Tech Trance From Scratch [1/22] Kick & Percussion Groove | w/ Demis Hellen

追加: 2026-05-30

[00:00:02]Hey everyone, Demis Hellen here. Thank you very much for joining me in the Tech Trance series and supporting our work here at Born to Produce. This is in any DAW series. I produce this in Cubase Pro 15 and I use stock plugins and free plugins I downloaded from the internet.

[00:00:18]But if at any time you have any questions or something just doesn't quite sit right with you and you need to ask a question, you can always email me with the email that appears at the start of each episode on the pop-up banner. Or failing that, you can email John and J as well if you prefer to do that. So let's jump in.

[00:00:36]So to kickstart this, we're going to start with the kick and percussion. So I'm going to add a sampler track here in Cubase. You can just use a generic audio track if you want to, but I like to use a sampler track so then I can use MIDI with it. And I'm just going to call that kick.

[00:00:50]And I'm going to start doing some color coordination to start this off. So we're going to have red for our percussion. So kick, claps, hats, everything's going to be in red.

[00:00:58]And then what we can do is we can head over to our folder and you can see here we've got our sample folder which you get as a download.

[00:01:08]We can drag and drop our kick. So you can see here kick with rumble. So I'm just going to drag that down.

[00:01:15]And there we are. So you can see it's a little bit quiet on the waveform and what we can do to fix this really quickly is use normalization in the track. So we can just click this button here, normalize, >> [snorts] >> and that will bring the level up to a good level. So if I'll just show you how you can do that. If you are using a waveform, so if you chose to drag and drop that into your DAW, you're going to have the option here to right-click and then process and you can see then we have normalize here and that will bring you your normalizing options and I imagine that's the same on many DAWs. So either way, you can do that yourself. So we've got our kick loaded in. Let's just do our one bar loop. And I'm just going to use the pen tool. Everything's super zoomed out today. There we are. And I'm going to draw the three kicks in. So, let's just draw them in at full quarter lengths and then you can see exactly what's happening.

[00:02:13]>> [music] >> Let's set the tempo to 140.

[00:02:20]>> [music] >> And we've got our kick drum. So, we're going to balance some levels after.

[00:02:26]We're just going to get everything dragged in to start with.

[00:02:30]So, now we can go back here and we're going to look for everything that is a loop. So, we need the bottle loop.

[00:02:35]We need the ride loop. And we also need the bongos, which is a loop as well. And if we drag these in, you can see in my instance, it hasn't asked me if I want to put them on separate tracks. So, don't worry too much. You can just grab each one.

[00:02:55]There we are. All three are in. And we can start by looking at what's happening with these. So, you can see these two are perfectly either five bars at four bars, sorry, or eight bars. This one overlaps just a little bit. So, this is just audio space. So, don't worry too much about it. It is just space in the audio where I've allowed a little bit of bleed of the effect to go through. So, if you just bring that back using the shape tool, you'll just bring it back.

[00:03:23]And this that's all we have to do.

[00:03:25]I'm going to use the scissor tool just to chop the end of the perk loop off.

[00:03:28]So, we've got the same length for each one.

[00:03:32]And that's going to sound like this.

[00:03:34]>> [music] >> So, you can see everything's all a little bit loud at the moment, but don't worry too much. We're going to rebalance these. Cuz in this series, we're going to balance the mix as we go along. We're going to do our mixing not at a separate stage. We're going to do it as we produce.

[00:03:50]And then finally, what we're going to do is drag in our 909 closed, open, snare, clap, and in fact, we'll leave the crash. So, these ones need to go on audio files.

[00:04:03]So, I'm going to drag and drop these in now just to save a bit of time.

[00:04:08]And voila, we have our samples. All I've done is created sampler tracks for the open hat, closed hat, clap, and snare. And you can see I've loaded them samples in just dragging and dropping like we did with the kick drum. I'm also going to add the crash in at this stage just cuz it is part of the percussion, but I'm going to add it as an audio file. I want to actually see this in the mix as an audio file. It's just much easier for me to um use this in the mix. So, there we are. We have all of our things. So, we're going to make some parts like this.

[00:04:38]And for the open hats, we are going to use the same pattern we used for the kick, but we're going to go off beats. And just remember, C3 is the initial pitch of the sound. Anything above or below is going to be higher or lower pitched for that sample. This is the originating pitch.

[00:04:56]So, we've got the open hat.

[00:04:58]The closed hat, what we're going to do with this one is just draw four.

[00:05:02]And then, you can use the pencil tool for this. I'm just going to draw a little roll like that just to give it some velocity sensitivity and just give it a bit of groove on the off beat. And then the clap, we can just draw this again, C3, and just draw it on the second and fourth beat.

[00:05:19]And finally, the snare, we're just going to add a snare roll in like that. So, we've just got a placeholder for the snare. And I'm going to put the snare at the end of this four-bar phrase.

[00:05:29]And I'm going to hit command D or control D for Windows users, and copy that across.

[00:05:36]And then we're going to do the same for the kick as well. So, there we are.

[00:05:39]We've now got our first four-bar loop.

[00:05:42]So, let me mute the microphone. We're going to balance these levels now. So, here's the mix console. I'm going to zero everything. So, I'm going to zero the kick and all of the extra stuff that comes with it, including that crash.

[00:05:57]And you can see here we've got audio one and two. Where is audio Ah, so we haven't renamed them. So, we can call this bottle loop and this one ride loop.

[00:06:12]There we are. And what we can do with all these as well is just color them red.

[00:06:21]Cuz I like to have everything in my percussion in red so I can quickly visually see where things are.

[00:06:29]And what we're going to do is we're going to balance out the kick drum at minus nine. And we're going to make sure that it sits around there then everything else is going to sort of blend in around that.

[00:06:43]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> It appears on the snare channel. I may have dragged on the clap again. So, let's just check the sampler.

[00:08:22]And I have. I've dragged the clap onto the snare channel. So, all we're going to do is just grab the snare. Well spotted if you did spot me doing that earlier. And we'll get back to leveling these.

[00:08:34]>> [music] [music] >> Okay, so we've leveled those out. You can see now that that kick drum, even though it's gone to minus 8.9 there, it is around 9 dB. It doesn't have to be absolutely perfect. But we've got the kick drum in the right place. We've got all of these now balanced in and around.

[00:09:02]And you can see the different levels that we've got there. We just want something that's nice and balanced and cohesive. We're not going to be thinking about EQ or anything like that right now. So, in the next episode, we are going to be looking at the bass. So, we're going to put the sub in. And then we will mix the kick and sub. And then I'll show you some of the things that we need to do with that percussion as well in the episode after that. So, just before we finish up here, let's close this lower zone.

[00:09:30]And all I'm going to do is set these from the clap to the bongos, so not including the kick, snare, or crash cuz I like these to be outside of the percussive elements. I'm going to add this or in fact we're going to add a folder. So, I'm going to call it perk group.

[00:09:51]And I'm going to make this red. Just make sure group channel's off. I will show you in a little while why that is important. But now we have a folder for our percussion, so we can drag all of our percussion into this folder.

[00:10:04]Now when we close it, we've got a nice neat tidy project and this is good housekeeping for later on.

[00:10:10]So, up to the clap, select everything.

[00:10:12]I'm just holding shift and selecting the first track and clicking here. I'm going to right click and say group tracks to selected track.

[00:10:20]What this means is going to group them all together. So, again, call this perk group.

[00:10:25]Leave that group project folder off and add to track cuz the snare and the crash are not part of this. And the reason is when we're doing some filtering later on in the track, we don't want the crashes and the snares to be filtering with the hats and everything else. So, there we are. We've now got our first section of the track complete, nicely grouped up.

[00:10:46]And if we just jump into the larger version of the mixer, we can see now that we've got the kick and then we've got all of these parts and then we've got our perk group here at the end of that. So, that means the snare and the crash are not part of it. But I'm going to show you a little trick here. So, we're going to start by organizing the mixer. Head to zones at the bottom.

[00:11:06]And you can see we've got all of our tracks that we've got everything including the stereo in and the stereo out. So, that's the master channel. If we click the right dot, you'll see the stereo channel, the master out, has now jumped to the right-hand side. And no matter what I do with this middle section, there's not enough tracks yet. When I scroll around, this on the right will always be on show. And same if you put them onto the left, they'll always be on show. Everything in the the will move around. So, we're going to have the stereo out on the right, and we're also going to have the percussion group also on the right because essentially it's a bus track. It's a summing of all of those percussion percussion elements, and they are in their own group. So, on the mixer view,