Let's make a custom drumbreak/drumloop! (and peep TAL Drum)
Yoooo!
I hope everybody's been mega productive!
This period of the year is really good for me in terms of working on bass music and darker vibes and all that – while summer is nicer for hip hop (if you don't know, check out my hip hop stuff as FatGyver on Bandcamp or Spotify).
Finished two DNB tunes this weekend – I hope you all have been working on some magic too.
One thing that's been on my video to-do list for a long time – and which also has been requested a few times – is creating a custom breakbeat from separate parts. So I wanted to do just that. I'm picking a few random drumsounds to create a breakbeat of my own. This is something I really like to do and would love to encourage many ppl to try out.
On the video, I'm using TAL Drum, which is a great plugin for drums (this is not an ad: I bought it, as I love the company and their great, inexpensive and also free plugins). Not going thru all it offers, but I'll go thru some of its very handy features.
Technically any DAW can do this, absolutely, and you don't even need an audio editor for this either (I'm using one a little bit here, doing the same thing I did on my previous video).
BTW, do you feel these embedded videos are ok, or did you prefer the uploaded video files? I've been embedding more in hopes of ppl not sharing the video files.
Man there is a lot to stuff on the pipeline…stay tuned, and thanks for all the support!
PS: The community chat still hasn't been enabled for browsers, so it's still on the phone app. The day the browser chat is enabled, I'll open it (I kind of cannot stand typing much on my phone!)
Comments (20)
Really enjoyed this video, seeing your process. Just one thing: I noticed that all the midi notes was bang on the grid - would you normally moved some notes off, or apply a groove from the groove pool in Ableton to loosen things up a bit?
At DNB tempo, things being on the grid sounds fine to me and swing for example doesn’t really work, but as one goes slower, there’s much more room for looseness.
Aside from the built in saturation and lo fi fx in TAL Drum (which sounded pretty great TBH), what is its advantage over using a good old Drum Rack in Ableton?
Slightly nicer, more visual look and some highly useful parameters and features such white noise, timing errors etc
Why did you use thst extra Audio editor to grab those individual hits? Is it just faster than doing it in Ableton?
Not a necessity, but I like the bigger screen real estate when doing precise sample editing.
I'm sure it is, especially when recording, I was only chopping a break while my friend was around and kept on missing slices because I was talking to him while I did it lol
My fav part of the vid has to be "I already regret my kick choice dude..." 😂
haaha! making music while others are watching is terrifying :D
one of the things I havent yet wrapped my head around is slicing in TAL Drum. its a little different than TAL Sampler. i hear there is auto slicing but i was only able to get it working to a grid rather than transients. suppose it would help to read documentation but its more fun to push all the buttons and see
Smashed it with this one again. Looks fun. Reminds me to spend some time getting my head around backbone too!
Backbone is so good for dope new drum sounds
Giving me an excuse to dig into TAL Drum and creating my own breaks. Hope is to get some decent ones going and then run them through some samplers for added character!
Sounds like a recipe for WINNING to me!
Great tutorial! The drum break ones are my favorite, especially when they involve using different drum sounds to make a new break. One trick I stumbled across to gel percussive hits from different breaks into a more cohesive break is to layer a little bit of the main snare under them, for example under the grace snare notes (but also works under kick, cymbal hits or whatever...). The copy of the main snare can be gated more, high-pass filtered, or a new envelope around a reverb tail of the main snare etc...
Ah nice, interesting! Never thought of that. But I can definitely see that work! Will try, thanks for the tip!
just had such a dumb moment watching your vid. I saw 2 separate views of TAL-Drum simultaneously visible (pads and editor) as you edited loopingand was like "woe woe, wa-wa-wait. how's he doing that?" I go to pause it and realize, yes, i do still have ableton open with TAL Drum floating over part of your vid. I need more coffee. lots more.
Yes, this most definitely does sound like a classic case of too low caffeine levels of one's system :D
sweeeet. ive been starting to us TAL Drum more lately for classic hiphop. feel like it definitely shines more when using it with midi pads (akai mpk mini2 over here). been curious about using it with breaks too so this is great timing (about to start watching this)
Yeah I can’t wait to get to slam some hip hop beats with it! 🤘🏻