[LAU] Music made with linux: a773/attention span

[Atte]

On 04/27/2015 05:38 PM, Chris Caudle wrote:
> On Mon, April 27, 2015 12:19 am, Atte wrote:
>> I weighed my options, and decided Renoise still does certain stuff (like
>> this) the best.
> 
> What tool or work flow is used to produce that really fast staccato drum
> pattern?

Basically it's quite simple.

I normally start with a breakbeat that I like the sound of, which I then
I slice into individual drum hits. Renoise can locate the transients
automatically, but I find I have to adjust them by hand afterwards. By
default the individual hits are mapped to a chromatic scale.

Then you get creative with the individual hits, triggering them to build
a new rhythm. This can range from pretty conservative to extreme
randomness. Some people like to start by putting the kick and snare
where they should go, then fill in ghost notes and hihats afterwards. I
tend to have a few goes on random monkey-style playing and then
adjusting to something slightly more musical afterwards, since the other
approach most of the times gives me something much to obvious and boring.

The staccato is either done by small gaps in between notes or using
renoises Cxx (cut) command.

To give the often 40+ year old beat some snap and a firm low end, I
often avoid using the kick from the beat but add my own, electronic kick
and a snappy and crisp clap or snare.

>  Is it something like a really fast roll (i.e. made on the
> pattern generation side), or is it more like an audio editing trick which
> takes a drum hit and copies and repeats the audio? Is there a tool that
> automates that, or is it a tedious manual process?

I seem to remember using tools that automates this, but I find it hard
to get something musical from the ones I (think I) tried. The sound I
have in my head is something a real drummer *almost* could play, given
he had been using the appropriate drug and the engineer spilled the
right amount of coffee in the tape-recorder. So it should be random the
way a human tries to do random.

You could say it's tedious, but after a while you get really, really
fast at this in renoise, and you learn how certain patterns are done.
But the first few times, I had a really hard time, it took ages and it
sounded like complete crap, others might do better faster. Of course to
some extend copy/paste and editing the copies is a pragmatic approach
that might help on speed and a uniform sound throughout sections.

Sorry if this got a little too long, but you asked :-)

-- 
Atte

http://atte.dk   http://a773.dk