J. Anthony Allen shows how to build a basic drum-and-bass pattern by doubling hi-hats to 16th notes, shifting the kick to beat 13.3 for swing, and raising tempo from 120 to 170 BPM. He adjusts velocities and levels to shape the sound, stressing this is a foundation for experimenting with the many variations that exist in D&B.
Okay, so in order to turn this into a drum and bass pattern, here's what I'm going to do. First of all, I'm going to double up my I hats so that we're going on every 16th. Oops. There we go. Now I'm going to pull these two, pull the velocity down just a little bit. Maybe actually the middle one, too. Let's do that so it kind of arcs a little bit. Okay, so now I'm going to delete all those because I've adjusted the velocity here. Now I'm just going to duplicate these out. So command D is what I'm doing here. Okay, so now my hi hats have a little bit of velocity variation to them. Okay, now for my kick, I'm going to leave my first one on the downbeat. This next one, I'm going to shift over a little bit to right here to 13.3. That's the second eighth note of the third beat. So instead of right on the third beat, we're gonna push it back just a little bit. And then my snare, I'm gonna leave right where it was. Okay. And that's it. So one thing I should mention. There are tons of different ways that you can come up with a drum and bass beat, right? There are a lot of different ones. There's not just one. This is a very basic drum and bass beat. Okay. So I'm going to play it, and you're going to say, that doesn't sound like drum and bass at all. But hold on. Okay, so does that sound like drum and bass? Probably not. And the main reason this doesn't yet sound like drum and bass is really just our tempo. Okay. Drum and bass is usually quite fast. So I'm at 120. Now we're going to go up to around 170. 170 is more in the ballpark of where most drum and bass is. Let's hear it now. Okay. Pretty good. One thing I want to do is pull this hi hat down a little bit. All the downbeats, it's just kind of sticking out in a way I'm not loving. I think it's partially due to our sample. Let's just pull that down a little bit. Let's hear now. That's great. Let's see. So that's our basic beat. Now I'm just going to mess around with it just a little bit. Maybe I'll double up this snare. I'm going to put that snare sample that I threw into our drum rack and quiet it down a little bit. But maybe I'll give us a little more punch. It's not bad. I don't like that. Don't really like any of these snare sounds. But we'll stick with this for now. And maybe I'll get rid of this. Just so we go back to our more simple, basic drum and bass pattern. So that's it. All we've really done from our basic beat is double up the hi hats and shift our kick drum over by an eighth note. That's it. And then we cranked up our tempo, like, a lot. So that's the basic or a basic drum and bass pattern. Now let's look at some drum and bass tracks and see if we can recreate them at least the drum patterns from them.
