From Michael Upton Sent Wed, Oct 13th 1999, 22:42
From Michael Upton Sent Wed, Oct 13th 1999, 22:42
On Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:56:32 John Counts wrote:
> Okay.....
> "A Journey to Reedham (7am mix)"- Squarepusher
> "Boy/Girl Song"- Aphex Twin
> The Entire Boku Mo Wakaran album by Bogdan
> Lunatic Harness-era Mu-Ziq
> How are those extremely cut-up and timestretched
>filled beats created? Surely it doesn't involve a
>meticulous programming of each whirr and bizzz at 210
>BPM. There is definitely an element of randomization.
>Can any of the gear-savvy shed light on the general
>technique of drill & bass (hate that word)
>programming?
I guess this is thislisty... I use a 16 bit sequencer and a sampler, and the following come to mind. (I should also say I don't write stuff with this style of programming, but this what came to mind when I tried to dissect some of the above tracks)
a) Randomize start times. Basically push notes about randomly. You can quantize this afterwards. A program like Steinberg's Recycle allows you to dump a beat as individual component parts to your sampler and will write a midi file of the same for you. Sorta took the magic out of the technical side of Wagon Christ for me, but, hey. Anyway... copy and paste the sequence out for 16 bars, highlight the snares (or whatever) and randomize the suckers. Quantize afterwards, and keep the few bits that sound OK. :)
b) Scale time. Stretches or compresses the selected part of the sequence (nb. not the samples) by whatever scale you like. This is verrry useful for doing those "drill" super fast snare rolls without having to zoom right in and draw in 256 to the bar, or whatever. :)
c) Lots of cut and paste of the sequence. :) Particularly, cutting and pasting sections divisible by 3 across groups of 4.
There're other approaches for sure, within my set up, let alone using hard disk recording or whatever.
Michael
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