How to Write a Drum 'n Bass Groove - Samplesound Academy with Ben Murphy
Hi this is ableton certified trainer ben murphy with another quick tutorial for sample sound.
We're going to keep looking at different drum patterns and this time explore some different genres.
All these sounds by the way come from the drum and bass vol 2 pack from sample sound, this has got a slightly different style of rhythm and by the way I've automatically adjusted the project tempo down to 85 beats per minute for this pattern as well so it's a bit slower let's break it down again starting with the kick and snare.
This is quite different to the patterns we've looked at in the past, we don't really have the same four on the floor kick for example, we do have four kick drums in the bar, but we have kick drums on beats one and three but instead of beats two and four those kick drums are kind of late.
They're a 16th later than where you might expect them to be and hey that's kind of like the syncopation idea again although in a slightly different sort of style and format we've shifted the accent itself this time a little bit later than where you might expect to find it that creates an interesting sort of varied length of pulse between these kick drums.
Then we've got our snare drums and they're not on beats two and four like they have been in the past as part of the sort of standard foundation they're almost working like the shakers were in the afrohouse pattern they're halfway through every beat but because the kick drums move around the kind of back and forth relationship between them happens in varied intervals as well so this kind of irregular pulse or what might be referred to as a broken beat rhythm has a really interesting kind of push and pull throughout it.
It almost feels like the snares are going faster than the grid would tell you to expect them to be right there's four of them in a bar not two and then the kick drums are still only doing four in a bar so they're sort of like the norm it has this really interesting relationship with speed that's quite common in this kind of style of pattern and something drum and bass really leans into is sort of playing with your expectation of how fast the song is making it feel kind of unnaturally fast or unnaturally slow or even both at the same time.
I'm going to add now some extra notes, these extra notes are what a acoustic kit drummer might refer to as ghost notes.
I made these sounds actually by taking the same snare drum that's used for our main snare and then simply trimming off the front of it and fading it in slightly to take away some of the punch of that sound and then lowering the velocity so that they feel like a kind of softer strike on the same sort of snare drum sound.
They're placed around some major accents like these kick drums.
They sort of lean into and out of those accents and again just kind of make it feel a little bit more detailed and almost a little bit more like it was played by a person, although this is obviously very electronic sounds a lot of drama bass really does like take its inspiration from actual performances by human beings and cutting up drum brake samples and all that kind of thing so i'm trying to lean into some of that here as well and lastly we need some hi-hats.
Those high hats are basically just a constant sixteenth pattern, but really importantly they do have varied velocity levels i'll take the rest of the sounds out and let's just listen to the hi-hats.
You'll hear they're kind of like rising up to the same place in the grid that the snares live so they're kind of like pushing and pulling again on those accents by the way they sort of ramp up and down in velocity so that each one of those moments feels like a really strong pulse that's kind of been led into and out of so here's that whole pattern together again.
You can take certainly ideas from these and apply them even to other styles of music good luck and happy music making
