CREATE A MINIMAL DRUM GROOVE

Let’s use samples to build a classic minimal housestyle drum pattern

01

Our minimal beat starts with a 4x4 groove at 122bpm. We use a selection of sampled drums – minimal staples of a 909 snare and closed hi-hat, with FM kick and clap sounds from the Elektron Digitone [grab these at FileSilo]. We program kicks on each beat, hi-hats on off-beats and a clap and snare hit on two and four. 02

We’ve compressed, EQed and added a little reverb to each sound before loading them into our Drum Rack, so they’re mostly good to go. We use Ableton Simpler’s ADSR amp envelope to tame each sound a little for that tight, punchy minimal sound we’re after. We filter the kick, snare and clap to stop their frequencies overlapping too much.

03

To make the beat sound less straight, we nudge the snare and clap off the grid a little and play around with their velocities. We’ve also added a subtle reverb to the closed hat that gives the top end shimmer and space. 04

Now to add a little interest. We create a second Drum Rack and add a selection of percussive found sounds – knocks, clunks, and fizzy noises. We program these to add groove around our straight hi-hats. 05

We want these found sounds to sit back in the mix but also have a little movement. To achieve that, we process the drum rack with a small amount of reverb, subtle dotted eighth note delay and an automated band-pass filter modulated by a slow LFO. 06

Finally we create another Drum Rack containing two percussive white noise hits. We create a sparse sequence, three bars long, which will result in slightly unusual phrasing. A modulated stereo delay turns this into more of an FX sound. We turn down both our noise and found sound kits so they sit back in the mix.