brephophagist.

re: Question for the techies

jamestelfordmusic:

Has anybody made any fairly hardcore drill ‘n’ bass/breakcore beats that glitch, a la venetian snares etc. on Ableton? I’ve been trying for days now, messing around with beat repeaters and so on, but I can’t seem to get it to work at all. I emphasise the Ableton point cos I don’t really have the money to spend on a tracker like Renoise, and all the forums have to say on the matter is ‘buy Renoise’.

Any help would be massively appreciated. 

Uhhhh… I’ll take a stab; you caught me on a talky night. Here are some random thoughts:

Beat repeaters can be creatively used, for sure, but understand that as far as sequencing electronic drums go, breakcore:electronic music::Rachmaninoff:solo piano music. Aleatory elements (like beat repeaters) will not get you there. At best, they’ll provide some raw material for you to edit down later. At worst, they are fundamentally lazy.

If you listen to some of Aaron Funk’s songs… a lot of the “drill” factor is sequencing notes at an extremely fast (and varying) rate, not repeating small sections of audio at a very fast rate like a beat repeater would do. You could call it 6 of one, half dozen of the other, sure, especially because a lot of the drums are short samples. But it just seems easier to me (assuming you are putting this into the context of a composition, and don’t just want to fuck shit up) to precisely sequence what you want to do rather than stack up a bunch of beat repeaters on tracks and submixes and twist subdivision / etc. knobs hoping to come up with the right combinations in sequence. Trust me, I’ve tried it. The allure of “automated glitchy sequencing” is very tempting, but it’s just that - allure. The results, as it sounds like you’re discovering, are rarely good.

The reason people tell you to buy Renoise is because trackers are exceptionally good at 2 things (among others):

• allowing you to quickly and precisely control a buttload of parameters on a note-by-note basis in a way that Live’s clip envelopes just aren’t built for.
• facilitating reuse / permutation / scripting of patterns of notes, events, and note parameters, in the same way computer programmers can copy and paste code. In this case, the patterns are patterns, not groupings of MIDI notes + a few modulators like Live’s clip saving shit.

These are both things that work exceptionally well for breakcore/drill-n-bass, where every single element is very precisely controlled for effect, and the music itself frequently employs numeric patterns that would make a linear algebra professor cream his jeans. Someone more informed on the history of trackers than I might argue that the nature of the tracker tool itself has had some effect on the way the genre has formed / progressed.

Think about it: if you had to do a 64th note buzzroll for 1/2 a beat, and pan every other note in a linearly increasing distance away from dead center (i.e. 1st note is center, 2nd note is 2% L, 3rd note is 2% R, 4th note is 5% L, etc.), how would you do it in Live? You’d draw in one 64th note or a few, copy and paste for the 1/2 beat, then create a clip envelope for the pan on the track, and draw the envelope with a quantised pencil (at least, that’s how I’d do it).

With Renoise, you can do all of this with the keyboard alone (easily), and you can precisely specify the pan values, rather than fiddling with the clip envelope / zoom settings to get exact values. Renoise is designed for very precise values and to allow you to use the keyboard more than the mouse, even for things like note entry and velocity scaling.

btw, last time I checked, Renoise is cheaper than every version of Ableton except for the limited-functionality free versions they include with MIDI controllers. Like, way cheaper than a lot of single plugins, even. You could do much worse (like that abysmal Project 5 bullshit).

That being said, there’s no law that says you can’t do breakcore or drill n’ bass with Ableton. And there’s nothing that says you can’t do it with beat repeaters; I just personally don’t think that’s a very efficient way of going about it, and if you’re not having any luck, sounds like it doesn’t suit your working style either. Try sequencing it.

</rant>