i need help with drum patterns

Krispy

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Nov 26, 2009
Location
Alberta, Canada
I am having alot of trouble coming up with different drum patterns for drum and bass other than the basic "kick - snare - kick - snare".

I've never written a DNB track before but I like listening to it all the time for the past 10 years or more. But for me to turn what drum patterns im hearing into something of my own is turning out to be really difficult.

Does anyone have any resources or tips or something for creating some different types of drum and bass style patterns?
 
I've actually been really getting into writing my own drum patterns. I'd rather create them myself than use breaks. Get a better sense of satisfaction knowing I've done it my self. I think the basic kick--snare----kick-snare rhythm is good as a base, intact it's what I always use. It's how you progress from there that makes the loop unique. Slightly softer, quieter snares with a little feedback on an off beat start a nice shuffle sound. Shakers, hats open and closed, rimshots, bongos, reversed snares etc etc all add to the depth of the loop. I usually end up with about 10-15 channels of kicks snares hats and miscellanious percussion to create the one loop
 
Try shifting a snare hit forwards or backwards by a 16th, same with a kick. Add an extra hit somewhere, and then take out one of the originals. Keep slowly mutating your beat by adding, moving and removing a single hit here and there.

As well as the 'standard' beat:
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
k + s + . k s +


You can do studies based on
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
k + s k . s . +


Which sounds a bit more 'jungle'

I can also recommend The Breakbeat Guide. It's written for drummers (in drum notation but that's much easier to learn than full music notation) and contains hundreds of variations of beats. Again, this is aimed at drummers, so parts of it are more exercises than useful beats, but there's still tons of different ideas in there if you are curious, especially if you are having trouble coming up with fills and placement of ghost notes.
 
It all depends on which sort of DnB your after tbh,
You could always stick to the ol faithful kick-snare
If your fishing around Tech Dnb,
Be more adventurous with your placements
such as Kick-Snare-Snare-Snare-Snare-Snare
Whilst filling in the gaps with fills =]
Best advice is to mimmick a track youve heard
And make your own drum placement from there!!
 
there are some on simon vs website too but tbh writing your own drum patterns is a pretty big part of making drum and bass. i suggest chopping up a break and reassembling it the way it was to begin with and start moving bits around and see what happens.
 
Experiment man ;)

Come up with some really kool rhythms sometimes that can really make a track
 
Okays heres a tip,
Alot of dnb tracks thin out to there basics near the end few bars of the tune
So have a listen to the drum patterns available and have a go at mimmicing and manipulating them yaself =]
 
Krispy, what DAW do you use mate? If you use FL then I'll throw a couple of 4 bar loops together, put them in a zip package and pm them to you, you can then open them in FL and see what I've done. They won't be the best but you can pull them apart and investigate them.
 
Krispy, what DAW do you use mate? If you use FL then I'll throw a couple of 4 bar loops together, put them in a zip package and pm them to you, you can then open them in FL and see what I've done. They won't be the best but you can pull them apart and investigate them.

Hmm im using Ableton...

What if you took a screenshot of the drum patterns in FL and then sent me the patterns as audio files in wav or any other format? That way I could listen to them and check out the patterns in the screenshots? Might work....

But that would probably be super helpful, thanks man

Just send me a PM ;)
 
PM sent Krispy. I'm not sure if the image came out, or the links work, because it seems as soon as you send a PM, you cant look at it to check it over, it's gone forever lol!

So I hope it's all worked ok.
 
Klute - Hell Hath No Fury

This should give you some ideas. Jungle/drumfunk in general is far more complex when it comes to beats than say 2-step, which appears to be more about mutating a similar sound.
 
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