I have listened to drum n bass for a long time. For me, it always felt like the punk rock side of EDM. I learned of it during the 90’s when it was still rudimentary but still had a distinct direction. I had never seen engineering done the way dnb producers did it back then. Inventing new subgenres and seeing how far they can be stretched out creatively is a lot of work. I bet it didn’t feel like work, tho. I bet it was an amazing time.
The drums are sped up versions of what actual drummers played on funk recordings. Speeding up drums makes them sound tighter and cleaner because there is less resonance from the drums themselves. It also means they have a sound that isn’t natural from regular instruments. This results in drums that sound right, yet they’ve been upgraded by technology too. It can be fast & hectic, yet also tight & clean in a way that actual drums just don’t do.
The part of me that would get lost in the details of a Dillinger Escape Plan song was drawn to dnb the same way. Dieselboy’s 6ixth Session record does such an amazing job of making you feel like you’re in the future. A future where drummers have cyberarms and cyberfeet and can actually play these drums the way we hear them.
Writing DNB
I have tried writing dnb songs a couple times over the years using drum samples and melody samples. After years of guitar playing and drumming, it always felt weird to make music this way instead of playing it. I wanted to write my melodies and drumming the same way I write any other song.
Once you hear what the drumming samples are like, you start to understand why folks in the 90’s sliced and diced audio with sophisticated tools. They had more than enough control to design all kinds of beats with no regard for whether or not a human could do it. I find this just fascinating.
After learning how to track my own drumming, I knew I would have to try making a dnb song the same way the early dnb producers did. I would simply record myself playing drums and then speed that up. No slicing or dicing. Just me.
With a path to doing the drums clearing up, I thought about how to write a whole song. I wasn’t going to write the music in a slowed down tempo. The feel would never be right. I would need write a normal speed song, slow it down to track drums, then speed it back up to normal speed. That way the song feels right, but the drums are still sped up, dnb style.
I gave it a shot sometime during the first American Food sessions, and I then forgot about it, and then I remembered it exists a couple weeks ago. This was an experiment to determine if I liked how it turned out enough to do multiple songs. Yes, I do. I really like it. I’m gonna do multiple songs like this.
I’m calling the project: Amphase.
Soundcloud
Reinitializing
This is the first experiment. I tried as many variations of how to play the drums as I could come up with while doing a couple takes. This was the last attempt.
All of the guitars are done using an ebow. Ebows are weird magnetic devices that allow you to get sounds from a distorted electric guitar that resemble woodwind instruments when played with a bow. I used it to give the guitars a feedbacky, haunting feel that is always present, even when the drumming gets wild. I then wrote a bass melody that would pound on different parts of the drum beat, similar to what Dieselboy would do.
Once I had samples, guitars, and bass arranged as a whole song, I could then slow the song down to track drums. I hit record and tried the entire thing a few times. The drums in this track are the last take of the evening. With the drums tracked, all I had to do now was speed it up and see how it felt.
Here is where the experiment ended up. The song is called Reinitializing. It’s cymbalic.
Just Drums & Drum Samples
I also want to share how cool it sounds when you hear my drumming sped up alongside the samples I used when I originally wrote the song.
