DR BEAT

Evoke a little movie magic with just a handful of percussion sounds

Having previously served as Editor of drummer’s bible Rhythm as well as Computer

Music, Ronan is clearly the right man for this particular gig. He’s been playing drums for over 30 years and making music with computers since the 90s. With so many superb prefab cinematic loop libraries on the market, working massive, Hollywood-style drums into your desktop productions has never been more instant and effortless a process. However, next time you find yourself looking to infuse a track with that epic blockbuster feel, why not give yourself the satisfaction of programming your own percussion section rather than take the creative path of least resistance? All you need are a few well-chosen samples and an instrument from which to play them back. You don’t even have to create that many parts – it’s amazing how big a sound can be achieved with just five or six sparse elements and a dose of reverb.

In this tutorial, I’ll put together a tense, cinematic percussion loop of the kind that might herald, say, an army approaching at the start of a historic battle scene. I’ll be using a selection of sounds from Rob Papen’s Punch plugin drum machine, and a snare drum from EZ drummer 2, but both have been chosen for convenience more than anything – you’ll be able to get perfectly equivalent results from any basic sampler loaded with a similar set of samples. My DAW of choice for this endeavour is Bitwig Studio, again for no particular reason, and my project tempo is a moody 62bpm…