Making Richter Scale’s smashing D’n’B drums

Gigantic drum grooves are one of René’s trademarks. This is how he made his earth-shaking beats

01 > “I wanted to do something that had a fairly straightforward groove to it that sounded nice and heavy.” He takes a composite snare comprising live and sampled snare sounds that he made in another project, and uses Logic’s Channel EQ to boost the fundamental so that it fits into the mix and sounds heavy. 02 > The high-end of the snare is EQ’d with SonicBirth 5 Band EQ. “I don’t really discriminate with what plug-ins I use,” René reveals. “I really like stuff that actually doesn’t have a graphical interface, because then you have to listen to what sounds good, and if you really want to know what’s going on you can put it through an analyser and see how badly you’ve fucked it up.” 03 > The kick is a live sound René processed during the recording session. He boosts the regions just above 100Hz and at around 2.5kHz, and runs it through ToneBoosters’ EZCompressor in ‘Modern punchy’ mode. “It’s a compressor but it gives it a bit of tone. It gives it a bit more attack on the transient and makes it a bit more slap, but it also gives it a little bit of bottom-end as well,” he notes. 04 > The hi-hats are from a live hi-hat loop that René recorded. “I like to do that as opposed to having an 808 hat because it sounds really robotic; in Drum ’n’ Bass it’s nice to have a bit of groove.” This is hi-passed with Channel EQ, then René adds a reverse clap at the end of the first, second and fourth two-bar sections. 05 “I’ve got some mono 909 crashes and stuff like that just to add a little flavour on the downbeats and stuff.” The first and third crashes are supplemented with some white noise down sweeps to accentuate them. “So basically a really simple, 4/4 beat that pretty much everybody can nod their head to.”