>Step by step
1. Banging beats and riveting rhythms
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In this tutorial, we’ll be whipping up an old-school Industrial track in the predominately electronic style of bands like Frontline Assembly, Klinik, and A Split Second, but with modern touches. Use your preferred DAW, but, as in the previous section, we’re using Tracktion Waveform Free. You can grab that (for free!) from www.tracktion.com. 2
The best-known industrial bands leaned heavily on powerful rhythms, often from unconventional sources. We’ll start with a rhythmic sequence, courtesy of Thorn CM, which we’ll instantiate on track 1. In Waveform, this is done by dragging the grey “+” widget into the track’s Outputs panel on the right, left of Volume. Select the plugin from the menu. 3
Thorn CM is a keen synth/sequencer combo with a preset that will perfectly suit our needs. Find it in the instrument’s preset browser in the upper right. Open the Seq submenu. Find a patch called Glitch Elastic. If that sounds too modern, rest assured, industrial musicians were making glitchy sounds long before anyone thought to give it a name! 4
Create a new 8-bar MIDI clip at the start of bar 5, track 1. In Waveform, do this by dragging the red ‘+’ to the desired position, wherein you’ll be given the option of creating a new MIDI clip. Doubleclick the clip for an expanded view. You can record or draw in the note data. In this case, it’ll simply be a single, sustained C#3 note over the entire eight bars. 5
Click the ‘L’ button in the clip’s header to loop it. Now, using the handle on the upper-right, drag it out to the end of bar 28. This clip will be our intro and ‘ verse’ section. We’ll fill in those first four bars later. Create another 8-bar clip at bar 29. This one will consist of two bars each of E3 and D#3, repeated. This bit will act as a ‘chorus’ section. 6
We’ll name our track, calling it GlitchSeq. Now we’ll move to track 2, into which we’ll drop an instance of Dope VST’s Beat Machine CM. We’ll dial in the preset called [1] Lost Cannon. This will give us a powerful sampled kick drum. Create a looped 2-bar clip and enter hits (C2) on every down and backbeat. Embellish with rapid-fire 16ths at the start of each bar.