Doubling the speed of your beats

1

If your drum loop is an audio clip, you can flip it into double time by timestretching it using whatever system your DAW offers – with or without commensurate pitchshifting. This may involve dragging an edge of it on the arrange page, or, in Ableton Live, halving its original tempo in the Clip View.

2

If, on the other hand, your beat is a MIDI clip, you have much more flexibility in terms of which elements of the kit get doubled in tempo. In this example, I have an 80bpm pattern that I want to double-time without changing the hi-hats and percussion, which are already fast enough.

3

By selecting all the kick and snare hits in the clip, then clicking the Play at Double Tempo button in Live’s Clip View, those two elements are sped up, leaving the hats and perc unaffected. Of course, this also means the notes now fill only half the clip, but that’s easily remedied by copying them into the second half.

4

Now, let’s explore a ’pseudo-doubling’ technique often used by real drummers to bring a double-time feel to the chorus or middle eight in a far more interesting way than just playing the whole beat twice as fast. Starting with a simple backbeat groove, I double the snare up, so that it lands on every beat.

5

The groove becomes much more urgent and impactful, but the kick is now at odds with the snare. I can either stack the kick on the snare, keeping the emphasis firmly on the beat and leaving space in between; or go for a busier pattern, but one that still stacks on many of the snare hits.

6

When a drummer steps up the power like this, their inclination is to open the hi-hats for a more aggressive sound. Your sampled drum kit may have multiple open hat articulations at varying degrees of openness – go for a ‘minimum’ or ‘medium’ option, and lower the velocity a bit on offbeat hits for a ‘human’ feel.