Making drum n bass drum beats

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wilson89

New Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2012
I've been listening to a lot of drum n bass at the moment, I'm not too keen on some of the more underground stuff, but I really like the mainstream stuff like from UKF, liquicity and DJ Fresh. I'm pretty good at making four the floor drum beats, but when it comes to making a drum n bass beats it just sounds stiff and obviously sampled. Each snare hit sounds to similar, and the loop just doesn't flow. I also can't get the hi hat work to sound good.

I could just use loops but I want to learn how to make them my self.
 
could you give a link to a small clip of drums you made?
It will help giving you feedback.

some things I sometimes do.
In case of the snares sounding to similar you could pitch shift each second snare a tiny bit.
to make a beat flow more the highhats are the most influential. you ca place a highhat every 16th or 32th note and make sure every second snare is about 80-90% of the volume of the first snare.
This will create the same flow as a real drummer would create. you can also add a little swing but in most cases that doesn't really fit imo.

To make you highhat work sound better, have you tried layering mulitple highhats on top of eachother?
 
Hey, here's a clip of a loop I made, like I said it's really wooden and stiff, and I hate it.

http://soundcloud.com/robertharriso89/drumloop/s-s66nz

Is there any way in Cubase that I can take my snare sample, my kick, hihat etc and put it into a visual thing so that I can change the velocity of a certain snare, maybe adjust the sway of something? At the moment I'm just importing the samples into my main area and editing them there, I find it really awkward to adjust the volume and work with it this way.

I think my hi hat work is the main problem here, I'll try what you said and return later.
 
You're using the full snare as a ghost snare, which is no good, plus the snare itself has got too much decay.

Make the snare a bit shorter and snappier, and use rim shots for the ghost snares. Layer a couple of high passed sampled breaks behind it.

The kick is too boomy, need something with less low end and more audibly mid/high end.
 
always try messing around with the samples; see how your snare sounds pitched up an octave or two, or with a shorter length etc! With the style you are working in, eventually you will want to start compressing your snare with another snare or just layering them so you can make it punchy as hell, but that is another skill. BTW, Even the top producers use drum breaks or "loops" but this is just to sit in the background and give the beat that rolling feel. Most of the shuffles you hear in between snares actually come from highpassed/chopped up drum breaks.

anyway my main point is just when you start out the drum samples you have are probably very limited and you havnt developed EQ/compression/mix techniques yet (which take a little while to master with practice) then yeah your drums are gonna sound flat or stick out, everybody's drums sound wank to start with. Start collecting as many samples as you can and you'll begin to see why your drums sounded bad before
 
wilson89 said:
Is there any way in Cubase that I can take my snare sample, my kick, hihat etc and put it into a visual thing so that I can change the velocity of a certain snare, maybe adjust the sway of something? At the moment I'm just importing the samples into my main area and editing them there, I find it really awkward to adjust the volume and work with it this way.
Click to expand...

you need a soft-sampler vst for this ... there are some basic beat making things in cubase .. but nothing for audio beats that is really any good.
 
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