DR BEAT

‘Thinning out’ a busy drum beat

Drum expert Ronan Macdonald talks space

1 Here’s my full groove: a quirky 100bpm number comprising drums, percussion, a sub bassline and synth chords. My goal is to thin the drums out by working in as much space and periodic silence as possible before it loses its identity completely and stops being a beat in any meaningful sense. 2 The hi-hats are the most obvious first candidate for thinning things out, the pattern being quite busy even on its own terms, let alone in the context of the groove. I start things off by deleting many of the offbeat hits, thereby pushing the line more towards straight-up emphasis of the beat. 3 That’s a start, but there’s still too much going on in the hats, so I pare them back further to just a couple of main hits per bar, with a few quieter incidentals in between. Crucially, the simplified hats are still playing an interesting and irregular rhythm, rather than just nailing down beats 1 and 3. 4 On to the meat of the beat: the kick and snare. This is where we need to be most careful in our subtraction, as the last thing we want to do is kill the groove by taking too many of these defining hits out. All I really need to do is reduce any double hits down to singles. 5 What remains is a very sparse beat indeed, with plenty of space and a limit-pushing period of silence at the end of bar 5. Sonically, I could just leave it at that, but smoothing over the joins with a bit of reverb on the snare will ‘colour’ the gaps nicely. 6 While maintaining the rhythm’s skeleton is key to a drum part like this, dropping in extended passages of silence for the benefit of the broader track is as valid as with any other arrangement. Here, I’ve dropped the drums out entirely every four bars for a weird, stop-start feel.