How do you make your rhythm tracks?

[clubbedtodeath]

I kind of write the drum tracks alongside the rest of the tune, starting with a regular kick/snare to get things going.

Usually I play some drum sounds from a sampler, or chop up samples and paste them part-by-part in Sonar until I have a phrase. This is usually done across 3 tracks, along for filtering with different effects for hihat/snare/kick/etc.

When I've got that down, I'll usually play out a large chunk of it through Sonar on auxiliary outs, and feed it through the Boss SP303, which gives me a chance to fiddle live with pitch shift/tape delay etc. That will be recorded back into Sonar.

This gives me a chance to switch the drum mix between the original and processed drum tracks. At that stage, I'll chop up some bars just for good measure in Sonar, usually towards the end of a phrase, with a touch of machine-gun kick drum or some reversed snares/hihats.

Lastly, for thumping kick I split the mastering compression between everything else and the kick, before feeding the whole shebang through a limiter. (I'd use side-chaining, but Sonar 7 doesn't support it)

[ronP]

oo


"tsst-tsst!'

Hi-Hats! . . . My rhythms almost always come to me first from the crisp, percussive hiss of a hi-hat pattern. I build kick, snare, tom, and secondary percussion around the dynamics of that tinny treble timbre.

"tsst-tsst"


oo

[StepLogik]

Genoqs Octopus --> 909, 707, EMX-1

Once I get a couple of good patterns I like, I dump them into Cakewalk Sonar for further tweaking and arranging into an actual tune.

I generally program very simple drum patterns so my process is hardly revolutionary i don't like creating drum patterns in software. mousing around to noodle a beat is pretty uninspiring.

[Polyroy]

.

[balma]

Well beyond buying a drum machine and following the manual......! What kind of sound are you after? How do you achieve it? Etc.,,,

For me - sampled drum sounds - nice and crisp. Not analogue, No bass drum. Double tracking..... etc...

As an example - on the stinky sound MC303 you can turn off instruments and strip the presets down tp an interesting `clicktrack` and then build on top of this inputing the other drums manually from a better drum machine source ( zoom drum machines are my fav), using tthe MC303 to keep the beat. Worked for me anyway.

I learned to follow the easiest path inside each one of my synths.

That means, I use the synths, for the functions they are more suitable to perform. I do not force them for hard paths, for areas they are not specialized.

Is like, trying to get pianos from a Virus, or drums from a Fizmo.... no sense.

MC 303 should be used to make stinky cheap plastic drum sounds... that's what it works for.... honestly, that's the worst synth I have played. Despite that, I had good fun with it....


There are synths, that can create AMAZING drum sounds. But they are not suitable for arranging them into a track or a mix. A good synth track depends of the sounds quality and the sequencing quality for equal parts.

What I do??

Took my Yamaha SY 99, and use the FM engine, to make some drum sounds.

Took my command station, and spend long hours creating some percussive ethnic sounds.

Took the fizmo,and program some short blip crunchy sounds.

Then, I sample them into the ELECTRIBE ESX1.

Now I have sounds generated by complex devices, loaded into a handy and very easy to manipulate mini synth.

I also, record aleatory elements. Drums from old albums (U2's october, alice in chains, James Brown, Lords of Acid, etc etc etc etc etc etc etrc) voices, real musical instruments sampled with a mic.

Sometimes, you get good drums from the most useless sound. who knows??? ALWAYS LEAVE AN OPEN PATH TO EXPERIMENTATION.

The best of all?? I have so much fun, I am very happy human being when playing my ESX1. You can create nice punchy and groovy tracks in just a few minutes.

[stephen]

I just mess about in Renoise

[ColorForm2113]

Well the way I USED to do it was I would make a percussion sound on my micromoog, sample it to my es-1, chop it up, compress it etc..and save them as the original and the modified one then resample them layered to together and do some final tweaking. And do this for each drum part. Then just kind of build a basic pattern and and layer upon that take some stuff out, kinda the same way stab frenzy says he does I guess. But now that the es-1 bit the dust, I've got the roland and I haven't had much time to mess with it, I need to hit up salvation army and get a crt monitor and track down the sequencer disc.....

[VCOrhubarb]

No drum machine here. I have to incorporate my rhythmic elements in the synth patches I play. Usually I use the envelopes and velocity response to emphasise the rhythm. Very limited, to be honest, but that's all I have at the moment. Can be fun, though.

[Cumulus]

I, too, am very happy when playing my Electribe. (And I only have the old ES-1 - not even a MkII.)

The part I didn't mention above is the fact that I almost always carry arond my little Sony digital voice record ero capture ambient and percussive sounds. Anything from playground equipment to garbage trucks, car alarms to cash registers can be twisted into useful percussion sounds.

I have all of the Casio SK-1 drum sounds on my electribe right now, they are pretty fun to mess arond with but so far I have only ,ixed them with other drum sounds. I haven't used them on their own yet..

[diezdiazgiant]

Drink/smoke. When I wake up in the morning surprise myself with mysterious recordings. Heh.

What I do isn't all that different from what's listed here. Often I will start a basic 4/4 loop triggering a synth/vst depending on what I have or just jam out, start recording, and then just muck around with layering effects on and tweaking various parameters. I usually get bored with this after about an hour or so. Eventually ill come back to the file after I've forgotten what's even on it, throw it in ableton and lay down markers anytime I hear something I think I would like to use or might find useful. Chop/extract throw into an ableton drum rack.
I recently have acquired a numark ns7, so I've taken to playing back the recordings on there. Using abletons looper with the ns7 I've been able to have quite a bit of fun mashing sequences or using the ns7 like a sampler/drum machine. Being able to manually scrub the playback position and browse files from a piece of hardware adds a certain element of immediacy and FUN that I felt was missing from using only ableton

[polardark]

For me, drums are a mystery. I have drummer friends who can pick up a crappy drum machine and make it sound better than I thought possible. When this happens I just get more perplexed.

I mostly start with drum loops I sampled from TV or somewhere and change the pitch and/or tempo while applying heavy distortion and/or aliasing and/or phaser and/or filtering until I get a texture I like. (Effects that preserve the rhythm but drastically change the timbre, basically.) After that I add a kick, hihat etc if it's needed to fill things out. I have a terribly bassy kick sample that I made in the excellent Computer Music Dominator VSTi that sees a bit too much use when I need to layer a weak processed kick.