Drill'n'Bass/IDM Beat Programming

  IdironBoomtracks said:

i got a review on P168 from space disease accusing me of automatic vst glitching, which really really insulted me, especially having left him such a drunken mega, over-blown praise review.

 

hours and hours of clicking and then someone says its 'automatic'

all my drill programming is done in reason with dr.rex. reason for beats, flp for synths. you cant really get any well-produced meticulous sound with anything 'random', its all about knowing your midi (for example, i make beats in 1/32th alternating 1/64th snapping so combined with basic things like filters and pitchshift you can make good 'glitches' as you go along).

 

in two songs ive used that original glitch.exe to produce drum sounds which were then put down as midi notes from dr.rex, and even experimented with the actual glitch vst demo on the wtfjimmy record (the last song i did), but both are pretty wack - especially the vst which makes rea`lly conventional, samey sounds no matter what you do.

 

hey, i guess im getting pissy cuz its always my beats that people tend to praise, and this thread just opened up a plethora of shortcuts in the future i can take... but being accussed of that when youre not is a kick to the balls. i like to keep it real. nothing beats opening 6 breaks and alternating between each one every two midi notes.

 

as for the tips in this thread - i just tried out buffer overide - lol wtf?

i feel your pain. when i made the autechre fake everyone over at That Other Site™ was saying my entire album relied on Buffer ovveride. It infuriated me only because they were so damn sure of it, when i know obviously that i never used that program before. All of my "glitch" sounds were done manually on that album.

Once Glitch making software gets mainstream all the smoke and mirrors of fast glitchy electronic music is gone. People need to come up with new smoke, and new mirrors. Its unfortunate, but it might force people to be more creative. On the other hand it might just create ahuge genre of shit music using glitch plugins.

pff, That Other Site™ suck (so i've heard). and yes, im sure therell be a whole slue of shitglitchcore programmers but hopefully theyll stick to places like acidplanet.

but seeing as you too, feel my pain. lets start an orthodox electronic music movement. sort of like mormons... but with beat programming instead of a god.

the NI Battery is so dope though!

i've heard that battery + padKontrol = SUPREME WANG ACTIVATION!

i'll find out tonight.

go spastic was very effects oriented... you could hear tom making a loop and slightly changing a few drums every intereation but it was mostly copied and pasted, the fanciness obviously came from all the routing of dps effects the thru on all those drums... like taking them, running thru reverb, having reverb on some gate, and then pitch shifting it etc

classic drill stuff i guess refers to snares rushes or <insert drum here> rushes, mostly at really fast paces. sure you can achieve this with almost any program, but i think it takes less effort doing this with a tracker style interface. You can get something like skale and load it into cubase if needed and program amens till your eyes fall out.

the reason why trackers make such easy drill machines is because you can effectively hold down a button which will auto make a snare rush, and within seconds you can press down enter 2 numbers and the drum gets reversed... scroll down a few lines enter 2 more numbers and it pitches up etc.. its the quickness of being able to do this kinda of t hing vs raw possibilities of beat manipulation... the more edits per second, the easier it is to pull off your fancy drill n bass songs.

there are lots of squarepusherizer tools ... everything from enfx for reaktor to custom made things to buffer override, the main thing these lack is raw precision, and sure you could be pretty precise about the midi data being sent to these objects, but again its truely just much easier to achieve drum precision via a tracker. we are talking about a usual 30 drum triggers per bar and maybe 25 effects per bar as well, use a mouse if you want, lots of clicking...

  acid1 said:

the reason why trackers make such easy drill machines is because you can effectively hold down a button which will auto make a snare rush, and within seconds you can press down enter 2 numbers and the drum gets reversed... scroll down a few lines enter 2 more numbers and it pitches up etc.. its the quickness of being able to do this kinda of t hing vs raw possibilities of beat manipulation... the more edits per second, the easier it is to pull off your fancy drill n bass songs.

here here. and with renoise you can retrigger those snares mighty fast

ex: 0exy - Retrig notes in track-row every xy ticks (y=ticks 0 - speed) The first digit (x) sets the volume of the retriggered sample.

yeah, i really should use renoise more, but i just dont have the time to learn properly.

To paraphrase BoC, Trackers Is Math

  acid1 said:

the reason why trackers make such easy drill machines is because you can effectively hold down a button which will auto make a snare rush, and within seconds you can press down enter 2 numbers and the drum gets reversed... scroll down a few lines enter 2 more numbers and it pitches up etc.. its the quickness of being able to do this kinda of t hing vs raw possibilities of beat manipulation... the more edits per second, the easier it is to pull off your fancy drill n bass songs.

thank you! this is the best explaination for the appeal of trackers i've heard. i've always wondered what the benefits were and why someone would want to use such a unintuitive interface for music production, but now it makes perfect sense... and also explains why soundmurder does everything in trackers... it's perfect for making ragga jungle beats.

thanks!

anybody who uses the squarepusheriser can leave this thread

  LUDD said:

anybody who uses the squarepusheriser/bufferoverride/supatrigga/glitchvst/glitchexe/etc can fuck off and die

fuxt

you beat programmers are so elite... who care what people use?

beat programmers

I use buffer override sometimes but not for drills... just when I want the entire sound to collapse in on itself like at the end of "William Shatner Changed My Life". It's a distinctive sound that can't really be masked but I think it has its time and place

  Iain C said:

I use buffer override sometimes but not for drills... just when I want the entire asshole to collapse in on itself like at the end of "William Shatner Changed My Life". It's a distinctive feeling that can't really be masked but I think it has its time and place

fuxt

I used to do drill type stuff using SF acid and just pasting breaks together. worked well considering it was just a matter of dragging shit around to fit, but very limiting considering i had to do all my offline processing in soundforge. Nowadays I don't use acid anymore, but I don't do speedy drill type shit anymore either.

I still cant believe what TJ said about editing with tape. such bullshit. If he edited with tape his albums would all sound like music is rotted. (I know that wasn't tape, but still)

i like to think i piss on most people when it comes to this sort of nonsense. check out the track on the following link;

http://forum.watmm.com/index.php?showtopic=5156

the midi was done is live 4 while the sounds were done in reason 3.0. it took about a day to do and is easy if you know how. if you down load it i'll tell you how it was done, and probably loose the freinds i'm making on this forum for being an arrogant cunt.

is there an emoticon for being smug?

P.S i am being marginally ironic, i'm not a cunt at all, i'm quite timid really.

FUCK

took forever to read all that.. and now im replying to something very early on..

  Quote

Yes, but how could you do all the cuts and effects with a MIDI-triggered sampler (no matter if hardware or software)?

There is practically no part in the song (except of the beginning) where he just triggers drumsounds, everything is chopped and messed up (in a positive sense).

  Quote

Once Glitch making software gets mainstream all the smoke and mirrors of fast glitchy electronic music is gone. People need to come up with new smoke, and new mirrors. Its unfortunate, but it might force people to be more creative. On the other hand it might just create ahuge genre of shit music using glitch plugins.

yeah, the typical glitch has kinda lost my interest.. actually, i got kinda bored of hard chopping a while ago.. it made me get out of vsnares since most of his drumming is very choppy (using a slice of a drum rather than a drum sample with full decay, etc.)

having said that.. i think his tracks might be going past that now..

i also used to be attracted to the idea that alot of drill beats werent playable by humans, but now that ive heard some great drummers, i know thats not true.. but i just dont care about that anymore.. its not much of a factor.

i also remember loving 'drill' stuff.. which i now realize is nothing more than snare rolls.. but i guess pusher and afx got over that in 95 or so, and now its just embedded in the style rather than the emphasis.. still, i love hangable autobulb type beats where the whole beat is based on the drill..

  rude_NHS said:

i like to think i piss on most people when it comes to this sort of nonsense. check out the track on the following link;

 

http://forum.watmm.com/index.php?showtopic=5156

 

the midi was done is live 4 while the sounds were done in reason 3.0. it took about a day to do and is easy if you know how. if you down load it i'll tell you how it was done, and probably loose the freinds i'm making on this forum for being an arrogant cunt.

 

is there an emoticon for being smug?

 

P.S i am being marginally ironic, i'm not a cunt at all, i'm quite timid really.

i would be interested in your technique. please elaborate.

all this beat programming/mangling stuff to me reminds me a bit of when i was at music college as a teenager getting a headache from too many guitarists talking about how many notes they could play a minute to a 240bpm click whilst drinking beer and standing on there head etc.

it all seems like a bit of a race to me. the thing is about go plastic is that it wasn't done to try and keep ahead of the game, it was just a guy realizing that he could do something maybe other people hadn't thought of yet. as a result, people (including me) are spending too much time trying to figure out an easy way to do it.

like spending hours a night playing scales at 240bpm is no different to spending weeks/months programming a whole load of noisey rhythms on your beat granulator program made by some boffin on reaktor.

but, at the risk of sounding prententious, like playing any instrument, be it a guitar, or a trumpet, or your sequencer, and, be it to a virtuoso level, or to a minimal level, its all about the timing, and the delivery.

and these are things i find endearing about people like all these names you see on here all the time, squarepusher, aphex twin, exile and the mighty snares, the appeal in the music isn't in how they program the stuff or what they use to do it, but the placement and execution of it.

you could spend forever programming your ultimate granular drum bastard in maxmsp which no-one else will understand or know how to use or better it, but if you cant use it in a musical way, then whats the point.

music shouldn't be about elitism and trying to be more esoteric than your peers, it should be about expression. and fair enough, if hyper detailed drum programming is your way of expressing yourself then do it by all means, just don't let fetishism get in the way of your integrity.

if we all keep up this attitude then electronic music is gonna get to the point where its gonna be totally unbearable even to the most knowledgable, able and talented of us, kind of like what happened to hair metal.

remember that electronic music has the word dance in it, and that is what people really want to do innit. we all like a bit of cleverness and trickery but we just wanna dance really and have a laugh.

drill,n,bass, like shred metal, is like saying "bow down to my massive cock and marvel".

stop wasting your time trying to work it out and just do it. you'll only turn 40 and think, "why didn't i just make house.

anyway. if reference to that chap who wanted me to elaborate on my technique, all i can say right now is this, just remember to keep it groovy, and think about deliverance, then it wont matter what program you use or what speed you play it at.

*thinks about Deliverance*

SQUEAL PIGGY!

  Iain C said:

*thinks about Deliverance*

 

SQUEAL PIGGY!

lol

  rude_NHS said:

anyway. if reference to that chap who wanted me to elaborate on my technique, all i can say right now is this, just remember to keep it groovy, and think about deliverance, then it wont matter what program you use or what speed you play it at.

wtf? you said that you would enlighten us with your unparalleled electronic music wizardry?! and instead we get some played out rant. maybe you're new here, but someone posts almost exactly what you just posted every other week.

so be a nice EKT-er and discuss music making techniques with us..

i was only asking to see if you used any techniques i was not already aware of, no ones going to beg you for tips on how to make tired-ass amen breaks.

(xlt is that-a-way)

you think house music is more danceable than drill'n'bass?

:laughing:

hahahahahhahah. that's a good one.

  $$$Celatid said:

you think house music is more danceable than drill'n'bass?

 

:laughing:

hahahahahhahah. that's a good one.

it is.