Tight kicks and snares

Sound selection is really important for drum sounds – let’s start with the kick. We’ve chosen the sample Kick.wav because it’s got a natural punch that’s solid without being overbearing, and a decent weight in the low end. You’ll hear that the sample has what appears to be a short snatch of vocal at the end, but it’s possible to make that less obvious by truncating the end of the sample slightly and applying a fade. Set your DAW’s tempo to 140BPM and place the edited kicks on the 1st, 4th, 9th, 11th and 14th eighth notes of a two-bar sequence.

Snare.wav is a snare with more than a hint of clap, and it’s also got a fairly long reverb tail. While reverb on snares sounds great in dubstep, we can have more control over the mix if we use our own. Again, shorten the end of the sample and apply a fade, giving us just the dry snare sound, and put this onto the 3rd and 7th beats of the two-bar sequence.