Rhythmic Inspiration

Get the groove juices flowing with this exclusive pack of percussive beds, reverb shadows and more!

When it comes to crafting beats for your own productions, you’ve generally got two options: make them yourself from scratch, or dip into a sample pack. But more often than not, grabbing a great beat loop with style and personality leaves more of a mark on your music than you’d like, coercing you into a specific genre that you didn’t want to get stuck in.

But never fear – it’s to the rescue with this pack of blank rhythmic beds to inspire your beatmaking desires without pigeonholing your entire musical output. We caught up with the pack’s creators to find out how they made it…

Cyclick

Sample-crafting specialist Robbie Stamp reveals the rump-shaking fruits of his labour this month.

“We’ve made a set of loops that are rhythmic in nature, yet still abstract enough to avoid categorising your track-making within any specific style or genre.

“The AmbiFex folder takes a load of ambient samples sent through a chain of delay, modulation, distortion, and reverb effects, most synced to the loop BPM. As each basic loop ran, the effects were tweaked, reordered or swapped out to create unique sounds.

“ArpegiFex is similar, but with arpeggiated synths as inputs. They’ve been processed with filtered noise or atonal modulated tunings, in order to stay away from obvious musical tones. Decons, meanwhile, features rhythmic samples fed into iZotope RX5’s Deconstruct algorithm and stripped of ‘tonal’ elements. The results were then sifted through and processed further.

“DelayStack gives you a range of rhythmic source materials put through a chain of six or seven delays and run in a succession of long stripes, from which the final loops were cut. RhythNoise, meanwhile, sees synth noise generators fed through an effects chain of tempo-synced modulations and delays.”

Groove Criminals

As his moniker suggests, Oli Bell chose to reject the formulaic when creating the second half of this month’s pack, instead opting to ‘steal’ rhythms and grooves from a variety of sources.

“We decided to take our own personal ‘rhythmic inspiration’ from sources other than traditional drum sounds and hits. We relied heavily upon hardware for the synth rhythms – the Korg MS-20 Mini is great for clicky, bleepy percussive noises, whether driven via a hardware sequencer like the Korg SQ-1 or via MIDI and a DAW. We also used our Nord Drum, Vermona DRM-1 and old faithful Amdek PCK-100 percussion synth for the synthesised percussive loops, created using lots of live knob twiddling.

“We dipped into more traditional drum loop territory with both the Rhythm Backers (designed to sit behind traditional beats to add interest) and Processed Loops – we processed the crap out of them to twist them into something more abstract whilst keeping their rhythmical essence. Long stacks of both hardware and software effects were used to mash these loops into something new.

“The same type of techniques were used to make the Glitchy loops, with both the fabulous Glitch 2 and Permut8 plug ins providing the glitch-crazed madness.”