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Im curious as to weather or not beats such as in the track below (zomby) are sampled/looped or are sequenced. If the latter, any idea how one creates such 'loose' beats by sequencing. Its like the beat has alot of background noise but but goes slient at the end of each bar giving that sampled sort of sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeEl0M7MQYk

mmm... i dont know what u think is loose about these beats... :/

seems to me like the lyn collins think break, not heavily chopped or processed, as heard in thousands of other tracks

or maybe i misunderstood ur question

well if you wanna program loose beats you just wanna turn quantize off really.

that sounds literally like the think break though, not even really chopped up much - hence the looseness.

I suspect that beat was made using a sampled break and then sliced up and rearranged.

If you want to create sequenced beats which are a bit 'loose' you'll need to subtly move some hits off of the grid.

Here's a couple of other ways of doing this:

You can tap in you beats using drum pads or you midi controller and then maybe tidy up anything that is too 'loose'.

Load up a break (one played by a real drummer with a groove you like) and then sequence you own drum hits so they line up with the break, once you've got something you like remove the break.

Load up a break and cut it up into sections (like kick hat snare, hat hat kick, that sort of thing) and then use those sequences to make you drum pattern - this method will generally preserve the 'loose' feel.


If you're using single hits and want to add some of that background noise you get from sampling old breaks, you could try using short reverbs, cutting out the noisy bits from a break and inserting them between hits, using a sig gen plug in and side chaining it to the drums +automation.

supposedly that song was used in the lady gaga's interlude. Pretty sweet track.

Oh yeah and what wrigzilla said.