Whether you compress your drums, percussion, bass and rhythm guitar individually, on one or more busses, or both, will come down to the specifics of the mix. You might be amazed at how effectively an overly rigid rhythm track can be livened up with a groove template extracted from a one-, two- or four-bar James Brown, Chic, AC/DC or Black Uhuru loop, to give a few choice examples.Ī certain amount of the tightness of a rhythm section comes from the production and engineering it’s been treated to, and one of the most significant factors here is the envelope timing of any compressors involved. Groove templates also lend you the power to imbue your own rhythm sections with the vibes of your favourites from anywhere in the musical universe. Your DAW will facilitate a degree of control over how stringently the template is applied, so you can still maintain whatever level of laxity suits the track if you’re not shooting for total tightness. Using these, you can easily extract the rhythmic profile of your drum track, and instantly impose it on the bass, percussion, guitar and anything else you want to tie to the beat. Use Tempo/Groove MapsĮvery DAW features some form of groove template system, whereby pre-designed or user-generated timing and volume/velocity maps are applied to audio and MIDI clips, conforming them to a particular temporal and dynamic feel. Also, in both cases, the implementation of sidechain ducking, as provided by a compressor or dedicated plugin such as Cableguys Kickstart 2, can totally transform a groove, giving the kick space to punch through and opening up another vector for adjustment with the onset slope of the bass notes. For electronic music, as well as shifting the bass MIDI parts around to achieve the desired offset from full lock, you also have the synth or sampler’s amplitude and filter attack parameters to work with. With a real drummer and bassist, hopefully the performances you’ve recorded will be on the money in this regard anyway, but if the audio does need nudging after the fact, make sure you appreciate and understand the vibe and groove your musicians are trying to create, and work to preserve it in any corrective edits you make, rather than inadvertently iron it out in the pursuit of metronomic ‘perfection’. Again, as touched on above, it’s those barely perceptible timing differences between the kick and bass, and their collective positioning on the timeline, that define the bedrock of the groove and, ultimately, the whole track. You might have heard it said that these two ground-level instruments should essentially sit together, with the bass slavishly shadowing the kick but while this is sort of true, it’s not as straightforward as methodically stacking them so that they land at exactly the same point with every hit. Perhaps the most important thing to think about when recording or programming any rhythm section is the interplay between the kick drum and bass guitar (or synth). ![]() ![]() Once you have your live MIDI parts down, you’re free to experiment with iterative quantise and groove templates (see below), tightening up or loosening the groove to taste, and make manual tweaks to individual notes if required. Indeed, even if you are a dab hand on keys, recording at very slow playback speed can significantly tighten those parts up when the tempo is raised again. If you’re not a great keyboard player or finger drummer, you can simply drop the tempo of the project temporarily to make the part in question playable, and record each drum kit element one by one – kick drum, then hi-hats, then snare, etc. ![]() ![]() If you really want to put some funk in that rhythmic trunk, playing those parts in ‘live’ on your keyboard, drum pads, etc, is the way to go, even in four-square styles such as house and techno (with the exception of the kick drum in those cases, obviously). With that in mind, when working with MIDI parts, resist the temptation to program your beats and basslines in the piano roll editor, locked to the grid. There’s much more to a tight rhythm section than just having all the notes line up squarely across its constituent instruments – it’s all about the subtle differences in relative timing between those instruments, which give a groove its unique character.
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