Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound recording and mixing podcast channel. I am Eddie Bazil. 

Welcome back. In part one we concentrated on altering timing elements of drum sounds within syncopated and staid drum beats to afford both variety and groove. In this podcast we'll concentrate on slightly more advanced and different techniques to help you to structure and spice up your drum beats.  If you struggle with creating your own drum beats, why not use an existing commercial drum break as the foundation to build upon.

I'm not referring to using the drum beat as is and as an audio loop, but rather ripping the MIDI note sequence and timing information from the beat and applying it to your own breaks. This technique is nothing new. Manufacturers saw the benefits of replacing drum sounds within a beat a long time ago and they responded by creating clever drum replacement software.

These software were initially created to replace acoustic drum sounds in existing recorded beats where the drum kit recordings were not quite up to scratch. The big players were Wave Machine Labs who gave us the wonderful drummer gog and Slate Digital who dropped the mighty trigger finger on us.

However, nowadays lots of software and hardware developers have jumped on the drum replacement bandwagon and are offering all manner of very cool beat ripping and editing software.  But there are other options available and within your door that are equally powerful and detailed as standalone drum replacement software. 

In the first example, I'm going to rip the drum elements and timing information from a commercial track, Timberlands Icebox, and replace the sounds with my own selection of drum sounds, and then apply the timing information to try to mimic the original track's nod. The software of choice is Cubase, but most DAWs will also house these features.

Here is the short segment of the track that I'm going to use. 

And this is what I've constructed. 

The first step is to isolate a four or eight bar pattern that loops nicely. This allows the ripping and editing processes to be easier to manage, particularly when it comes to ripping and storing the timing information to be used later as a quantized template.  If you try to rip a drum beat from a song and don't find the perfect loop segment, then you'll need to edit and loop afterwards, which trust me can be challenging. 

I find it saves me a lot of grief if I do this right at the beginning. I have used Hit'n'Mix's RipX DAW Pro to rip only the drum and percussive elements from the Icebox segment. I have then imported the rip loop into Cubase to isolate the drum elements and convert them into MIDI notes which I can then use to trigger my own drum sounds.

Cubase has a very good hit points detection algorithm which can be customized to taste. I've set the threshold to only encompass the kick and snare sounds. I'm not interested in the percussive elements as I'll be creating my own sequences. Once the hit points are processed, there are numerous options available to the user.

I've opted for create MIDI notes from hit points. Once the hit points are converted into MIDI notes, you can load your own drum sounds, be it a sampler or drum machine, etc. and have the converted MIDI notes trigger your drum sounds. Here is the ripped loop:

and the replaced drum sound sequence.

and the added percussive sequence I have created.

I've used Native Instruments Maschine 2 and customized the drum kit to my taste and I've added a couple of percussive sequences to spice up the drum beat again using Maschine 2. I've also thrown in a looped sample from the Cubase library browser and used Waves OVOX vocoder and edited the sample to afford some variety.

Cubase also allows the user to create groove quantize presets from the hit points. Because the MIDI note placements are in the same position as the newly created quantize template, there is no need to apply it to the extracted MIDI tater. However, it's really useful to save the groove. As a quantized preset template, as you can apply it to beat sequences you create.

Very cool. Here, as before, is the final version. 

In the next example, I'm going to use a selection of simple loops generated as sequences in Native Instruments Maschine 2. I'm then going to overlay these sequences with my own kick and snare, which I've custom designed using Cubase's Groove Agent. I find using existing commercial loops or sequences a great way to build beats as the grooves have already been created and you can overlay your own drum sounds over them.

The trick is not to use the entire sequence as your own but rather to select the elements you like and structure a new beat around them. It's even better if you use a pre made drum loop, build your beat on top, And then ditch the original loop. This helps to exact kick and snare note placements on the existing beat which will already afford a nice groove that you can take advantage of.

Although the advice keep it simple is a good one, I don't believe you should feel restricted in your beat designs.  I have often created multiple percussive loops and then stacked them on top of each other to create one overall homogenous funky loop. Break some rules and have some fun. Let's start with the final drum loop with the added percussive sequences and then we will work backwards and decompile the elements.

I've added a supplementary bass and hook sequence to highlight the overall groove of the beat. Here is the whole sequence 

and here is the drum beat. 

And now the kick and snare pattern. 

And finally the percussive patterns. 

I'm using a combination of ghost notes and loop layering for the overall beat groove and effects and dynamics to shape the drum elements. Whereas timing and note placement reign supreme in beat constructions, it would be negligent to ignore the roles of effects and dynamics in reshaping and coloring existing sounds.

Note lengths and velocities have been covered in the first podcast, so I'm going to concentrate on all the other processes. Ghost notes are musical notes that represent rhythmic values but have no discernible pitch. They're used purely for rhythmic tasks and with regards to beat construction, they can be a really useful weapon.

I triggered a percussive pattern from Maschine 2, whereby the exception of one open hat being played, every other sound is a ghost note.  I've also added a little reverb to the hi hats but left the cabasa dry. This gives a lift to the percussive sequence and softens the overall feel. Have a listen to the percussive pattern.

So first off we have the ghost notes pattern. 

And now the cabasa pattern. 

And finally the third pattern with the scraper. 

The kick and snare is where most of the action takes place. Not so much for the pattern, it's a pretty straightforward beat, bar the odd offbeat kick, but for the shaping and texturing of the drum sounds. I filtered the kick heavily and reshaped it using one of the supplied envelopes. By reducing the sustain and boosting the decay of the amplitude envelope, I can tighten the kick drum's duration and highlight the attack transients.

I've done this so as to allow the sub bass, shaped and triggered by Rob Papin's mighty sub boom bass, to bounce beneath the beat without the kick drowning it in low frequency mayhem. The snare has also been reshaped and I've added a low pass filter with some resonance and used a filter envelope to shape the snare to the whack.

I've then added copious amounts of reverb to the snare to give it that 90s texture we have all come to love and hate equally. If I could have added a mullet hairstyle and glitter spandex to the snare, I would have. The bass is there simply to give some weight to the low end of the beat and the keyboard sequence is there purely for context.

Once again, here is the complete sequence. 

In the final example, I'm going to construct two versions of a hip hop beat using the ubiquitous 808 bass drum, a simple off beat hi hat pattern and a dry clap sample. You've heard countless songs with a building, rattling 808 sub kick, taking center stage and providing not only the low end factor for the beat, but also the note.

Sounds crazy, but nailing the 808 sub in a beat is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you want the beat to note.  I started my career in this industry as a sound designer, programming for the labels and bands. I then ventured into the land of remixing and earned the great living remixing commercial chart tracks for the club circuits.

My forte was managing the low end of a mix coupled with creating driving drum beats specifically for the club circuits. I'm not a great musician by any stretch of the imagination, but for some weird reason I seem to have natural timing when it comes to programming beats. I believe a great deal of that is down to the fact that I use drum triggers and samplers with pads to lay in a groove.

The Linn Design Akai MPC 60 was the beast I cut my teeth on, and the drum pads were a joy to behold. A testament to the genius of Roger Linn. At some point in my MPC journey, I decided to test the timing of the MPC60's pad triggers, and found that by the time I hit a pad, coupled with the time it took for the pad contact to run through its travel, a tiny amount of latency was introduced.

This accounted for the timing, as we called it, of the Linn design pads. It was so intuitively delicious that I would slave my MPC to my Atari, just to make full use of its unique timing. Nowadays I mainly use a keyboard to lay down my grooves, but I must say the tactile interaction and the physical hitting of pads are sorely missed.

I've adapted and enjoy playing drums with a keyboard, but if you can grab something like an MPC, an iMachine or even trigger systems like a Cat or the Roland SPDs, then give bashing with hands and sticks a go. The time it takes to deliver a stick hit or pad slam can go a long way in introducing unique timing elements for your own beats. 

Okay, let's start by auditioning the beat sequence. 

I'm using D16's Nepheton 2, which is their emulation of the classic Roland TR 808, but on steroids. It is here where I have shaped the bass drum. I've timed the decay of the tonal bass drum to fill the gaps between the measures but not to hang over any notes. I've set the tone control to zero as I didn't want a bright clicky attack.

I'm leaving the sweep function alone as I'll be using this in the next example to demonstrate how the 808 bass drum can be shaped to act as a bass. I have applied no effects or dynamics to the bass drum. The clap and hi hat are triggered via Steinberg's Groove Agent SE 5. The magic takes place not only in the shaping of each drum element's dynamics, but the timing applied to each separate sequence. 

I never use the DAW's quantize feature when I lay down hip hop beats. I prefer my own timing to take over without any note placement corrections being applied.  I find that hip hop beats lend themselves much better if the human factor is applied. However, this is exclusive to the way I work and should not interfere with your process.

The screen of the MIDI note placements for the kick drum shows how some notes are played either early or late, but the variances are no more than a 30 second quantized placement. This is the timing of my played in real time kick sequence. In effect, I've played the kick drum more like a tonal bass than a solid on the beat kick drum.

The offbeat hi-hats pattern has also been played in with no correction and their variances are even smaller and closer to 64th quantized placements. The clap sits close to the 2nd and 4th measures but is timed late by at least 32 to 64th quantized divisions. The random early late note placements make for a more fluent and dynamic sequence, but feel free to quantize to taste.

Just make sure you don't end up with a rigid, syncopated drum pattern. And to end it all, I have added some pitch sweep changes to the bass kick drum sequence to make it sound more like a bass pattern than a kick pattern. And I've also added extra decay to one note to extend its pitched value and a short decay on  to remove the boomy bass effect and make it sound like a short thud.

Have a listen to how the pitched and envelope shaped bass drum completely changes the character of the beat. 

I'm using two automation lanes in Cubase to affect the sweep and decay parameters for the tonal kick in Nepheton. Automation lanes are very useful in altering both dynamic behavior and expressing further timing changes. You need to make sure that the pitch changes are musical and not random. After all, the 808 bass kick is predominantly a sine wave, which means it has a root pitch.

That means it can be tuned to the key and scale of the song the beat sits in. In this example there is no song but I've made sure to affect pick changes that sound musical.  Altering note decay values goes a long way in shaping the overall drum beat to sound more dynamic and affords further timing changes as covered in the previous podcast. 

These changes have given another slant to the existing drum beat, making it sound more musical thanks to the pitched bass drum, and with even more nod than the previous example.  That's it for now. Thanks for listening. This has been Eddie Bazil for Sound On Sound.  Thank you for listening, and be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information, along with web links and details of all the other episodes. 

And just before you go, let me point you to the soundonsound.com/podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels.