Although we pretty much dedicated an entire issue to UK Garage a few months back, it seems that this particular genre of music continues to go from strength to strength. Of course, if you look back on any form of music that’s had a degree of longevity, one of the main criteria is that it had an ability to take on new influences and adapt - thus evolving and refusing to stagnate. And it appears that our home grown Garage is doing precisely this, converging with other musical styles whilst still retaining an infectious groove.
In this months Style Counsel we’re going to look at constructing a cool Garage tune, but unlike previous tutorials which relied on the sounds within our sound source, we’re going to incorporate some samples from the UK Garage and 2 Step Grooves CD reviewed elsewhere in this issue. By loading some of these samples to instruments such as Emagic’s EXS24 Sampler, and triggering these from the accompanying MIDI Files, we not only get immediate sounds relating to this musical style, we also retain the flexibility that MIDI imparts.
Furthermore, when we marry the rhythmic flexibility of products such as this, with the authenticity of VST Instruments such as the Steinberg Model E, and the convenience of Plug In effects, then we really have no excuse for unprofessional results. In 2001, we have all the tools at our disposal All we need is an occasional helping hand to point us in the right direction.
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A good starting tempo for UK Garage is between 135 and 140 bpm and our first task after opening our sequencer, is to set this. Here you see the transport control section of Logic and within it, our desired tempo of 135bpm.
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Next we need to designate the amount of bars that our initial piece will play over. In this case we’re going to cycle around four bars. You can see the selected bars by the white area on the time line at the top of the page.
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As usual we’re going to start with the drums only this time, instead of working with sounds from a sound card or module, we’re going to load some drum samples from GMedia’s UK Garidge & 2 Step Grooves CD, into the EMagic EXS24 Sampler seen here.
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Here we can see the samples mapped to their corresponding note numbers and ready for us to start using with a drum pattern. Conveniently though, the UK Garidge CD gives us a host of Garage MIDI Files that we can use with these samples.
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Here we’ve loaded a MIDI File that corresponds to the samples in the EXS24 and we can begin to edit the parts to suit our own taste. Before we do that lets have a look at the way some of the drums have been programmed.
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A great way to dissect tracks in order to analyse them within Logic is to use the ‘Demix’ function. There’s several demix different options but for drums it’s best to use the ‘demix by note number’ function which separates each drum out.
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Having performed our demix function we can now see all the separate drums as individual blocks in our main arrange page. When performing a demix your final demixed tracks will retain the name of the original track, so here we’re naming each drum.
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Now we can see the hi hat parts both in the matrix edit and event edit page and whilst everything looks normal within the matrix edit, if we look closely at the event edit we can see that the part is swung slightly.
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If you’re keen on programming your own Garage beats It’s worth analysing this swing or shuffle in terms the template quantises. Taking note that our original shuffle equals 55 we can apply a quantise to see if any of these will equate to the same. Here’s the results from the 16C template.
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Whilst the 16C quantise is too loose, we can see here that the 16D quantise is slightly too severe. However we can see that either quantise affects the right hits so all we have to do is to highlight these and drag them back to our value of 56.
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A quick look at the other drums reveal that they are all on the beat so we don’t have to worry too much about them at the moment. Therefore in the interest of keeping all our drum parts on a single track we’ve remerged everything again.
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Before moving on to the instrumentation it’s worth highlighting one of the advantages of MIDI over audio. Because our drum part is MIDI Data simply triggering samples on the EXS24, we can play the track at whatever tempo we desire. Here’s the track at 100bpm with no need for time stretching.
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Additionally we can edit any of the drum parts to suit our taste. In this case we’ve put an extra snare drum at position 2.3.4.55 to give the pattern a little edge. Also, we’ve added a ride cymbal part on the off-beat just to lift the groove.
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Normally after the drums we would move onto the bass but one of the backbone instruments of UK Garage is, without doubt, the Fender Rhodes. Whilst a real Fender Rhodes is slightly impractical for most computer musicians, thankfully most sound cards will have a facsimile at program change 4.
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When emulating the sound of a real Rhodes you’ll need to make judicious use of any tremolo effects your sound source may have. Luckily, our Roland SC8850 has a great Rhodes sound and a tremolo effect. Here’s a Rhodes riff that we’ve come up with that syncopates nicely with our kick drum.
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At the minute our Rhodes part is unquantised which although seems adequate, should be tightened up with a little quantising. Remembering our earlier quantise dilemma, all we’ve done is to add a 16C quantise template and move all the notes that subsequently fell on the 41 to 55.
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Now we can begin to expand on instrumentation a little more but instead of adding more chordal parts on different instruments we’re going to simply add a small lick that works around the overall groove using the obligatory garage organ sound at program change 17
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Having assigned our sound to MIDI channel 2 we’ve come up with a simple chromatic run that works well without being too intrusive. Again, we’ve had to quantise this as per our previous method which is a little tedious.
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However, there is an easy way to create your own quantise templates within Logic. Using our drum track which is perfect in terms of creating a groove template, all we have to do is highlight it, then go to Options > Groove Templates > Make Groove Templates.
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Now if we look at the list of quantise templates available there will be one called Garage Groove which will contain the same quantise value. So instead of dragging notes around within the event edit to achieve the correct quantise we can simply apply this template.
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A final word on creating you own groove templates. The template will always adopt the name of the sequence from which you’re taking the initial quantise values. So, had we have named our drum part ‘Garage Quantise’ and created a template, it would have had this name.
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Our track is grooving along quite nicely as it is so we don’t want to overcook it. However it still needs a few more bits and pieces. Here we’ve taken a sound from the SC8850 entitled ‘Minor Rave’ and played in a couple of hits across our four bar section.
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Now we get another chance to put our quantise template to the test by applying it to this part. If we’ve created our template correctly we should end up with everything quantised with a value of 55 ticks. Hey presto, success.
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UK Garage is all about rhythm and syncopation so in this example we’ve simply taken a 303 type synth bass sound and hard panned it to the right before playing in the above groove. Again, we’ve also applied our quantise template to tighten the part up.
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As much as our sound source contains some very decent sounds, there are sometimes when you want to play around with a Plug In synth to create you own sounds. In this instance we’ve opted the Steinberg Model E as our second audio instrument and programmed an abrasive but not too intrusive sound.
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Finally, we’ve programmed in a very simple series of single notes that juxtapose themselves against all of the other instrumentation within out track. When creating juxtaposing lines such as these try muting the main drum track and chords leaving the ride to mark time. That way you’ll get a sense of space.
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The great thing about the Model E is that it’s multi timbral and here we’ve created a funky little sound on MIDI Channel 2. Again when creating lines that are meant for creating juxtaposing parts, make your sounds for sufficiently different from each other so as to add interest to the overall piece.
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Things don’t necessarily have to be complex to sound good. Taking our sound created on MIDI channel 2 of the Model E and stripping back the instrumentation as before, we’ve come up with this very simple single notes. Now when we add all the juxtaposing lines everything should come together.
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Here’s everything that we’ve created so far but note that we’ve muted the drums and the Rhodes part. Again this is a perfect way of checking that everything has it’s own breathing space and the instrumentation within our piece is not too cluttered.
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Now once all of our instrumentation kicks in our track should start to seriously groove as the rhythmic elements of each part blend together. All we need to do now is apply some space n terms of panning within the stereo spectrum and we have the basis of a decent track.
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Because Garage is very much a groove based genre, often you’ll find that a main theme such as we have here will be used throughout the song, with minor changes here and there to help lift certain sections
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Obviously muting and demuting play a key part in creating dynamics across an entire track. However, there’s several other things we can do to make our track more interesting such as create another sampler with the same drum kit triggering the same drum groove as seen here.
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In this sampler though, we’re going to program a filter envelope setting that when applied to the drum track will create a sweeping filter effect. Here you can see a close up of the final filter envelope settings on the EXS24.
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Now all we need to do is to either copy the drum track to the track containing the new sampler and settings, and either run this at the same time as our original drum track of at different points within the entire composition. For example in an eight bar breakdown.
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Of course this being a plug in instrument we can also assign any plug in effects via a bus send as seen here. In this example we’ve routed the filtered drum part to a tempo delay which has been set up with the correct tempo value.
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Now it’s simply a case of getting an over all mix between all instruments, but in particular the two drum tracks. We’ve boosted the volume of our main drum track and dropped the filtered and delayed drum part back so that it gives more of a subtle rhythmic effect.
