Beat Building: how to make a Big Beat beat
In our Beat Building series, we show you how to produce beats, grooves, and drum patterns in a variety of styles and genres, touching on different eras of production to help you identify the key rhythmic elements behind many of the greatest tracks to understand from today.
Big beat music became mainstream in the late 1990s/early 2000s, with artists like The Chemical Brothers, Junkie XL, The Crystal Method and of course Fatboy Slim – the genre is even named after a Brighton club night he once ran.
Big beat producers took full advantage of modern sampling technology, using breaks and other loops (often included in an Akai S-series hardware sampler) alongside sampled vocals and programmed beats as created on a Roland TR-909 , have been played.
Sample selection was everything, especially with those all-important breaks or beats that formed the basis of these new productions
As with hip-hop music before it, sample selection was everything, especially with the all-important breaks or beats that formed the basis of these new productions, and no vinyl stone was left unturned in the search, sometimes using some rather unexpected material – see Fatboy Slim’s use of Ashes The Rain And I from the 1970 album James Gang Rides Again for his hit song Right Here, Right Now.
The James Gang is Joe Walsh ahead of the Eagles, showing us once again that classic rock has some very usable intros and breaks – the most obvious examples have to be Aerosmith’s Walk This Way or Billy Squier’s The Big Beat…hmm, wonder if Fatboy that’s Slim got his club name from?
build a beat…
The first thing you need is a sample DRUM BREAKD; We faked one here using the session dry kit in Ableton Live, assuming an acoustic beat would be the best source material. You can use one of SampleRadar’s many breaks absolutely free.
We won’t convert it to MIDI because we want to keep the flavor of the original beat, but we will slice it in our software sampler like things like that used to be done (enable poly mode so it plays more than one drumbeat at a time ). Most softsamplers give you the option to cut manually or automatically; You must work according to your chosen beat.
We kept most of the original pattern but added a few kick drum hits at the end of the two bar loop. We use a tempo of 135 BPM, right in the ballpark for this genre. Then it’s MIDI time. We used a 909 KIT to add a beat and percussion to spice up the sample and add contrast.
If you want a really heavy “1” you can use a synth kick so you can easily adjust the decay and emphasize the first beat in the pattern. We also have a hi-hat loop, not shown here, which is useful for quick little glitches. These parts can be simple – sometimes all you need is the first kick on the bar and a snare drum.
We don’t care about speed or groove with the electronic beats, the sample conveys all of that. Coming from vinyl, the original sample already has “personality” and we can keep the electronic beat clean (we add a tape simulator add/
compressor plugin to master track to tie things together).
After creating the drum pattern, we’ll add an acid-style bass line with some automation to develop it further, and then maybe a guitar part. Finally effects in the form of delays, reverbs and the all-important band simulation/compression.