Hello steemains!
In this tutorial we'll talk about basic drum patterns and BPM(tempo) in different styles of music.
So "Beats Per Minute" defines the tempo of your track, in ableton you can set the BPM at the top left corner.
I've alligned 3 different style of drum patterns in one track starting from about 100 and going up to 168BPM.
-Dubstep is usually 90-120BPM
-Trap is around 140BPM
-D&B starts from 160BPM
But there is no golden rule, nothing will stop you to write dubstep in 140 for example.
These drums might not sound the best, I apologize for that, but I didn't find it important to upgrade and customize the sounds for this presentation, since it's only for showing the caracteristics of the different patterns... We'll talk about effects, and Ableton's Impulse tool in a following tutorial, concerning each style one by one with more details.
-Kicks, Snares, HiHats:
So, the base, the soul of the sounding is given by the kicks and the snares, I'll show you how to arrange them for each style. The hihats are very playful, I just drew a more or less random pattern for them.
First the Dubstep:
Plain and simple, the base is one kick followed by a snare at every 1/2 bar... it's that simple, here you go Dubstep drums bahhh.
Then you can add some extra kicks basically wherever it sounds good and suits your music... the same goes for hihats...wherever you see fit.
Trap:
Now trap is a little bit trickier, because of the long bassdrums, and the typical 1/32 notes, which you can play with a lot... transposing, stretching, panning etc, but we'll talk about these later...
So the trap scheme builds up from 3 long, stretched bassdrumms following each other ,then snares or claps or even Toms, coming in and closing the space, getting closer at every bar. The 1/16 - 1/32 notes stacked on each other is an other well known trap cliche.
Finally the so familiar D&B pattern:
Good old kick and snare... sounds perfect just as it is. Just look at it and u'll hear that:
-Bum-Ts, BumTs...Bum-Ts,BumTs
After u've obtained the basic pattern, you can double the kicks at every second bar, or pick one out, adding a snare to its place, and so on.... there are countless ways in which you can arrange your kicks; and the hihats will just fit in wherever you want them.
That's it for today!
Effects, shaping and customizing the drums coming soon.
STEEM ON!