Teft’s Blog

Ever since Mimi and I went to Miami I’ve been loving that electro sound. Hearing it in the clubs was tight! So I thought, why not make an electro-ish beat? Cool. Then I thought, instead of relying on drum samples in things like Stylus RMX, make the beat out of Logic’s own synths (ES1, ES2)! Below is a sample of the full beat (with a bassline using Vanguard).

All the drum sounds were created using presets from Logic Pro’s ES1 and ES2. The kick was an ES1 and an ES2 layered together. On the ES1 channel, I applied Logic’s Guitar Amp simulator and then added Logic’s SubBass plugin (for that LOW end). Initially, the kicks were weak to begin with, but layering them together and adding those plugz helped thicken it up.

The snare was an ES2 patch with a standard Logic EQ added to shelve off the highs and bring out the 1khz SNAP. A touch of room reverb was added to give some sense of space. Listen to the kick and snare alone:

The HiHats was an ES1 modified patch called “Closed Smooth”. I adjusted the pitch envelope so that higher velocity would raise the pitch. It created a snappish whiplike sound on the hats. I then compressed through Logic’s standard compressor (I love that compressor!). Listen to the hihats:

I then added percusion flourishes with two ES1 patches. One sounded like a would block, and the other was heavily flanged to give wide stereo depth. Listen to the percussion:

And here’s the beat by itself with all of the drum parts:

All of the patches are played via M-Audio’s Trigger Finger. I’ve found that playing all of the sounds directly makes the biggest impact on the sound. When I first started producing and writing electronic tracks I was strictly sequencing, and everything sounded robotic and bland.

As the years have gone by, I realized how much I was losing by not directly playing the parts on the keyboard! But, if you play on the keyboard you have to stay away from hard quantization. Logic has a feature to quantize “a little”, which is what I use most of the time. I’ll play a part, like the feel, but want it slightly cleaned up … do “a little” quantize!

After I’ve got the drums looping, I start messing with synths. I’m a sucker for the Vanguard, so I pulled that bad boy up and started riffing a bassline around the F-Minor chord. Then I pulled up another ES2 instance and started doing a midrange sqaure like rythm synth on Bflat and C. I’m Feeling the electro vibe!

One quick note: When looping drums, it’s best to play each part for at least 4 measures (16 is best!) And then stagger those parts so it won’t repeat the same for a few minutes.