![]() Enjoy enough listening time to take you through your longest workdays or redeye flights with up to 24 hours of music, movies, and calls on a single charge. Try a djembe/conga/sleighbell combo, say, or go totally off beam with a pizzicato cello kick, shattering glass snare and clock-tick hat, transformed beyond their identifiable origins by judicious processing.Ready to roam? BackBeat PRO 2 can stream audio up to 100 meters/330 feet from your Class 1 Bluetooth® device. However, rules are, of course, made for breaking, and this is one area of drum design in which you really can go to town in your more adventurous electronic tracks. The holy trinity of kick drum, snare drum and hi-hats has been the standard voicing in beat-driven music for the best part of a century, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. The obvious first move is to shift those predictable hits on beats 2 and 4 over to 1 and 3, evoking something of a Motown vibe but it’s the spaces between the beats that are of more interest – knock one (or both!) of your two backbeat snares a 16th-note in either direction to change the phrasing entirely and greatly increase the funk factor. Clearly, there’s only so much you can do here without confusing the dancefloor, so don’t go overboard – experiment with moving one kick every two or four bars to a different subdivision, adding the odd extra hit in between the main ones, or nudging select individual hits off the grid slightly.Ĭentral to all modern genres, that unwavering snare drum backbeat is, like the four-to-the-floor kick above, not really something you’d describe as cliché, but again, its standardisation across the musical panorama makes it a prime target for compositional tomfoolery. It’s a bit of a reach to describe the quintessential four-to-the-floor bass drums of house, techno, EDM et al as ‘cliché’ by the dictionary definition of the word, but they certainly constitute an established form that invites creative disruption. We’re not suggesting draining those chitinous metals of their contextual raison d’etre, but try quintuplets instead or take them off the grid entirely and mess with their regularity (see above) and/or mix in a cowbell, tambourine or other tonal layer. Take the rolling triplet hi-hats of trap, for example, essential to the languid, sleazy feel of the style, and surely ripe for tinkering. ![]() Okay, so some cliches play a key role in defining the genres that spawned them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t push them in new and unexpected directions. For an interesting take on this topic, Google ‘linear drumming’ – a technique in which only one kit piece is ever struck at a time, necessitating the on-the-fly invention of imaginative hi-hat patterns. You could simply add, delete and move hits around, or use accenting and open hats to reshape the rhythmic emphasis. Take a leaf out of the funk/fusion drummer’s playbook and break up that monotony by programming variety and syncopation into your hats. In the vast majority of pop, rock and dance music beats, the hi-hats are relentlessly metronomic, striking every eighth- or 16th-note with no deviation from start to finish. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |