Dubstep drops, call and response, how is it made?

[crazyinhackney]

Hi,

this is my first post, I just got into dubstep production, made a couple of tunes but I still don't get completely how the crazy drops, basslines are done.

An example tune would be this, from 0:54 on:

Soundcloud

How does he make the bassline? Like does he write a simple bassline on a regular subbass, for instance, then chop into various synths, or is it more complex, like various mini jams with different melodies playing in sequence? Maybe sequenced sounds?

I read the forum up to page 20, read a couple Call & response threads, watched Reso Masterclass, Dodge and Fuski tutorials but still, it's not clear to me...

Any info would be greatly apreciated,

thanks

[Turnipish_Thoughts]

People spend years trying to find the answer to that question. There is no straight answer. How did Bruce Lee move like water? A life time of dedication. Repeated practice and years of becoming one with the artform. Sorry its not what you wanted to hear, but to a question like that its the only way you can answer really. People could tell you 'how' its done physically, but the thousands of tiny nuances involved can't be explained and they're the difference between a mess of a tune and a masterpiece

Get used to making bad tunes for a while and keep practising, you'll get better and along the way slowly answer that question for yourself. By all means stick around, you'll learn a lot here, but your question is fairly fundamental. Each drop is different, analogous to the strokes of a brush from an artist, its just the nature of it.

[Gurnumsbug]

It takes time, patience & dedication..
It's a real tedious process(that's why I don't do it )
That example is a good, it's just a shame it sounds like every other 'dubstep' tune..

[acrap]

let me know when you figure it out bud i got torn a new asshole trying to figure that exact thing out. it'll have to just click at some point in your production phase. once you can get the flow of how a song should sound like and keep enough uniformed variation in your drops to keep interest then pumping out tunes will be alot easier

[Jas0n]

What DAW are you working with?

Listen to the drop (in the context of the song!!!) and every two or three seconds, pause the track, and ask yourself what you just heard. In ten seconds, you'll hear half a dozen sounds which are essentially unrelated - which is to say, you're not hearing two notes from the same synth, you're hearing two notes from two very distinctly different origins.

In analyzing each individual sound, you'll hear a mixed bag of pitch-ups, pitch-downs, chopped-and-repeated stabs; bass hits, screechy hits, and the occasional melodic tinkle from something comparatively soft.

My best thought on it is, build your drop last. I mean, once you've got your vocal track, your pads, your bassline, and of course your perx kits figured out ... then you can figure out how to pump up your drums a little bit, how exactly to draw up your build-up, you can sample down little pieces of everything to work with and re-sample, and when you do go to find your various stabs, screeches, and other effects, you'll be able to put it next to the rest of the track and say "well this doesn't make a bit of sense here."

If you think about it in those terms, you could fill a hard-drive with just .wav samples of all the little screeches and burps and whomps you make. And for as much so-called dubstep is out there, you could probably dump them into a track like empty beer cans onto the sidewalk from a trashcan, and you'd have a serviceable drop. Wouldn't recommend being quite so cavalier about it, of course.

Again I ask, though, what DAW you're in. If you happen to be in FL Studio I would be glad to share a couple of my presets such as you might hear occasionally in some of the more thoughtful drop-artists' work. (That's my opinion.)

[crazyinhackney]

Haha, exactly what my friend was saying the other day. That these producers are putting vocals on their tracks so people can recognize. Because the drops are sort of similar, although not identical. Unfortunately, I'm liking this stuff alot. Tunes like Hold on to Love, Skrillex and the like...

I'm using Ableton Live here, and I'll try reverse engineering some tunes to figure out. I got some synths sorted, now I just gotta figure a way out to use the sounds.

Maybe my question was, do they make these by chopping simple basslines, but probably not... Although I have heard some tunes that do it successfully, chopping regular bassline into frenzy, like Datsik's Stand Still, but I guess that's more of the deep stuff.

Tks for the answers and if anyone can enlighten a little more, it would be great.

BTW: I'm making a set focused more on these types of tunes... I have like 10 that are worth grabbing so far, and I listened to the whole dubstep.net repertoire and Beatport top 100 a few times. So, since there are few tunes that sound good in this crazy drop style, I think there's potential. Of course I'm counting out all Skrillex's tunes..

Here goes another example:

Soundcloud