Back To Root {music}

You know, I'm having a great time trying out new dnb and electronic musical styles in my spare time, but I realise that I will probably never loose my ambition to make electronic music sound as real as possible, which in turn means I'll probably never get too far with aggressive breakcore, sick dubstep, fucked up wonga jungle etc. I joke around with that kind of music too much to make a serious tune (probably a defence mechanism).

So rather than get depressed about that, over the weekend I just sat down and did what I've spent years doing, improvising on the piano. This is one little ditty I came up with. You could probably class it as spoof-jazz ('jizz' or 'shit-jazz' if you're feeling unkind). Musically its whatever, but what got me most excited is the drumming part. I tried out a few different techniques to get some natural sounding snare 'ghost' notes, and I'm really delighted out how well the whole drum track came out, with relatively little effort too. Not perfect, but it's definitely a great base to improve upon as time goes on.

Production notes: [click track] (FX'd Piano part then Drum Part)quantised... some minor changes made to note velocities in piano track, Was going to remove the last few bars as they're just blah and sound too quantised but left them in and put in a resolving tonic discord to finish. The rest was left alone. All done in Reason. A few more random thoughts about recording drum parts follow below...

Back To Root  by  Gamma Goblin

Not used in this piece but used elsewhere. Record the drum part at a slower tempo. It allows you to get more drumming in and as long as you don't go too crazy when performing, the speeded up recording should sound smooth and tight.

The biggest trick with recording "natural" drum tracks is not to try to lay it all down in one take. Thats what I used always do. It was the easiest way to make sure the drum part wouldn't sound like it was played by an octopus because you were mimicking a real drummer (4 limbs) with your fingers, but it would end up messy and patchy. I used three separate takes for the piece above: "Kick, snare, toms + cymbals". With that setup and practically no planning, you can still manage to avoid the octo-drummer phenomenon, achieve better dynamics, and an overall better and more complex percussion part. And all parts were improvised in one take after each other.

Oh and quantising is your friend: I hated it for years but thats because I was cretin and using it wrong. Quantising artefacts can be heard in this piece too but they can be easily smoothed out when working on a more serious piece of music.

The best sounding drum track will come from a mix of sequenced and recorded parts.