Everything about the DNB Beat... Complete Masterclass

in this video I'm going to show you everything you need to know about the two-step drum and Bas beat and turn something that sounds boring and it's something like [Music] this you'll learn everything from drum patterns sound selection mixing and more my name is stranger and I've been producing drum and Bas now for 28 years with releases on huge labels such as hospital records and now I'm here to take everything I've learned and give it to you there's a lot of newcomers the drum and base due to its racing popularity so let's have a refresher on how to make a pro Drummond based beat all right let's get it all right so in today's video we're going to be working on a basic drum and bass two-step beat and we're going to be learning everything about this beat so you can make drum and bass whether you're into jump up dance floor or even liquid drum base learning this beat will be essential I'm going to show you all the Vari and how to make this beat unique so for the first part I'm actually doing this in audio if you see my older videos I like programming in MIDI but I want to make this a little more accessible for beginners and usually with audio things are a little more visual so you can see how each hit is placed in context to all the other sounds so the first thing is to set the BPM or the tempo of your track now for drum and base it generally ranges from 170 to 170 5 beats per minute however sometimes I haven't seen as fast as 180 beats per minute but generally 170 to 175 sometimes I've even seen slower especially for more jungle style tracks it can go as low as 160 beats per minute for the most part drum and base is between 170 to 175 depending on the tempo that you like now first we're going to place a high hat into the pattern because I find it just helps when we have a counter and a high hat acts as a counter for our Rhythm so I have a one bar Loop here and then I've set the grid to eighth notes so it's split the bar into e notes here so let's put a high hat on each of these spots here and we can simply duplicate the hits with command or control D so this gives us a reference on how to place the kick and snares with this counter so let's start with a kick generally we have a kick at the very first beat here and then followed by a kick over here and then we're going to place the snare and the snare is usually placed on the second and fourth beat so over here I just get rid of this unnecessary space and then over here if you're wondering how I'm copying I'm selecting the note and holding control or command I think for Mac is actually option but you can hold down and click and drag and it makes a copy now we have the basic two-step beat so for the basic two-step beat the snare is always on these positions however we can also play with the kicks a little to make it a little more funky for example we can add additional kicks we can put one here or we can move it here this one is quite popular in jump up drum and Bas sometimes it's found over here I kind of call this an accent kick because the main kicks are these ones you have this one that makes it bounce a little some less common positions if we move this one here we can move this one over here or we can move this over here as you can see the possibilities are almost endless you can play with pretty much any position with the kicks and you can get some interesting rhythms that one I don't hear much but it is interesting so I encourage you to explore start with the twostep which is the basic pattern like this and and then start playing with additional kicks if you like it just makes your Rhythm a little more interesting sometimes with the kicks we can add smaller ghost kicks so what I'm talking about is little kicks in between the Beats so what we can do is add a new audio track what I'm going to do is just take this small bit here and copy it over here but instead we're just going to play it over here so we can play with the volumes so with little kicks like that I like to like shorten the attack something like that we can maybe even add one here you notice how it sounds a bit tighter it gives it more of a bounce you find these kind of rhythms more common in neural drumond base you can make it even shorter like this notice that I'm adding Fades here to make the kicks really nice and tight I think like this sounds better but Noti notice the Fades you can actually adjust the strength of the Fades by playing with this little blue dot in the fade so we can make it tighter in the this manner the reason why I put it on this Lane is you can now adjust the ghost kicks here by adjusting the mix here bringing it [Music] down all right so that's pretty much for the kicks let's talk about the high hat so if you want to get away from just the common eight note pattern we can go like this so we have more of a quarter note pattern which is just four high hats this is common in more newer drum especially in jump up and rollers a neat way to make this a little more interesting is use a completely different high hat to alternate between the four so I can grab this high hat here and then duplicate it now getting the mix of your drum hits while you lace them down is important so I'm noticing that this high hat is a bit loud so we can go into the mixer and bring this down adjust the taste I find around5 to -6 is good for this one notice there's a lot more Funk now with the alternating high hats one step further and add another high hat at the end of the phrase here so instead of this we're going to replace it of course adjust the level bring it down just having more high hats in your pattern makes the Rhythm more interesting of course it doesn't have to be here you can place it perhaps over here can move this one here or over here or over here you're going to have to play around and find what sounds good for your beat so I know many of you at the beginning of your music production journey in today's digital age creating a following and getting your 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change it to 16th notes so the these placements in between the eighth notes is what are usually the ghost note positions so what you want to do is find a tight sounding snare uh usually if you're using splice you can just look up ghost snare or you can just take a snare and Pitch it up for example we can take this snare that we had the cap snare and place it here and adjust the tightness like that and you may want to pitch it up these are two ghost note placements that are very common in drum and bass we might want to make it even tighter like this or in between so like this by the way the shortcut to increase or decrease the granularity of your grid is to hold control on the PC and then two decreases the granularity and one increases the granularity very useful tip now with this SK snare I simply Ed the exact same snare we used for the two and four I simply made it super short so very tight and small one other trick you can do is go into the snares I'm just going to highlight both of them note when you highlight both of them when you change the parameters here it changes uh for both samples so what we can do is we can change the pitch so when I change the pitch of drum hits I like to unwarp it because warping creates AR facts and makes it sound a bit weird and sludgy so turn off warp mode then play with changing the pitch of the ghost snares so I pitched it by three semmit tones using the pitch wheel here now it sounds a lot more different from the main snares and that's the goal of the ghost snares to make it sound a little bit different as well you may want to decrease the volume so you can adjust the volume in the mix or again you can do it right in the audio by adjusting the gain here and that way we get a visual cue that is actually quieter so I'll bring it down to -6 you don't always need to use the same snare as the ghost snares you can just find an actual ghost snare sample for example like I was saying earlier on splice there's tons of ghost snares here's a good one that we can just import right off the bat so this time I'm just putting it here sometimes it you just need one you can place it here you can try more less common positions like here or even here but generally they're either here or here but do encourage you to try different positions you might find something new and exciting now I just want to make this a bit tighter so I'm just going to adjust the Fades here and then I'm going to bring down the mix [Music] all right once you have to kick snare high hats and ghost snares you might want to fill up the space in between the beats with air a good way to fill in the air is to use ride symbols because ride symbols have a lot of high frequencies and it's a longer sound that fills in that silence I mean between the gaps so we can take a ride shot like here and simply place it either on the eighth notes or quarter notes like this so either like this or like this now obviously adjust the mix I like it's super low just to fill in that air it doesn't need to be super high even -5 Works here's without here's with notice how it fills out that air let's try in quarter notes I like that it kind of lets the beat breathe a little sometimes you might even have it just like that just two ride symbols and with that you can also play with the position maybe like this the mirror to kicks or like this over here the possibilities are nearly Limitless all right so this is our basic beat now here's a secret that German based users use to add a little more humanization and groove to that beat and that's the use of layering brake beats over your main drum hits so I have a number of brake Loops from the hybrid brakes sample pack [Music] here beats like these are perfect for layering over drum and BAS because they're played by a live drummer has those inconsistencies or kind of a human Groove to the beat that add something a little bit extra that a computer can't achieve solely if you want to learn more about the hybrid brakes drum pack you can learn more on devant audio.com or check it out in the links below I'm going to use the funk Ride 3 Loop here I'm going to bring this in now what I like to do is go into the actual break because we're going to be playing and rearranging it what we like is the groove of these little ghost shuffles this this bit here and here is that ghost snare position you see how it's a bit off the grid if we look at the 16th node grid however I do like having the kick and snares to line up exactly so sometimes we might have to go into the audio and just make sure the pieces are snaap right on the grid because this is played once again by live drummer you have pieces that are not exactly on the grid and that's what gives the drummer its unique sound but sometimes we want just the mean kick and snares lying up with the grid so everything's in line with your uh drum hit so all I'm doing is just either highlighting over here and double click or making a new warp marker by double clicking on the ruler here and then we can move it and snap it on so this one is fine over here we'll keep those might want to keep this one a little tighter so I brought that over this one's okay here might want to drag this over here so these two are still a bit off grid that just makes it sound a bit more funky and that's sounding great and now the thing is our drum Groove already has a kick and snare right so instead of cluttering the mix of the kick and snare with with of this drum Loop all we're looking for is kind of those kind of nuances and air and shuffles of this brake we don't need to kick and snares CU we already have a kick and snare in our beat this would just clutter up the mix so what we can do is we can simply replace this kick with this high hat here this is why I like to line up the main hits because we can simply highlight to slice hold control click and drag and copy it and can do the same for this kick here I'm replace it now hearing a bit of a click on this hit here so we can just add a bit of fade here and it's sounding good now we can do the same with the snares we can replace it the ride but here's another trick you can do you can take the snare just make sure it's cut so you can highlight the snare hit control or command e that just slices it and then simply just add a fade to the snare because we really just don't want the attack to clutter up the attack of our our main snare so adding a fade Works same with this one over here so I'm noticing there's a click here so just add a fade at the end of this high hat here that's sounding good then bring back the main hits here's without notice how that adds a lot more Groove and because of we might not even need these two Ghost Notes here because we already have ghost notes Here Again here that's kind of clanging with these ones because these are right on the grid whereas these ones are humanized so we can mute these ones and that sounds a lot more funky now since we don't need any the the bottom end from this layer you just to play it safe I have an e key here that removes all the bottom in and just using a high pass here here taking everything from 220 Hertz and Below even around 110 should be fine you're just getting rid of the bass notes but depending how you want it to sound you can increase it right you may want to even accentuate the [Music] highs and possibly the mids to bring up that ghost note that's sounding fresh another thing you can do is you can highlight this and go into the audio view by hitting shift tab now because this is a drum loop I do want to keep the warp on and then you can play with the pitching I'm pitching at three notes let's try six that sounds Super Fresh so I pitched It Up by six keeping the warp on remember to adjust the mix so I'm going to bring the mix of this brake down sometimes what I like to do is bring all the way down and slowly bring it up sometimes it's easier to find the right mix by doing that that's sounding fresh one more step to adding more uniqueness to your drum pattern is employing additional top Loops such as Shaker Loops tambourine Loops or even percussion or Conga Loops so you can add a quick shaker like this because the Shaker again is played by humans so it sounds really nice on top of the drum and base break we can double time this by holding down shift and then condensing it like that and that double time Shaker tends to sound really good with drum and bass as well if you want a sharper or tighter sounding a Shaker you can add a one shot shaker like that and what I like to do is make it super tight and then put it on every 16th note except make this quieter every other one a bit quieter so we can bring this down by negative like seven for example just duplicate all the way across like that adjust the mix of course before after notice the energy this fast high hat or Shaker brings to the drum Groove you can make it tighter by making them shorter as well like this just make sure you add a bit of a fade to it like that then then we'll just replace it it just adds something extra to that Rhythm now because we have a number of top sounds such as the high hat the ride the break and even the Shakers we can play with the painting of certain sounds to make this drum grp sound a little more dimensional so usually I keep the main high hats in the center that's not a hard rule you can also pan those as well but I might pan for example these uh fast shakers a bit to the left so around I'd like to be subtle so like left around 8 to 10 to the left or even or even 16 I find if you go past around 30 it sounds a bit too extreme so I like around 12 to the left and then maybe the this ride or maybe the break can be 12 to the right and this Singler ride maybe can be eight to the right actually I like the main symbol in the center that just makes The Brak sound a little more dimensional now if you want to make those ghost hits a bit tighter we can line these ghost hits right on the grid as well and now we can bring these guys back and this will give it an interesting Shuffle makes it sound tighter in this area once you have all your hits placed you can play with also the pitching of the samples so we talked about pitching some of the ghost hits but you also play with the pitching of the kick sometimes you might want a pitched up kick right so you may want to go into the sample again go into it turn off warp so it doesn't make the sample warbly or sludgy and then try pitching it up or down pitched Up Kicks are very hman and Drummond base because we have the Baseline so we don't need the kick to sound so boomy so one way to make the kick sound less boomy is to pitch it up as opposed to regular pitch it's really up to you and how you want it to sound the snare likely can be pitched up as well turn off warp I think just one semmit tone up works for the snare fin you might want to play with the tightness of the kick and snare for example we might want to shorten it and add a fade sometimes to add more variation the main one could be bigger so leave the fade out like that it's just a nice sometimes to have this one to be a bit different from this one so we can make this bit shorter and Tighter like that likewise we can make the snare shorter play with def fade position using the dot for this instance I want the snare to sound exactly the same every time it hits so I'm just going to make a copy however there are instances where you may want the snare to have a subtle difference so you can play with the fade or even the tuning of the snare but for this type of roll the Rhythm I like it just like that now for drum and Basse sample selection for your drum hits is super important because they're going to dictate how your drums are going to sound especially if you're going for a specific sound of drum and base for example if you're going for dance floor Drumm and Bas you may want the snares to sound bigger and Fuller where if you're doing rollers you might want the hits to be more Tighter and sharp for liquid you might want the hits to sound more organic so sound selection is very important because they're going to direct the sound of your drum Loop and your track so our main drum Loop over here here let's see what happens if we replace the kick and snares so I'm going to take this kick and this snare and this snare now sometimes if you notice the kick is overlaying the snare you may want to cut it perhaps add a bit of a fade here and this one sounds a bit boomy so I'm going to shorten it add a fade and this one I might want to make shorter again just to add some variation so simply by changing using different kick and snares we've changed the vibe of the track all right let's try one more let's take this kick here and let's try a tighter scenario like this and then we're actually going try a different high hat Let's uh take this high hat here nice and tight high hat just duplicate all the way across take out these hits over here for a different vibe and we wait we want to pitch up the kick over here once again turn off [Music] warp this is a really good Loop for either rollers or minimal or even liquid drum and base whereas this one here this could work for jump up or even neural then over here this could work for a rollers or a jump up track notice how different each one [Music] sounds and this is simply all done by using different sample sources all right once you have all the sounds and the pattern laid out what I like to do is put all the layers into a drum group so you can simply highlight all the layers right click and then group the tracks I've already grouped them into a drum group here from from here you can add effects such as saturator compressor or even parallel compressor to glue the sounds together and this will alter the the energy of the drums so for example you might want to add Ableton stock drum bus effect this is really useful for gluing sounds together depending on the settings it might sound harsh so you may want to play with it you can simply click on this icon here and go through the different presets in the drum bus notice with each setting completely changes the character of the drums so this is a neat effect to play with you may want to play with the dry and wet so it's not EXT so extreme another thing you can do is you can add a Clipper to the drums so this is helpful if I bring in a visualizer so right now this is how the drums look like essentially with a Clipper as you're squaring off the Peaks so simple way you can download a free clip or you can use Ableton saturator you just turn on soft clip and all we're doing is increasing the drive now we may want to adjust the gain if we're pushing the drive by eight you want to bring the utility which is the gain control down by eight here so that when when you turn it on and off you get an Apples to Apples comparison notice how it squashes it that's more of an artistic preference you might want the drums to sound cleaner in that case you may not want to include this step another way to achieve it you can use the glue compressor Turn on soft clip once again and increase the makeup once again use utility if we're bringing the makeup by eight bring the gain down by eight so this is a true Clipper it's completely squared off now my settings are kind of extreme eight really squeezes it let's bring it down by six instead here's with it off so that's neat you can also use funky effects like this one which is a parallel compressor it's called ihart New York [Music] 2 just makes this drum sound more Punchy otherwise these are all just additional steps you don't really need it if if the drums are sounding good is just adding spice to your drum track all right now that we have our drums why don't we hear in context with our some Bas so we can hear how it would sound in the track so I have some Sounds here and then I got a wobble base here and then this sound here these are all sounds I'm working on for the new gnarly Volume 2 is hopefully coming up sometime this year still need to put a lot more work into it but let's hear how this track [Music] sounds oh yeah we got some drum and Basse hope you enjoyed learning everything about the basic two step St drum and based beat try different placements of notes and even sound selections you might just find the next fire beat these are basic and rudimentary skills but once you master them you're on your way to becoming a pro drum based producer if you want to support I have a number of sample packs preset packs enable tin kits to help you along your journey you can learn more at devant audio.com down in the links below if you want to learn how to arrange Drummond Bas check this playlist up here and if you want to learn how to create the dorest drum and Bas bass sounds check this playlist up here all right guys until the next video Stay creative stay safe and peace out

Channel: STRANJAH

Views: 27,314

Keywords: drum and bass type beat, music production basics, music production tips, drum and bass, drum and bass tutorial, drum and bass tutorial ableton, drum and bass tutorial fl studio, dnb tutorial, dnb tutorial ableton, dnb tutorial fl studio, dnb masterclass, how to dnb ableton, how to dnb fl studio, how to dnb drums, dnb production, dnb production tutorial, dnb production ableton, dnb production tips, dnb production masterclass, dnb production tricks

Id: vmPY1xlZmm4

Length: 31min 39sec (1899 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024