Adding ‘authentic’ drums to your tracks

Synth sounds of the golden age are matched in their desirability by classic beatboxes of a certain vintage – here’s how to get authentic electric grooves

Just as the ’70s and ’80s were the golden age for synthesizers, so too they were for drum machines. Some of the most celebrated designs we still covet today originate from that period, and many of these units have been extensively sampled to create a range of virtual drum machines, so the expense of sourcing one of the originals units isn’t necessary. We’re using a couple of sound sources for our programmed beats, mixing and matching the classic kick and snare of the LinnDrum with the hats of the E-mu SP-12. However, we’re being as authentic as we can for pattern programming, limiting our patterns deliberately and emulating the lack of velocity control. In the audio clips we’ll be using a bass sequence as a foundation, which we’ll see how to build from scratch on page 36.

We’re choosing the Linn Drum kit from Battery 4 to provide the kick and snare foundation. We’re ‘thinking’ like a drum machine as we program the pattern, limiting ourselves to the same pattern in each bar, which we’re quantising and ‘fixing’ in terms of velocity.

For the hats, we’re using a straight pattern of 16ths but turning to the SP-12 kit from E-mu for this part. There’s no velocity variation but we’re setting overall volume at a level which uses the hats as a driver (to mirror the bass sequence) but not at an overwhelming volume.

For some ’80s reverb, we could use a gated reverb treatment, but we’re going with Valhalla VintageVerb’s NonLin algorithm for a similar result. We control reverb time with the Shape: Size parameter to match the gate length to the track and add it to the kick and snare part.