One thing I’m struggling with in my tunes is keeping them interesting when I arrange them. Like allot of peoples stuff, my songs sound good in short loops but when I try to arrange them they end up sounding boring.
My question is, does anyone have any tips for how to keep things ticking over. I like deep music so this is probably the most important thing. Do others like to have two or three different percussion tracks and alter between them. Are there any good plugins that could help with this? I don’t have any drum machines, I just use ableton, would a drum machine help with this.
Also, how do people approach drums fills, it always stands out like a sore thumb when I use a sample, does anyone have any tips for this?
Thanks
Alan
Might have been covered already, but here’s how I try to do it:
1. The only thing that’s straight on the beat is the kick drum. All the rest is not. Just to give it a human feel.
2. When you are at the stage of creating the beat, I start off with the kick. Then I add a snare, clap or fingersnap. I EQ this so it fits with the kick. I make a few clips with variations of it. Some a bit early, some a bit later. Give it a follow action as well.
3. Now it’s time for the hats tracks. One for the closed hats and one for the open hats. I use Impulse, so I can load a bunch of them.
Pan them, give them variation through randomness. For the open hihats I use a few on layered on top of eachother, but not straight. Play around with their placement. Again vary their panning, etc. Used an auto filter wiht an envelope as well.
4. Use some rides and crashes when you want to emphasize a new part.
5. If you layer some percussion samples on top, make sure you EQ them first. Then copy them a few times in your track and change the transient envelope on them all. Preferably not the same. Aside from that give the samples a different start position and a different size.
6. Add some snare rolls/fills after each 4/8/16 bars. Just what feels right.
7. You can also try to give it a groove by using the groove pool.
8. An original bassline will help you too. Try to be inventive.
9. The right stabs on the right moment are great for giving a track a good groove as well!
Hope this helps a bit.
The other thing to bare in mind is that you are listening to tracks your making your self for 4 hours at a time… you can get fooled easily in to thinking it needs to change and do loads…
if you actually listen to a lot of stuff there is probably less going on than you think.
Transitions and fills for me are what keeps things interesting.
I notice that I tend to automate everything. Automating the filter frequency can be a great way to creating a slightly different sound to drums and percussion throughout any track. Usually I automate the frequency up or down every 4 bars(sometimes 2 bars).
Hope this helps!
[quote]phil johnston (06/01/2012)[hr]The other thing to bare in mind is that you are listening to tracks your making your self for 4 hours at a time… you can get fooled easily in to thinking it needs to change and do loads…
[/quote]
sooooo true its unbelievable!!!
think its took me nearly 2 years to figure this out :w00t:
Thanks for the reply’s guys, there’s some great tips in there!!