Drum and bass live setup

Some genres can really go well together if you pick the correct tracks and can bring some diversity to your DJ sets. Below are sub-genres that can be found on the navigation of Beatport. Jump Up is very much heavy bouncing basslines with catchy riffs, great to get the crowd going.

The drum beats are very harsh hitting with the kick and snare, usually featuring an off-beat hi-hat to add to the rhythm.

Jump Up sub-genre here on Beatport. Different to Jump Up, Deep Drum and Bass is synonymous with dark and grotty sounding basslines, more fluid in motion. Drum beats can be very simplistic featuring heavy sub bassline rhythms. Liquid Drum and Bass is recognised as being the melodic chilled and high tempo positive vibes. Some tracks can be super uplifting with epic string sounds and hammering piano stabs. Liquid is a very popular genre, giving DJs an opportunity to mix up the tone and sound in their DJ sets.

Liquid sub-genre here on Beatport. Jungle is the origin of Drum and Bass in my opinion and the start of where Drum and Bass is today. Classic sounding sub bass stabs rolling throughout and bouncing along to sampled breakbeats.

Check out this article here if you are a sample geek like me. The article gives great examples of Drum and Bass tracks and which original track they were sampled from. Jungle sub-genre here on Beatport. With a more glitchy feel, half time allows you as a Drum and Bass DJ to switch up the flow and rhythm in your DJ sets.

Half Time sub-genre here on Beatport. Unlike the music genre of house that has a standard beat pattern of a kick and snare on every 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. The quickly you learn the different beat patterns the better off you will be when looking to beat match various styles of Drum and Bass. Example of this type of beat, listen here. Track by Logistics — Together. Another beat pattern you will find is a beat that has the second snare in 4 count beat that has the snare on the offbeat.

Jungle tracks are produced with this most often and liquid Drum and Bass tracks feature this beat too. Track by St. Cal — Red Light. A great track by Sub Focus — Timewarp. The beat of a half time track in Drum and Bass sounds more like a Hip Hop beat. The tempo is still around Bpm so that you can mix into other Drum and Bass tracks. The beat pattern usually is, but not strict and set to, is Kick on first beat and then Snare on 3rd beat. Notice that the beat pattern is not too dissimilar to a normal standard beat.

The key difference is that the kick and snare are spread over 8 beats making the beat sound slower in rhythm, similar to a Hip Hop beat. To put definitions behind these sections the sections of a typical Drum and Bass track is defined by:. Breakdown : Either a rich sound or calm sound about to build up towards the end of the phrase. Drums can build up to then drop into the chorus or a more simple and silent 4 beat before the drop. Chorus : Bassline and sub drops in, main melody and core of the song is executed.

Verse : A slight change on the chorus and variation is given to string out the track leading up to the second break down. Breakdown 2 : Generally very similar to the previous breakdown just after the intro, but can change slightly.

Does the job of building suspense again and drums can drive tension releasing into the main chorus again. Repeat Chorus and Verse again, maybe with some slight variations in drum patterns and melodies etc. Followed by a finish with the outro, not too dissimilar to the intro, Drum and Bass track done! I then count in chunks of 32 beats to allow me to better process each phrase and section of the Drum and Bass track. You can see in the image above in the track by Mutt the intro is made up of 3 x 64 beat phrases, with the fourth being the breakdown section also made up of 64 beats.

For some reason when I first started beat matching Drum and Bass I picked out the snare, 2nd count in the beat, as the go-to sound to beat match with. Looking back on that decision I think it presented a limited ability to beat match with other Drum and Bass track. Purely because you can see from the different beat patterns above there are multiple different beat patterns in which the snares hit in a 4 count beat.

Cue points are simple and effective. Investing your time to set cue points for each track is really beneficial for you to become more advanced with the quality of your DJ mixes. Cue points set the foundation to mix Drum and Bass tracks quickly.

Cue points give you greater control by cutting out sections of tracks allowing you start a track nearer to the breakdown or drop into the chorus. This is how you can get stuck into the mix quickly and more creatively, with another track.

Setting cue points in DJ software is relatively simple. Following the steps below to achieve setting a cue point.

For this example I will explain it from the point of view when setting in Rekordbox. Use the mouse on your laptop or the DJ jog wheel to control the exact placement and beat on the audio wave.

Make sure the red line on the audio wave file is on the specific beat that you want to set the cue point. The mouse or jog wheel can help to be precise at this point. If quantise settings are activated you can sometimes see a faint grey line behind to line up the audio wave and cue points together.

Cue points A and B have been set in this instance. The green line above represented the first beat of the chorus The Drop! Cue point A — The purpose of this cue point is to cut out the long intro and get nearer to the breakdown and drop. Cue point A cuts out two sections of 64 beats. This allows for time to mix in the beat and then use the crossfader to bring in the drum beat towards the end of the phrase.

Or you can simply use the crossfader to bring in the breakdown and blend the two tracks together. Our front-of-house engineer was particularly happy with the enhanced sound of the bass drum I used a big, crunchy kick from the album, and also a tight, dry Linn LM1 bass drum sample, a useful weapon in overcoming the boomy bass response of some large halls. The audience joined in the celebration too, showing their appreciation by throwing things at me: during the course of the tour I was hit by various items including rolled-up tee-shirts, a woman's blonde wig, a metal ashtray, and, strangest of all, a bible, clearly one satisfied customer's way of indicating his faith in the Godfather Of Punk's music.

Amidst all this unconfined joy, one person was less than impressed The samples always sounded late when I could hear them — the stage monitoring wasn't exactly reliable , and if the acoustic drum source and the triggered sound were mixed into the PA at equal volume, everyone would hear a pretty obvious flam.

What I really wanted was an instant, delay-free triggering system where the sound of the real drum and the triggered sample happened at precisely the same time and became one new super-sound. It seems simple enough, but this divine synchronicity proved to be highly elusive. When I first played electronic drums in a rehearsal room, I realised that it's a very strange feeling to hit a pad and hear a sample come out of a monitor some distance away.

We drummers are used to hearing acoustic drums 'explode' in our faces, and after many years of that experience it's hard to play any other way. For that reason, it's crucial to have a good live monitoring system. I recommend 'in-ear' monitors or headphones as the best way of hearing your samples directly.

Hitting the pad hard with a drum stick sent a nasty shockwave up the arm, causing carpal-tunnel syndrome, loose teeth and various minor personality disorders. The pads' surface also made a loud 'clack' when struck, which would cause problems when the noise spilled onto drum mics.

It also pointed up the latency problem, as the 'clack' was liable to flam with the attack of the sample! The Roland Octapad's plastic pad zones had more 'give', generated less impact noise, and were much nicer to play. Nowadays, units such as the Pintech drum pad use mesh drum heads. These are incredibly quiet, and a joy to play from a feel point of view. As you can't really hear the sound the pad makes when it's struck with a drumstick, any obvious flamming with the triggered sample is eliminated, which helps create the illusion that triggering is instant.

Clavia also make drum pads with a choice of mesh heads or real drum skins, the latter padded out with foam to kill all resonance. If you want to get away from the traditional drum kit, there are now several electronic drum kits out there with agreeable playing surfaces.

The Roland V-drum kit which also uses mesh heads is very nice to play and reasonably responsive, but the big problem with such units is that you're stuck with the factory sounds, and however great and versatile these seem at first, you'll always want to add something new at some point. But personally, though I'm impressed by the technology and came close to buying a V-drum kit, I feel most at home playing acoustic drums; their nuances can't really be captured by a set of samples, no matter how comprehensive.

Fast forward ten years to A leaner, wiser, more experienced drummer takes the stage with Iggy Pop, but he wasn't me — I was touring with soul diva Lisa Stansfield, and still trying to get really tight sample triggering from my acoustic drums. The Akai contained a sampled bass drum triggered by my kick, and a variety of TR samples that I played directly from the Octapad.

The results were still to my ears at least pretty unsatisfactory — everything sounded late, and the bass drum sample and the real kick still produced their usual horrible flam when mixed together.

According to the sales pitch, this audio-to-MIDI box was capable of instant triggering, but I discovered that it had a 13ms delay from input to output. When I mentioned this to an Akai salesman, I was told that I was splitting hairs, and that no one could hear that kind of delay. That made me even more obsessed. Determined to hunt down the fastest system in the west, I bought an Alesis DM5 drum module, which has a set of internal sounds and built-in audio trigger inputs, but this also suffered from late timing.

I began to suspect that the problem was caused by the very thing that was sent to this planet to save our souls Every time MIDI was involved, I got horribly late triggering and, more worryingly, inconsistent timing.

Finally, I decided to use Logic Audio to test the timing response of the Alesis DM5, by recording a live bass drum playing a series of single hits into Logic; feeding the output of the recorded bass drum track straight into the DM5's audio trigger input; playing back the recorded bass drum track while recording the DM5's analogue output onto a new Logic audio track; and then finally repeating the previous step, but this time recording the DM5's MIDI output onto a Logic MIDI track.

Recording the analogue outputs enabled me to look at the DM5's audio response time, while recording the MIDI notes it generated in response to incoming triggers gave me an idea of its MIDI processing speed. Having recorded these tests, I compared the timing of the DM5 recordings to those of the original bass drum hits, and found significant delays in both the audio and MIDI events.

I also found that the delays were slightly different each time, even though the recording conditions were identical. I also tried the same test on my Akai sampler with similar results, eventually concluding that although MIDI wasn't entirely to blame for triggering delays, it was a major contributory factor.

Using a triggering device to fire off custom sounds in an external sampler, I could expect unpredictable MIDI processing delays from both units — clearly a recipe for timing disaster. In the end, I found the only fix was to trim the front off the bass drum sample to reduce its attack and minimise the flam effect.

Far from ideal, but it got me through the tour! Whatever the triggering system, accurate sample triggering relies on the manual setting of an audio threshold for each trigger source.

The threshold value determines the minimum level at which the incoming audio generates a trigger impulse — all signals below this level are ignored. The level therefore has to be set low enough to pick up quieter hits not that there were many of those in Iggy's set, for example , but high enough to rule out cross-triggering from adjacent triggers or background noises. With multiple drums triggering samples, crosstalk becomes an even bigger issue, as a loud hit on one tom-tom can easily cause its neighbour to trigger.

Onstage background noise is often extremely loud, so getting the threshold settings right in a live situation can be very tricky. Another problem is that trigger boxes sometimes over-react and generate two or three impulses in response to one loud hit; some units cleverly overcome this by supplying a 'hold' function which can be set to prevent multiple hits occurring within an excessively short period.

I've learnt that setting up live drum triggers is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman — it requires a lot of patience, determination and fiddling, and you seem to have to tweak the damn things almost on a daily basis. By the time a second tour with Lisa Stansfield came around in , I had bought a Clavia ddrum4, a professional drum module from the company who make the Nord synthesizers.

The ddrum4 has a large menu of high-quality mono sounds, 8MB of Flash RAM for user samples and its own set of built-in audio trigger inputs, enabling internal samples to be triggered directly, without MIDI being involved having identified MIDI as a source of timing slop, I was happy to see it eliminated.

But even with direct audio triggering, the ddrum still outputs its samples slightly late — 4. The good news is that this delay is at least consistent, so once you find a sample that blends well with the acoustic drum source, it will sound the same each time — a major breakthrough! Although 4.

Thanks to the ddrum, I was able to use a triggered bass drum sample all the way through the tour with no problems. Clavia's own high-quality drum triggers. Clavia have shown their commitment to sample triggering by manufacturing their own, very good drum triggers — these clamp onto the rim of the drum and have built-in jack or XLR sockets so that you can attach your own cables.

Being able to use your own samples in the ddrum4 is a great selling point, but loading them in is pretty painful; the unit doesn't have front-end sampling, so you have to use an external sampler to transfer your samples into the ddrum4 one at a time. This process relies on that slow, tedious transfer method known as MIDI sample dump, which, along with hexadecimal code and haemorrhoids, is one of the greatest pains in the rectal zone known to mankind. Using MIDI sample dump, it takes a long time to transfer even a very short bass drum sample — having got to the point where I thought I could dispense with an external sampler, it was ironic to discover that I still needed my Akai SXL to perform the transfers!

Impossible as it might seem, the mechanism used in this Axis bass-drum pedal makes it possible to set it up to trigger a sample fractionally before the bass-drum's beater hits the head.