by mondays child » Mon Jan 11, 2010 1:15 am
The whole point about this is that you make the sounds yourself, start with a template and work from that point onwards.
It's not what DAW you use or how you arrange stuff, it's the WAY you do it. There are no rules because each track you make should be different. Use quantize if you think it helps, turn it off and then deconstruct the beats, move stuff around to get a more natural feel.
You can make the beats as complex or minimal as you like but it should have some kind of a groove or swing to it. There are plenty of places to get decent samples and a lot of them have been mentioned in this forum. Also if you can get hold of a mic, try sampling into the DAW or a Minidisc/tape recorder.
I wouldn't worry about it, the heart of 2 Step is a swinging beat that can be made on really cheap gear, you don't need loads of expensive kit to do it.
A useful trick is to multi track the same drum part I.E have two or three copies of the same thing, this can help to double the loudness, then you can add different compression EQ ing and so on to each copy. Try messing around with stuff like this and envelopes, Filters, gates and the like.