'Old-school' sound?

[Skang]

Half time feel usually means the backbeat or the snare on the 3 I believe

[Basic A]

Drums : Sparse, lotta ethnic percs and ect., woody reverby snappy sounds n all that... snappy/cracky snares... Make em have an evil halftimey shuffley feel, saturate them as individuals then saturate them as a bus.

Bass : Start simple wavewforms, add lots of wet/dry distortions, like old school cabinet emulators and analog pedal emulators and all that... split freq's, reverb on the upper portions of your bass sounds to gel with drums.

Melodics : Mangled vocals, reversed guitar/piano/rhodes/we... pile on the saturation, use tons of tape delay, let things swell in the listeners persption and climax and fade away and ect... Eerie synths with alot of saturation...



Be more specific youll get more specific answers

No no, this is exactly the kind of advice I'm looking for. I know the sound but have no idea how it translates into production terms; more technical stuff would probably go straight over my head, so general is definitely better for me at this stage Having said that, I am curious to know how an 'evil, haltimey, shuffley feel' could be achieved. Quantize to swing I'm guessing for the shuffle? But half-time? (I'm really embarassed to say but I don't know how to make a halftime beat!) As for evilness, I imagine that can't be done 'box-ticker' style and is just the kinda thing you have to experiment to find? (although if you have any advice on that one, feel free to share!)

Thanks so much for the advice guys, amazing response and so many useful suggestions, without even putting them into practice yet I feel like I'm understanding a lot better already. Will have to re-read this thread in this thread tomorra to absorb it all lol

If you have your hihats on the 16ths's and your kick on one snare on three, thats halftime, if your hihats are on the 16ths and your kicks on 1-3, snares are on 2-4, thats normal time... Make sense? Halftime = half of 4 to the floor... or two dominant beats per 4 beat bar...

Evil shuffley feel... lay some hats out where you normally would then turn the quantize/snap to grid off and drag every second hat a little later then it should normally happen, hit play... Instant feet moving ska-skanky shuffle stuff haha... Triplets give a really nice feel too, that'd be 3 hihats in the space 2 would normally occupy...

[makerowner]

Drums : Sparse, lotta ethnic percs and ect., woody reverby snappy sounds n all that... snappy/cracky snares... Make em have an evil halftimey shuffley feel, saturate them as individuals then saturate them as a bus.

Bass : Start simple wavewforms, add lots of wet/dry distortions, like old school cabinet emulators and analog pedal emulators and all that... split freq's, reverb on the upper portions of your bass sounds to gel with drums.

Melodics : Mangled vocals, reversed guitar/piano/rhodes/we... pile on the saturation, use tons of tape delay, let things swell in the listeners persption and climax and fade away and ect... Eerie synths with alot of saturation...



Be more specific youll get more specific answers

No no, this is exactly the kind of advice I'm looking for. I know the sound but have no idea how it translates into production terms; more technical stuff would probably go straight over my head, so general is definitely better for me at this stage Having said that, I am curious to know how an 'evil, haltimey, shuffley feel' could be achieved. Quantize to swing I'm guessing for the shuffle? But half-time? (I'm really embarassed to say but I don't know how to make a halftime beat!) As for evilness, I imagine that can't be done 'box-ticker' style and is just the kinda thing you have to experiment to find? (although if you have any advice on that one, feel free to share!)

Thanks so much for the advice guys, amazing response and so many useful suggestions, without even putting them into practice yet I feel like I'm understanding a lot better already. Will have to re-read this thread in this thread tomorra to absorb it all lol

Yeah shuffle means sixteenth-note swing. If you're in FL you can slide a little bar in the step sequencer to change the amoung of swing. Swing btw is the difference in length between the even and odd sixteenth notes.
Halftime means more or less kick on one and snare on three, which makes it feel like the kick and snare are at 70 bpm instead of 140. Though I would also point out that not all the older stuff is halftime:


More generally, someone mentioned garage and jungle and I think that's definitely a big part of it. Listen to some of the stuff that inspired these guys. El-B was a big influence on dubstep, which you can hear on this track, and tons of others:

[jaydot]

Hissy snares are a no go here, you want a nice organic sounding snare with a little snap to it...reverb/delay it by all means (in fact it helps) but don't go over the top so it sounds like a brostep snare

Lots of reverb and delay on synths and whatnot in rootsy stuff is very important.

As for bass, the tune Spooks in my signature is basically two sinewaves layered, one lowpassed at around 400 and one quieter one lowpassed at around 60.. I got a nice dubby bass from doing this

As for the bassline itself definitely experiement, even if you have to do it all across one note. As long as, as someone says you don' t have whole-bar notes. They definitely don't work in rootsier stuff