Hi, I've posted a beat below I'd like to use for a house track. It's 3 measures long. If you could tell me what you think, and how I could improve what I have. I have done some EQ, compression, and slight reverb on tamb and shaker. So I have a couple questions...

First, I like to produce my beat "tracks' in either 3 or 7 measures and then produce a couple 1 measure tracks. The other 1 measure tracks are fill-in type of thing to change the beat a bit -- not all the same. Others do this? Is that a good thing to do? Constant beat gets kind of boring...

Second question. I know you make what sounds good, but there are obviously some basic "standards" to follow. So I was wondering how many of you that produce house, use snares? They don't seem to be used quite as much. A lot of other percussion instruments such as cow-bells, congos/bongos, tamborines, etc... are used. Also, I've noticed that deep-house songs tend to use less percussion instruments, that true?

Anyway, thanks for your help.

CLICK ME

Edit: Sorry my DSL went down between 11pm and 4am CST.

Last edited by RungeKutta on Oct-14-2004 at 08:44

that beat sounds very basic
you need atleast a snare or clap or something, and alot of more layers of hats etc to give it drive
alot of house producers just use finished loops though, lazy bastards, but atleast it sounds good

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first off the constant beat is sort of necessary in some types of house and most trance music. well produced tracks tend to build up and shift the focus away from the constant beat which you kind of lose consciousness of after a while. particularly on the dance floor. gives many tunes a hypnotic feel. but fills are necessary at some point particularly as a precursor to a biiiig drop or relaunch.

ill do a couple of fills in a bit.

a typical house beat would go something like this


K---K---K---K---
--O---O---O---O-
-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-H
----C-------C---


where K = kick drum
O = open hat
H = hihat (closed hat)
C = clap or snare

there are many many variations on this and its not as simple as plinking notes in a piano roll and thats that. first off you already have the kicks and open hats right but beyond that its fairly bare. the kick needs some pretty serious reworking. you dont get a sense of a thump and a tail. its more like a hollow BOCKing sound. you can make this kick better by layering other kicks on top of it and using EQ and compression. ideally you want a kick that has an initial thump. an OOOMPH. and then a sub bass tail off. many kick samples dont have all of these qualities so its necessary to use multiple kicks to fatten things up. also, without hearing the original kick i wouldnt know for sure but your kick doesnt sound like its got a compressor on it? could be just the original sample. you have to make sure that the threshold on the compressor is lower than the peak volume of the kick. otherwise the compressor does absolutely nothing. only way you can be sure is to use a spectrum analyser. find the peak of the kick, and set the threshold as an example about 2 to 3 db below that peak. then whack the gain up as high as you can until it clips. then lower it maybe 0.5 to 1db so you have a little headroom to play around with.

onto the open hats. the open hats you are using are fairly thin and lack the clang and sharp hiss of your average house tune. i would recommend using a more suitable sample first off. go get doru malaia's super percussion set. the link is around here somewhere and the demo pack is available for free. that has quite alot of good open and closed hats. for EQ to get a sharp hiss you might want make a boost around 8,000 hz to give it some air (but again consult the spectrum analyser cuz all hats reside in different frequencies. some are barely affected by a boost around 8,000. some hats have alot of presence around 8,000hz and a 1 to 2db boost around that frequency can make em sound really harsh and painful to the ear). i also tend to add a very subtle reverb to the open hat too just to lengthen the tail off. usually a bright reverb with a very short decay time (0.1ms or 0.2ms). dont overdo the reverb cuz it'll muddy things later on when you build up the rest of your percs.

closed hats. heres where things get a bit interesting. pick a short, sharp closed hat sample and instead of putting them at 1/8th intervals give them a little swing. what i do in the piano roll in fruity is change the grid snap to 1/4 step and move them 1 notch to the right. this gives it more of a rolling sound when you play the open hats and closed hats together. what i also do is add some shakers like this

SsSs--S-SsSs--S-

where S = shaker at normal velocity
s = shaker at lower velocity

if its EQed right it'll give it more or a rolling kind of sound.

claps and snares. you gotta EQ them differently but its fairly necessary to have these. you dont want the clap to cover up the kick too much so no part of your clap should be anywhere near as low as 500hz. shelve everything off below that frequency. depending on the effect you want you can add a reverb or a delay to create subtle snare rolls. i tend to use claps more than snares for house and trance. i also write freeform and hardcore though and thats pretty snare intensive (but thats hardcore for ya!)

fills. theres plenty of ways you can add variety to your beats but its very much possible to overdo drum fills. in some types of hard house and happy hardcore they definitely over do this

K---K---K---K-K-

this one less so

K---K---K---KKKK

another typically overdone fill is

K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K- KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

in trance these days alot of producers seem to prefer more subtle ways of making percussive fills. some will drop the beat for a whole bar and stick a reversed crash sample down instead. add a deep reverb with a loooooong decay to draw it out for the bar then kick the bass drum back in.

I think more producers than you think use loops. It's not hard to make loops but it does take time. There are hundreds if not thousands of sample cds out there and new ones being released every week. If u got money u can buy them but for the poor saps like myself we gotta use single shots After all trance tunes all use some variation of a hi hat pattern. So even if you wanted to make loops from scratch the only thing that would make the loop not sound standard is to introduce small fx sounds, or percussive instruments like bongos, shakers, etc...

quote:

Originally posted by Derivative first off the constant beat is sort of necessary in some types of house and most trance music. well produced tracks tend to build up and .... loooooong decay to draw it out for the bar then kick the bass drum back in.

Wow, hey, thanks for the great reply. The sample I got for the kick is basically how you hear it... The kick is compressed but I just used the "Drums" preset in FL. And yea it is a fairly hollow sound. So do you think what I have is an "ok" starting point, just need a better kick and to layer on more percussion?

its not a good idea to use compressor presets because they are designed to work on instruments with specific frequencies in mind. ill bet the threshold on that preset is higher than the peak volume of your kick and hence is probably having no effect whatsoever. when its compressed properly it should have a noticeably thicker, louder sound. or at least you can make it louder than you could before without it clipping off.

its also not as simple as changing a few samples. you have to know what frequencies produce certain types of effect and where each instrument should sit roughly along a parametric EQ. you really need to know for example what too much sub frequency does to a kick drum. or too high a boost around 4,000hz does to most hihats. i can tell you roughly what'll happen with those 2 cuz it'll make the kick sound muddy and it'll make the hat sound like its being played through a telephone but ill not bullshit you - you get good at picking these details out by getting it wrong over and over and over again. ive botched hundreds of drum loops. im still botching a few right now actually

also be aware that the more layers you add the more frequencies you are piling onto your track. if you dont know roughly where each instrument is sitting in frequency terms you will end up more often than not muddying the mix with each new layer. this is still happening to me cuz my EQing is far from perfect. you may find that each instrument retains a kind of clarity with just the kicks and open hats but add more layers - a pad a bassline and a synth lead and you'll begin to hear things getting muddy. hats becoming indistinct. bass and kick stacking up and clipping badly. that horrible telephone quality sound to your leads. and the whole mix wont be as loud as a pro tune because too many elements of the song reside in the same frequency band resulting in you having to lower the overall volume of the track to avoid clipping.

try building that loop again from the ground up with the knowledge you have now, maybe even try to add a few more percussive elements and post that. then we can give feedback until its absolutely rocking. trial and error is how i work :P

New version... please have a listen and let me know.

CLICK ME

Last edited by RungeKutta on Oct-15-2004 at 09:31

layer

Fine as a starting/cueing beat.. introduce more elements as it progress'.
Nice swingy closed hat, a wide open 909 open hat and a nice sharp snare. Add another kick too on top (careful of destructive phasing)
And speed it up

heheh. i think you either might have set the compressor threshold too low or used too soft a compression or you've EQed it funny cuz now its lost its slap. you got the oomph bit though so you can build on that. if you browse through some kick samples you have, pick one that has a nice slapping sound to it. it doesnt matter so much about the thump and the tail. if you stack that kick drum on top of the one you have and change the levels a bit you should get some properties of both kick drums. if both kicks occupy alot of the same frequencies then they may clip. you can sometimes correct this (but not all the time) by reversing the polarity of one of the kicks. that'll cancel out some of the shared frequencies by putting 1 kick sample in anti phase with the other. you may also need to re EQ the kicks so they sit well together. i sometimes stack up as many as 6 to 8 kick drum samples or synth blips to get it right and alot of places i go wrong is in the EQing and the phasing.

that open hat (the one every off beat) is still far too tame. it has a soft mute kind of sound. i still think it would be preferable to change the sample altogether to something harder, crunchier. a wide open 909 hat is almost a trance cliche but i still use em - they sound great . then you fine tune it with EQ to get a bit of air. also, the hats line you've got is still a bit bare. you got the 8ths now so thats better and i can sort of hear a bit of swing in them but you need the layer of 16th hats to get that rolling sound. ill see if i can upload a loop i made on soundclick. you can fill up that loop by adding hihats at 16th intervals or as is commonly used, shakers. that should fill out the emptiness between downbeats. it also seems to make drum loops sound (relatively) faster.

EDIT: i boshed up a loop. you can find it here: http://www.soundclick.com/bands/9/katjunkiemusic.htm

i should update my page more. its sort of derelict.

Last edited by Derivative on Oct-16-2004 at 18:07

Ok, version 3 and 3.1 (not for workgroups though).

The first is just an update to my two previous versions. The second one is same as the first but with congas. Remember, this is a 2-bar beat @ 120bpm -- and I'm going for a house beat.

Please listen and let me know what you think.

CLICK ME 1
CLICK ME 2

The kick is far too weak and the clap should be on the 2nd and 4th beat instead of the first and the second

yea you got the claps on the wrong beats plus they are too quiet in the mix. the kicks in the new loop are kind of weird. it sounds like they are cutting off or distorting or something cuz it just sounds like a short fuzz sound. what sequencer are you using? cuz the kicks that come with fruity are fairly good. the dance kicks are quite suitable for house although they are a bit sub heavy. reason drums are fairly decent out of the box. check out that doru malaia super percussions pack cuz that has quite alot of quality perc samples and good kick samples.