized slices, triggered only by midi tracks, with random arp and all lfo arsenalā¦
I have to try thatā¦