|
I usually start my tunes out with a top line. I load up a weak hat, and a weak snare or clap, along with some blippy synth elements or other percussion and get a little groove going. Once I have that I find a break from a disco record, or some other track, or a loop library... something that has a good groove that compliments my top line. I then modify this loop, re-arrange hits, mute parts I don't like, reverse other parts etc.. Once thats done, I'll beef up the snare, and kick by layering anywhere between 2 to 5 more additional hits using EQ and Compression to bring out or carve the bits of each individual hit I want. I find that 180-210hz is the best for a punchy weighty snare.
I'll then route all my drums to a submix bus and then compress it lightly to get the individual hits to gel together.... somewhere in this chain i'll apply a little distortion or saturation to my drums, which kind of acts as a compressor, but also an exciter. The end result is one fat punchy, weighty breakbeat... just don't go overboard with the compression.
My bass is the same too. I typically use raw wave forms in a sampler, or I'll use NI Massive and start tweaking from scratch and bounce it down and put it in a sampler. I'll typically layer these sounds up, usually run one thru guitar rig... Once I get a nice sound I like, I'll take an empty sine or triangle wave and put it underneath the other two or three bass layers to give it some weight. The stuff on the top end of the bass I tend to widen out on the stereo field to make it sound huge, and all the low frequencies I leave dead center. Once the original bassline is written, i'll take a copy of that instrument, and start making a few answer riffs, falls, rises, random trickery that are in the root note of my song, and bounce those out and load them into a sampler for variations and fills.
And thats it. I haven't gotten very far or really completed anything in the last five years. I've just tinkered, and tinkered and tinkered learning how to do things... but my composition skills have atrophied. I'd basically work on a track, and then never finish it because I didn't feel it was up to par or lately, I get tired of it or come up with a new idea for a new song. I've kind of developed this habit of making 8 bar loops and then loosing interest and starting something else and not going anywhere from there... it kind of pisses me off.
|
