House beats, your help please

APPOLOGIES I HAVE RE-POSTED THIS IN PRODUCTION TECHNIQUES BIT..

Hi All,

I have had my mpc2kxl for about 4 months now and I am making steady progress with my beats hip hop d&b and house.

But I wondered if anyone has any tips that might be useful for programming my house beats. I am using a basic kick on 1st kick & snare on the 2nd kick on the 3rd on kick & snare on the 4th. Now thats all good but I am having a little trouble with my Hi Hats, dont get me wrong they sound ok and I am making some nice patterns but if anyone can I would like someone to explain how to programme open and closed hats. I use note repeat on different time settings sometimes to create fills and stuff on the ends of sequences.

So any suggestions on the type of hats to use and how to programme would be very welcome. I enjoy finding out by my self but a little push in the right direction helps lots.

Cheers

Happy new year Roundy

Well i don't know $hit about house, but if you're looking to add a little movement to your hats there's a few things you could try:
1. Turn quantize off or use the swing function in the Timing screen. A swing of 56 or 57 should do ok.

2. Program your hats at slightly different velocities (i.e. turn FULL LEVEL off).

3. Use the slider to open and close your hats slightly. If you assign the slider to a pads sound and use DECAY you can make the hat longer or shorter so it will sound a bit like opening and closing a hihat (it won't fool a drummer though, so don't overdo it )

Same here.. I dont know ISH about house.. But all i can suggest is to find a sample with a open high hat... or a closed high hat...that is the easiest way. If you have a keyboard use your midi controls to go through your sound banks and take it from there to get a clean sound.

My hats, like all my beats, are tightly quantized & at full velocity....but I'm going for a robotic kind of feel.

Your basic house hat pattern is a closed one on every beat with an open on every half beat, so that will be 1.48, 2.48, 3.48 & 4.48. Experiment with adding just one or two extra closed hats in the spaces that are left, for example 4.72 is good if it cuts off the open at 4.48 a little shorter than the other three opens. Add another snare at 3.72 & add some swing to everything.

This simple pattern is often called "four on the floor" because, on a drum kit, the beat is kept with the foot on the kick drum pedal. It is credited as the invention of the Philadelphia soul drummer Earl Young in the early '70s who was trying to create something heavier than the "four on the top" sound of '60s R&B.

The early Chicago house records from the late '80s nearly all use the same three drum machines: Roland's 707, 808 & 909. Samples of those still always sound right, but depending what sort of house music you are doing there are plenty of alternatives which will suit your other styles of music too. Jazzy brushed hats & rides are obvious choices for jazz & latin house. Deeper, minimal styles often just use a longish closed hat or even a similar sound like a shaker or even little bursts of static for a techier, glitchy feel.

The main thing is to keep the pattern pretty simple & concentrate on eq & compression to keep it punchy.

make your closed hats mute-off the open hats. Use a break and not your ubiquitous 909/808 sounds. well maybe layer the 909 kick in with it. i use a swing value of 62% on an earlier setting. Make the hats sound nice sloppy/lazy yet retains the tightness of the kick and snare. get some mad stabs of a jazzy/funk records and viola. all you need is love and some wench on the vocals. the bassline is most commonly the thing that drives a good house track.

Thanx for your input everyone,

Featherboy thanks for the history lesson dude, also thanks for the indepth explaination it's a massive help, those tips are invaluable for me. At the moment I can do everthing else nice stab samples basslines coming out of my ears but the hats are just sounding shizzo!!

I just cant wait to get home now and try these things out!!!!!!!!

Roundy

P.s. nanoloop what did mean by using a break? a chopped up loop or a straight loop?