Adding A Nice Effect to Your Drums with Drops and Mutes

Nowadays most producers are using some sort of updated piece of technology to make their drums, whether it’s the top of the line MPC, Fruity Loops, or Logic, most producers plug in some kicks and snares and sequence their drums to create a drum track. This is great, but there’s more that can be done to give your drums a fresh feel and help ya track. One of the ways you can tighten up your drum track is by dropping the drums.

Dropping out the drums, or muting the drums helps give ya track more feel and mixes it up so it’s not the same drum loop over and over. Try using them right before the hook or bridge, or even when ya emcee spits his hottest line so it really stands out.

Here’s an example of what we are talking about…as the track plays listen to the drums, eventually they will be muted for a nice effect:

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Additionally, you can just mute most of the drums except one part, say for example the kicks. Here’s an example where the snares and hi-hats are muted, leaving only the kicks:

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Remember, just because you might have made a sick drum pattern, don’t short-change yourself and stop there. Add some variety and mix it up to create some nice effects. Dropping out the drums is just one of the many techniques you can do – we’ll be definately dropping more techniques in the future so stay checkin in…oh and if ya feeling the track, it’s called Street Envy and is a free download from our downloads page.

don’t forget to check out Rhudeisland Records for the hottest instrumentals that’ll get you heard!

Free Mp3 Download: Street Envy

Our first free mp3 download: Street Envy

Street Envy

note: you may have to do a right-click -> Save As…or Save Link As… in order to save the file

Don’t forget to check out Rhudeisland Records for the hottest instrumentals that’ll get you heard!

Basslines

Basslines are just as important to music production as the drums are. They serve to complement the drums and fill out the lower end of the frequency range. Basically, they provide the *thump* in your tracks, they’re the *boom* in the jeeps with the boomin’ system, they’re the part of the track that makes the car shake as you roll leanin’ to the side.

In this post we’ll show you: 1) How effective bass lines can have and the impact they have on a track, and 2) how to create a simple bassline.

To begin with, let’s listen to a drum pattern with no bass:

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Not too bad, but we’re going to add some flavor by adding the following bass notes:

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So when we out it together, this is what we get:

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sounding better already, right?

All that was done was the bass notes were played the same time as the kick to help accentuate that part of the track. It was one bass not we used, but you can vary the notes to get different effects. Here an example where, instead of playing the same bass note, different bass notes are played:

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As you can see it gives the track a different feel. The bass notes played are part of the same chord and are played in the same scale. Chords and scales is a whole ‘nother topic and we’ll definitely get to that is later posts. The point is you can play different notes if you like to get a different feel for the track you are producing.

So far we just looked as simple bass notes that are layered on the drums, but we can play longer notes too and have a whole bass line. I also added a couple extra notes here. Check it out:

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In addition, you can keep adding and make a whole bass riff. The more you add the more the bass will line will stand out. Check it out:

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