How to Mix DubstepĪs you’re going through this process, you can make rough tweaks to your volume levels. Remember to low pass it so it doesn’t interfere with your mid-bass. Ableton’s Operator has a preset called Sine Waveforms that works fine. It gives you the vibrations your audience is craving. The sub-bass should generally be a sine wave: it gives you the maximum amount of resonance without a lot of additional harmonics. Listen for the call-response drop pattern around :55. Many dubstep drops are fairly atonal anyway (lacking melodic structure). Try shorter sounds and cut out most of your melodic, more horizontal elements. Done properly, it’s what gives the up-down motion that makes people want to break the rail. i ll Gates calls this a “vertical” composition. Give each sound space to breath in the mix by checker-boarding them so each has an opportunity to stand out. You can hear a great example in Knife Party’s Bonfire around :55. In terms of arrangement, try a call-response between 2-4 elements. You can then chop up those audio files and use them creatively. Once you’ve got some great squelchy sounds, set a new track to record and set the input to your synthesizer track and re-sample the noises your making. Ableton Live 10.1 now has some really great automation curves built in if you right click on a clip. Try using macros to automate multiple parameters simultaneously. A key element is modulation: automate the hell out of filters to give these middle sounds a lot of motion. I don’t personally have Serum, so I’ll likely pick a patch from Wavetable, Massive, or Sylinth. Double your baseline and work with two tracks separately, although feel free to add some compression and saturation to the bass group to taste.įor the mid-bass, I see a lot of recommendations for FM synthesizers such as Serum. ![]() Think of dubstep basses in two layers: your mid-bass and your sub-bass. For example:ĭespite the increased complexity in the second sample notice how the snare hits dependably on the 3rd beat of each bar. Many times in dubstep it’s the regular snare that provides the dancer the rhythm, and the kick and high-hats will move around that snare. Generally you want your kick hitting on the first beat (downbeat) of a bar and the snare on the third beat to give it a half-time rhythm. How to Make Dubstep Rhythmsĭubstep beats tend to be slower and simpler than other EDM genres. Because dubstep often has a somber feel to it, it is often written in minor keys. Many of those systems roll off ultra-low frequencies, so if you use keys of E, F, or G your root notes (the lowest note of a chord which often makes up the baseline) should be hitting that sweet spot. What Key and Tempo should I use?ĭubstep is generally around 140 beats-per-minute (BPM), although it has a slower feel due to it’s half-time beat (more on this later).ĭubstep is written with big club systems in mind: it is meant to be felt as much as heard. ![]() ![]() I had the pleasure of seeing Flux Pavilion perform at Imagine Music Festival in 2017.
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