Dissecting our 60-minute track
01 INTRO Our track begins sparsely, with just kick drum and top loop - we want to make the DJ’s job easy, after all. To give the track identity, the “Baz Bird Echo 1” sample created in our earlier sound design tutorial is used.
02 BASS SNIPPETS The resampled, reverb-heavy bass snippet comes in, with part of it reversed to create a swell. During the build-up beginning bar 25, it’s played twice as often, with a different phrase every two bars, to build intensity.
03 BUILD-UP During this quick eight-bar build-up, a good-ol’ 909 snare roll is sidechained to the kick drum to create a repeating crescendo pattern. The topend of the mix really fills up here, with pumping strings and arpeggiated synths.
04 PRE-DROP FILL We’re using a high-energy build-up to a fairly low-key drop, and it could sound a bit anticlimactic if we just push straight through. So at bar 32, we abruptly cut off every sound except the white noise riser, and drop in a phat sampled drum fill to bridge the gap. We use the fill at other points during the track.
05 FIRST DROP The first drop begins in low-key fashion, and is basically the very first idea we came up with for the song, minus the keyboard lead line. We kick it up at bar 41 with programmed hi-hats and an extra pad, filling out the treble and lower midrange respectively.
06 MASTER HIGH-PASS We’ve got the Glitch Machine Rack from 217’s Rack Builder tutorial on our master bus. This features eight one-knob effects, and we automate it to filter away the low end in the two bars leading up to the vocal. We slam the filter back down just before the kick drum reappears.
07 LEAD VOCAL The lead vocal is introduced, and at the same time, we sneakily drop out the programmed hats – it’s not that noticeable because the vocal takes the focus. We can then stick the hats back in after another 8 bars to ramp things up once again.
08 KEEPING IT ROLLING The second half of the drop (bars 65-96) is just a repeat of the first half. We use a few more of the preprepared FX samples from our earlier tutorial to make the transition at bar 64-65.
09 KEYS We finally give the solo Keys line an airing during the breakdown. The kick drum is absent throughout this part, and the one-finger pad plays throughout.
10 SECOND DROP It’s time for our final playthrough of the anthemic chorus. Because the listener will be fairly familiar with this motif by now, we can get away with piling another element onto the scene: we add the Keys melody that we just introduced in the breakdown.
11 OUTRO The outro echoes the intro, gradually removing layers and playing them less frequently until finally a cut-up “drop-drop-drop-drop-drop it low” sample signals the very end of the track.