Download the Ableton Live 7 techno beat project (.zip format) to play around with this example track

In the techno beat live set provided above, you’ll find several samples:

• kick.aif: this is a clean, punchy kick that works well for techno. It has a nice click at the beginning, followed by a punchy sine wave that bends in pitch after a few milliseconds
• snare.aif: this snare has punch and smack to it, with plenty of high-frequency content
• open hh.aif: a very short, minimal sounding click that works nicely for anything minimal
• boink.aif: a high hat and a cup type of sound.
• blip.aif: a synthesized little hit with high and mid frequency content
• tom.aif: a clicky, synthesized tom, very techno

These samples came from SampleMagic’s Minimal/Tech House sample and loop library.

Here’s a quick tutorial of how I made this beat:

1. Create a new Drum Rack Instrument by dragging it from “Live Devices” into the clip/device drop area
2. You should see a grid of 16 squares in the new Drum Rack. Navigate your samples directory with one of the File Browsers, and drag your drum samples into the grid squares. Note: you can select multiple samples and drag them into the drum rack at once, they will be automatically placed in order.
3. If you want your drums to be velocity-sensitive, (which is a must for writing expressive drum paterns) then you will want to select each drum except the kick (either by clicking on a square or selecting it in the Chain List) and set Vel (on the right side) to 50%. The reason I don’t like to set the Vel on the kick drum is because the kick is your constant, you may not want to accidently make the volume of one note louder than another.
4. Now you’ve got a nice drum kit to work with. The typical house or techno beat has a 4/4 kick drum, so go ahead now and create a clip by double clicking an empty slot in the drum rack track, and then double clicking on the newly created clip.
5. Before you start creating any notes, make sure your clip has its Groove set to “Swing 16″, and the global groove amount set to anywhere from 20 or so to 70 or 80. This will make your clip play back with a lot more swing, and this is essential for creating a “groove” feeling. See the image below for where to find the global groove amount:
   
6. Create a Kick drum note on 1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Play the track so far by pressing space bar, and listen to your simple beat. Now click on the clip and hit Cmd+D or Ctrl+D for PC users. This will duplicate the clip.
7. Now let’s add in some snare in this new clip. on 1.2 and 1.4, add a snare drum note. This is the simplest of all house beats.
   
8. With each new duplicated clip, begin to add in more samples in between the kicks, making it however simple or complex as you’d like. By adding new clips to the drum rack for each new variation, you make it easy to create a progression that will fit into a track. It should start out simple and grow more complex as the song goes on.
   
9. Now that you have several different clips of different beats, you can click record and then trigger each clip and let it play for 2 bars or so, then click the next, then the next after that. This will create a recording of your beats, which you can view by pressing Tab to switch to the song mode.
10. That’s it for now. Good luck! Oh, and if you have any of your own tips, post them here in the comments.

Related articles

• Sonic Transfer: How to build a kick drum
• Sound On Sound: How to synthesize a snare drum (advanced tutorial)
• Tweakheadz: How to write original drum tracks

For those times when your loops in Dr. Rex are twice as slow or twice as fast as your song, there is an easy way to slow down the loop or speed it up. In the sequencer view, select a group of notes and right click on one of them. Then select “Change events”. You will see an input that is labeled “Scale tempo”. If you want to double the speed, type 200% and then press ok. Otherwise, type 50%. You can experiment with this for interesting loop speed variations

When you use the Dr. Rex loop player, you can easily change the pattern to break the monotony of looping something over and over. Here’s how: on the Rex player, there is a button labeled “to track”. Press that, and notice that in the sequencer view, the space between your left and right loop points will fill up with colored boxes. Right click (or ctrl+click for mac users) on one of the colored boxes (this is a group of notes), and then choose “Change Events” from the pop-up menu. This gives you many options for changing a group of notes. You want to use the “Alter Notes” functions. This will randomize the notes according to whatever percentage you choose. Now listen to the loop, it will be remixed. Granted, it is somewhat randomized, so you may have to switch over to the note view and change it to your liking. But this is a really great way to come up with drum tracks in a matter of minutes. Try it on a whole bunch of note groups all at once and listen to all of them. Chances are, there will be some remix of the notes that’s a real keeper.

“The fatness of the snare tends to reside between 120 and 400Hz. A boxy sound is indicative of comparatively high energy in the 800Hz-1.2kHz range, whereas the resonances of the drum’s ringing reside above this, between about 2-4kHz. The crispness of the drum’s attack tends to reside more in the 4-8kHz region.”
(from Sound on Sound)

A well-known trick to beefen up your snares is to combine two snares with complementary characteristics. For example, combine one snare that has a nice snap to it with another snare that has a thump to it. Optionally, you can EQ the snares to accentuate these characteristics. EQ the lower pitched snare with a lower EQ and a higher EQ to the one with more snap to it. This will result in a slap-you-in-the-face snare sound.

Try adding a little bit of delay to your snare. A delay of 3 steps will give you an interesting syncopated effect. You can alternately use a delay with a setting of just 2 steps for the dub/reggae feel.

If you don’t want your hi-hat track to sound mechanical and lifeless, then you need to vary your patterns. This can be done with a few different tricks. First, alter the note velocities to create accents as seen in the left image. A good starting point is accenting the first of every three or four hits. Make the velocity on these hits higher than all the other hits. Second, set the hi-hat’s volume envelope to the following settings (and as seen in the right image). Attack = 0, Decay = just above 0, Sustain = 0, Release = 0. Now you can automate the decay time to make the hi-hat hit shorter or longer. This emulates the sound of a hi-hat being closed tighter or looser.

“The punch component of most bass drums lies between about 80 and 100Hz. Below this area, you’ll mostly feel, rather than hear, any boost, and it’s easy to overdo. Warmer kick sounds major on the 200-300Hz region. When the kick needs to cut through on smaller speakers, then you might also consider a boost in the region of 2.5-6kHz, which will tend to emphasize the click of the beater.”
(from Sound on Sound)

If you want a dull sounding kick for mellow tracks, you can apply a lowpass filter to it to create a low thump with no high-end whatsoever. For trance and breakbeats, it’s good to add some high frequencies to the kick so it has a little bit of click to it. This will give the kick much more presence and make your track more danceable. You should apply two separate EQ curves to the kick to achieve this. One EQ curve should emphasize the low frequencies (which usually are just below the bass frequency range. you don’t want the kick and bass to reside in the same frequency because that will result in a muddy sound) The other EQ curve should be just above the bass frequency range. The combination of these two EQ curves will give you a “saddle” for the bass to sit in.