IDM/Breakcore drums in reason ?! (Tutorial sorta )
So I often recieve private messages or comments asking me how I do my drum sequencing.
Last night I was responding to one of these questions and realized that I had written a decently large
psuedo-tutorial . Rather than retype the entire thing i'll just copy and paste the email into this post.
this is for Reason 3-4, but the ideas will work for any good sampler/slicer
I hope this answers some questions. ( Since this was an email directed towards someone specifically, please don't worry about anything that doesn't appear to apply to you
)
I don't know why but I'm in a writing mood, So i'm going to go ahead and detail out how I do drums in reason. If you're able to take the time to read it haha.
So first off, because I don't own a drumset myself, I usually end up using samples for my drums. whether it be single hit samples put into a redrum or a full breakbeat sliced up.
For the redrum, it's all about filling the kit with as many sounds as you can get, Usually 2 kick drums. 3 different hats. 2 snares and then whatever other random sounds you want, Because the redrum works really well as a sampler.
I'll get abit advanced with my redrum by setting it so that triggering one snare drum will trigger the other at the same time( which is usually why i use 2 snares)
I won't get too deep into the redrum as it's pretty basic and generally used for background and underlying beats.( you know, the basic kick hat hat snare hat hat kick hat hat hat hat snare hat hat combo)
The real glitchy drums come from the DR.Rex loop player, not because it plays loops( which is good) but because it allows you to automate so much.
++==Here i will break down the drum creating process==++
we'll start with a very common drum sample for reference, The Amen Break.
Every one knows the break it's in almost every drum and bass song, and alot of 90's hip hop.
The first thing you want to do is use recycle to slice that thing to the way you want it. Recycle has alot of built in effects itself, to help you personalize that breakbeat or individual hits, but for now we'll just talk about the basics.
You're going to use the pen tool to put slice points, the first slice point is assumed at the very beginning of the sample, so what you want to do is set the slice at the very very beginning of each hit that you want.
You can make this alot easier and more precise by zooming in, so that you can see the the micro-waves.
A fun trick and what will make things easier for you is to edit the drum loop that you have with "Audacity" and copy it out to run twice. That way you can make the first round of hits super precise, while slicing the later hits to be a bit off or a bit different to get you a unique sound*
*For instance, the amen that i sliced has one hit that is a snare/hat roll one right after the other, so that I can use that as one hit.
Once you get that all finished up and sliced the way you want it, it'll automatically save as a rex. Then you open that up in the DR.Rex, and the fun begins
The best way to use the rex, is to paint the notes on yourself, or if you're feeling amazing enough, you can map them to midi keys and drum it out with your fingers, but you know as well as I do that you aren't going to be able to get the sound you want with your fingers.
I'm going to assume you know how to use reason's sequencer already, so we're not going to go into detail on that.
so basically you're going to start drawing the notes, using it as you would while drawing redrum notes, though instead of being labeled " Kick, snare, hat, etc" they are going to be labeled as slice 1-40 or however many slices you have.
Then you're going to get into the hardcore automation.
On the timeline, right click on the label for your dr rex(where the little record buttons are and whatnot) and go to paramter automation.
Uncheck the box that use " show most common paramters" or sometihng like that, and it will give you a HUGE list of paramters you can automate. I normally set " Master level, Pitch bend, Transpose, Oscilator octave, LFO amount, LFO rate, Filter Frequency, and Filter Resonance.
After then you can edit the automation just as you would the notes, except instead of note boxes, you're working with vector lines.
For a quick example; to get the kind of " Whoooaaaappp" snare roll,
You're going to start on the 4th beat of the measure
set the note timing to 1/64th. Set one note on the 4th beat and then copy paste that note to the end of the measure.
you should have a very stale sounding bllrrrrr snare roll. ( like my onomatopoeias? haha )
Now, you're going to edit the Filter frequency parameter.
start at the very first snare hit and have the frequency all the way to the bottom. Then, at the end you're going to set another vector point at the top, so that it makes an ascending slope from the beginning of the snare roll, to the end.
go ahead and listen to that, you're going to notice a VAST difference between that snare roll and your normal "no volume to high volume " snare roll
hope this helps a bit, please feel free to ask any more questions you might have.
Last night I was responding to one of these questions and realized that I had written a decently large
psuedo-tutorial . Rather than retype the entire thing i'll just copy and paste the email into this post.
this is for Reason 3-4, but the ideas will work for any good sampler/slicer
I hope this answers some questions. ( Since this was an email directed towards someone specifically, please don't worry about anything that doesn't appear to apply to you
)I don't know why but I'm in a writing mood, So i'm going to go ahead and detail out how I do drums in reason. If you're able to take the time to read it haha.
So first off, because I don't own a drumset myself, I usually end up using samples for my drums. whether it be single hit samples put into a redrum or a full breakbeat sliced up.
For the redrum, it's all about filling the kit with as many sounds as you can get, Usually 2 kick drums. 3 different hats. 2 snares and then whatever other random sounds you want, Because the redrum works really well as a sampler.
I'll get abit advanced with my redrum by setting it so that triggering one snare drum will trigger the other at the same time( which is usually why i use 2 snares)
I won't get too deep into the redrum as it's pretty basic and generally used for background and underlying beats.( you know, the basic kick hat hat snare hat hat kick hat hat hat hat snare hat hat combo)
The real glitchy drums come from the DR.Rex loop player, not because it plays loops( which is good) but because it allows you to automate so much.
++==Here i will break down the drum creating process==++
we'll start with a very common drum sample for reference, The Amen Break.
Every one knows the break it's in almost every drum and bass song, and alot of 90's hip hop.
The first thing you want to do is use recycle to slice that thing to the way you want it. Recycle has alot of built in effects itself, to help you personalize that breakbeat or individual hits, but for now we'll just talk about the basics.
You're going to use the pen tool to put slice points, the first slice point is assumed at the very beginning of the sample, so what you want to do is set the slice at the very very beginning of each hit that you want.
You can make this alot easier and more precise by zooming in, so that you can see the the micro-waves.
A fun trick and what will make things easier for you is to edit the drum loop that you have with "Audacity" and copy it out to run twice. That way you can make the first round of hits super precise, while slicing the later hits to be a bit off or a bit different to get you a unique sound*
*For instance, the amen that i sliced has one hit that is a snare/hat roll one right after the other, so that I can use that as one hit.
Once you get that all finished up and sliced the way you want it, it'll automatically save as a rex. Then you open that up in the DR.Rex, and the fun begins
The best way to use the rex, is to paint the notes on yourself, or if you're feeling amazing enough, you can map them to midi keys and drum it out with your fingers, but you know as well as I do that you aren't going to be able to get the sound you want with your fingers.
I'm going to assume you know how to use reason's sequencer already, so we're not going to go into detail on that.
so basically you're going to start drawing the notes, using it as you would while drawing redrum notes, though instead of being labeled " Kick, snare, hat, etc" they are going to be labeled as slice 1-40 or however many slices you have.
Then you're going to get into the hardcore automation.
On the timeline, right click on the label for your dr rex(where the little record buttons are and whatnot) and go to paramter automation.
Uncheck the box that use " show most common paramters" or sometihng like that, and it will give you a HUGE list of paramters you can automate. I normally set " Master level, Pitch bend, Transpose, Oscilator octave, LFO amount, LFO rate, Filter Frequency, and Filter Resonance.
After then you can edit the automation just as you would the notes, except instead of note boxes, you're working with vector lines.
For a quick example; to get the kind of " Whoooaaaappp" snare roll,
You're going to start on the 4th beat of the measure
set the note timing to 1/64th. Set one note on the 4th beat and then copy paste that note to the end of the measure.
you should have a very stale sounding bllrrrrr snare roll. ( like my onomatopoeias? haha )
Now, you're going to edit the Filter frequency parameter.
start at the very first snare hit and have the frequency all the way to the bottom. Then, at the end you're going to set another vector point at the top, so that it makes an ascending slope from the beginning of the snare roll, to the end.
go ahead and listen to that, you're going to notice a VAST difference between that snare roll and your normal "no volume to high volume " snare roll
hope this helps a bit, please feel free to ask any more questions you might have.
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