Back to Basics

So as you know, I've been hobbled for the last 2 months. While this has been a weird time for me as I've never been this inactive for this long, I'm trying to keep a positive spin on things and focus on what makes me happy... Music. I've finished a few songs in the last couple of months (or somewhat finished, good enough for me) and have been trying to keep the momentum going. I'm currently finishing off a downtempo piece whose bass has been shaped by my fascination with dubstep. I'm going to walk everyone through my process for building this track.

First off, I'm really trying to focus on my mixing skills and getting everything its own place in the mix in terms of frequency range. You see, if you have different sounds that occupy the same frequency space, you begin to get muddiness where those frequencies cross (nice technical term for all you readers - HA!). Until you start to mix tracks or you are an audiophile you probably wouldn't be able to notice the muddiness too much unless you A/B'd it with something that was done correctly. So, that is a point of emphasis now when I sit down to make tracks, especially with the dubstep bass because you not only need the very low frequecies to stand out over top of the kick, but you have mid and hi frequencies that can help to define the sound as well, so getting your EQ'ing and compression right is key. Just a quick point here for non-producers, when I talk about EQ'ing, what that means is either increasing or decreasing the volume (or dB) within a certain range of the frequency band (ex, I want to ensure the kick drum and bass line don't interfere, so I would lower the volume of the Kick drums frequency on the bass line track or vice versa - for an example of muddiness, check out my track called I Will Go (to the bass) - you can see that when the bass comes in, it kind of drowns out the kick drum - not a good job on my part of getting the elements to sit right in the mix). So anyway, that's a big emphasis when I sit down to make a track and something I've kept in mind for Slow & Steady.

Whenever I sit down to write a track, I usually always start with the drums. Why do I do this, probably because I'm pretty good with rhythm and not so good with melody - do my rhythms usually drive the track as opposed to melody. I find that by doing things this way, melody usually falls in line with the groove of the track. Kind of an ass-backwards way of doing things as I know most people start with a melody and derive the key and then go from there. My lack of understanding the melodic elements is probably the sole driver for my approach. No formal music theory, so I try and and go with rhythm and use my ears as to what sounds good to me - I find this usually works out well for me.

For this track I decided to use Ableton's native drum rack and used one of the CR-78 kits. This kit has some nice percussion and a nice kick that I though I could work with. I'm bad in that fact that I start out with a 1 bar loop and because of this my stuff (or at least the drums) tend to be a bit tracky - my formative years in Detroit has made a mark on me in this respect! - so I do some other things to get movement and add interest whic I'll get to later. The obvious I start with is the kick, snare and highhat. True 4 to the floor style which usually hits nicely and gives a lot of options in terms of rhythmic structure for other percussive elements. For this piece I movement the 4th kick to change the rhytm a bit and added a rim shot in the space that was not occupied by either the kick, snare or HH (this is another approach I use, I like to have things sit in their own physical space within the track, especially with drums).

Now I have the drums, I usually go after the bass next since I like the bass to be one of my main elements and also because a bassline does not need to be very dynamic in terms of melody. Great basslines are usually pretty simple and interact with the rest of the track in a unique way (at least in my opinion). I'm going to stop here for now and will continue with the rest of my track buidling process with the next post. I'll also put the track up so people can take a listen.

So, until next time. Turn up the bass and do a 2 step.