Can I Make A PHATT BEAT? (with The Blue Devils)

so why don't we take this [Music] and turn it into this [Music] what is this sorcery let me introduce you to my new friend know red-headed ruddy-faced soon to be quintigenerian actually talking about fat beasts truth truth of the matter is that my first claim not to fame but claim to a paycheck in hollywood was as a drum programmer i've been doing it for 30 years so i'm fairly obsessed with this stuff and when spitfire had the opportunity of working with the blue devils well anything that takes us away from a trap kit for a drum programmer like me makes me think will it make a fat beat so in this video contents listed down below i'm going to try and make a beat with the blue devils our drumline plug-in but also i'm going to introduce you to a piece of hardware that has made me think differently about the way that i process drums entirely but first what actually does fat mean a few years ago i was proposing a collaboration with an established breakbeat artist and he said he would be very happy to work with me provided it was fat and i thought well i can turn up the base as if fat is just simply lots of base end now let me show you an example of why i was wrong with that assumption [Music] all i would need to do to make this drum kit sound fat would be to turn up the bass fat beet turns out it isn't fat doesn't mean just bassy with all of that bass where would your 808 go so what about tight punchy [Music] now would we be able to hear our 808 under that [Music] isop or isop the international spectrum of fatness is a way of plotting where your beat sits on the isop scale from one end we have thin all the way to flabby neither of these are good and should be avoided at all costs what we're aiming for is that point halfway between the two ultimate fatness it's combining the best of these two ends of the scale now the halfway point between the extremes and ultimate fatness we have tight say david garibaldi's beats for tower of power or steve ferroni's beats for awb and then over on the other side you have monster john bonham's work with led zeppelin or indeed the ferocious tomfest that is billy cobham my theory is combining and attenuating the best of tight and the best of monster will get you to ultimate fatness but in all honesty i feel our notion of fatness is all to do with the lathe when a production engineer sets out to examine and judge the performance of a center lathe what are the main points you'll look for not that kind of lathe but this traditionally djs used to press dub plates you want to get the balance of the dub plate being as loud as possible without it becoming unplayable one method employed here is compression an evening of dynamics so the thing is loud so what we want is the kick and the back beat the the real impact of the snare on the two and the four to be consistent and as loud as possible every time so i'm simply gonna take this and smash it to bits with a compressor [Music] so what you need to do is make sure that the attack isn't too fast so you're not chopping the transient off and not making it too [Music] thick what we could also do is just maybe take the very bottom end of the kickoff so we're we're not kind of being too flabby at the bottom end so surely the answer is in order to achieve fatness just compress it to buggery turn up the makeup until it's as loud as humanly possible well oasis tried that back in the 90s and whilst there's no denying the loudness of their tracks if you listen to them on a pair of like earbuds it's like washing your ears out with barbed wire so for me when designing a fat beat it's all about orchestration voicing if you like the different frequencies should affect you on different parts of your body the snare should smack you in the chops and make your pupils dilate and the kick drum mistake a lot of us make is to put it too deep in the in the flab around our tummies well speak for myself anyway but actually what it should be doing is hitting you in the chest so hard it wins you leaving space for your iterate or your base to loosen whatever matter you have in your colon now stuart copeland in many interviews is argued that turns out machines are capable of making beats that lift us up and deposit us on the dance floor i agree with the kind of kick the bass and the backbeat aspect of that but not with i think the most important part of a beat and that is the very top head for me this describes the groove this is the element that gets inside your head it doesn't just smack it it's the it's the domain of ghost notes and hi-hats a great example of this is rock drummers playing sixteenths on a hi-hat they'd usually use both hands whereas funk drummers will play it with one hand even though the left hand is free to do the alternate 16s because it will give it a tension that will drag against the kind of the the the groove if you will and make it kind of more of a swaggery groove [Music] but obviously not like a crap finger drummer like me now if our american cousins could bear with us just a little bit explaining here drum lines are largely an american phenomenon a form of kind of athletic drumming performed by drum corps derived from european military bands highly tight highly competitive of which the blue devils are arguably the best in the usa and are indeed a household name over there and what stimulates me about the idea of making a beat with the blue devils is their snares well it doesn't get thinner they're really crisp but their bass drums aren't a tad on the flabby side can we coalesce these two elements to create fat and i've taken inspiration from kanye's masterful jesus walks to imagine what that beat would have been like if it was played by the blue devils so i'm doing something 88 which is just just a little bit slower than your kind of average 90 bpm hip-hop beat just to make it have a bit of a a swagger i'm gonna start with some snare hits i think i'm going to start these kind of sound like a cross between a clap a snap and a snare hit which is kind of this is just holding pattern something's coming let's get some little bouncy ghosts in there okay so i'm quantizing that to a swing a now let's go in with the main back beat the main snare so at the moment all we've been looking at is the just the different snare hits within drumline and then i'm going to go for some rolls now which are just awesome now i'm going to create a kind of a little like a lo-fi loop and i'm going to use the percussion ensemble for this [Music] it's kind of almost going to be like a conga pattern [Music] quantize [Music] and that's now starting to feel a little bit kind of computerized to me so what i'm going to do make the whole thing feel just a little bit lazy [Music] and then what i'm going to do is just going to add a filter to it just a like a low cut [Music] and i might just like stick it through like an amp just to make it just feel a little bit not crunchy but just like just a little bit retro [Music] the kick drum i'm going to go to the bass drum drum hit that sounds good now i'm going to actually just tune it down to kind of accentuate and unlassue the ones so they go smack bang on the one of everybody and then just pull these just back slightly it's a bit lazy so the drumline plug-in has different mic positions close and room it was recorded at the newman stage in l.a which is a big room and i'm using a mixture i like the room with the snares but maybe with the bass drum we could be more close so i still think the room decay needs to be tighter so i'm going to apply a gate to chop or rather fade out the decays quicker for me just a little bit soft it's a little bit thicker so what i'm going to do is just add a 909 last thing's last i just want to add just just really get the transients out of the main snare just so it's really smacking in the face and uh and the transients out of the kick the original kick as well i'm just going to compress those channels independently of everything else so that's attacking too quickly [Music] i'm liking but what about we get that kind of bus compression on to smash it all together and make it feel like a record right for this i'm going to go out board so why don't we take this [Music] and turn it into this [Music] what is this sorcery let me introduce you to my new friend the overstayer basically a stereo channel with preamp eq filter and compression stages but with a novel signal path instead of serial parallel okay so the difference between a serial signal path and a parallel one standard channels desks outboard will place one stage after another with parallel devices the unit will split the signal and treat each stage independently before summing at the end so on the overstair we have a three-channel stereo summing mixer for the dry eq stage the filter stage and the compression stage the problem i've been having up to this point is you can't unbreak an egg so by compressing a signal smashing it to bits you're making it bite and tight but you're losing power and punch and by saturating it you're clipping it there's no coming back from both so instead of sounding fat it just sounded processed and lame but with the oversteer you get your yolk your white and a whole omelet served up separately so the power of the original mix is maintained the added tightness of the compression is introduced and the clipped monstrousness of the saturation is mixed in without the whole thing sounding flabby and because they're all independent stages there's all sorts of potential to distort and saturate them [Music] internally [Music] the problem is the over stair is really expensive but it is a piece of kit that i've been looking for over 25 years now but i've also learned a lot from the unit and i'm wondering whether i can replicate what it does out of the box in the box so what i'm going to do is create three separate paths and try to run them in parallel within logic so i'm going to create bus one there and then bus two everything up bus three everything up so we've got one two three so these signals are now running in parallel which will mean they'll get louder as i turn them up but hopefully it won't go all fazey [Music] it naturally sounds better because it's just three of the same things so it's kind of bigger and better so what i'm going to do is just concentrate on the first overstayer channel if you will which is the eq and filter so what we're going to do see that feels tighter already just chop topping the very bottom off just a little bit of base and then top [Music] okay next up gonna do the compressed you can hear the attacks too quick there and saturation just going to use distortion on the oversteer we didn't use too much of this i'm just going to take this down [Music] [Music] so let's compare to the new virtual overstay signal [Music] whilst this way of processing really looks after the head and the chest part of beat making what about the stuff that gets inside the groove so this is the beat without what i would refer to as the noggin material let's add in the ghosts [Music] and then the loop [Music] and it's these parts of the beat the groove are the bits that you really need to nurture i know for jesus walks kanye allegedly spent three days just setting that groove so bear with me if you if you can bear to i just want to take it back to one final stage with this beat creation and that is to imitate mastering it for the lathe okay so i'm going to take this back through the over stair [Music] so often when you master the vinyl they put the low bottom end into mono this makes the lathe operate more efficiently and many say that if you put your low end in mono it'll be fatter okay so what i'm going to do is send this out of a new bus and another bus so we're working again in parallel so that's going to be loud [Music] because there's two of everything so what i'm going to do is chop off the top here from 175 and i'm going to chop the bottom off here from 175 it doesn't seem to like doing 175 174 it is join those together great now what's the point of this well i'm going to put this one the base one the low into mono and hopefully it's going to give us a tighter bottom end and a wider broader top so can the blue devils play a fat beat well i think that that is a groove that a bass would sit or an 808 would sit really nicely underneath if you want to find out more about drumline it's linked in the video description below have you any thoughts on what defines fat and any experience of cutting dub plates yourself and things that you should and shouldn't avoid when looking at the crossover points of when you should send stuff into mono there was kind of a lot of argument whether it was 50 hertz 100 hertz 175 hertz what do you feel is your preferred crossover point and have you ever tried any of these crossover plugins that are available i believe ozone does it thanks as always for watching till the end if you haven't subscribed yet please do so and ding that bell to be notified the next time i put up a video one of those for the blue devils see you next time

Channel: Christian Henson Music

Views: 32,352

Keywords: spitfire audio, christian henson, behind the scenes, orchestral programming, media composition, media composing, media composer, orchestral samples, orchestral sampling, behind the scenes in recording studios, recording studios, music programming, music programming techniques

Id: P_GJu6CHsWE

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021