I’ve been getting a bit into 2-Step Garage lately, and am trying to replicate some beats on the MD. The problem I’m encountering is in trying to get the right feel, as the lack of microtiming means you can’t shift beats around on the grid. I’ve set the swing to around 62-66% which helps a bit, but the shuffle still feels too rigid. Anyone given this a go and have any pointers?
Hi . I’m by no means a garage head however,
There are various ways to get more funk.
Experiment with:
The hi hats with the close function.
Trig lfo’s on any sustained sound set to decay, vol, filters (or anything):
Plocking lfo rate can be great.
The delay with Ctrl machine
Short reverb with pre delay
Record a uw loop then experiment with playing it back using pitch and start point.
Filter, distort and layer with other sounds. Set trig lfo to vol. play with rates and different lfom shapes and mixes.
There’s an old MD UW trick for samples that gets at this somewhat.
Recreate your samples with a little silence in front of them. You can do this on your computer or by manually trigging RAM machines a bit before manually trigging your sound.
Now put LFO to Sample Start. The audio for the sample will start late (because of silence) but you can vary the lateness with the LFO and Start Time selection.
(A newer hardware option would be to check out the Mutable Instruments MidiPal)
My friend would do this with his samples and it drove me CRAZY trying to use any of his gear :].
I can appreciate programming it in, but forcing yerself to get past it just to get a normal hit was not something I enjoyed.
My tip for garage - use a crappy snare sample and also maybe the hi hat but keep everything else synthetic.
You can fake microtiming using swing per track only on certain steps instead of the default (global, every other tick).