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use es2 and sculpture man, and don't just use the presets (because they're mostly average). Learn how to build your own synths with these two and you'll be well on your way. ES M, ES P, Ensemble, etc are all excellent if simpler synths that come with Logic also. Explore using effects like reverb, exciters, delays, etc to strengthen your pads. Don't give up so easily.

Also, for 2-step drums the quickest way to do this in Ultrabeat is to turn the swing up to full, punch a kick in at the start and a snare in on the third, with a kick just before that. Add a straightforward hi-hat pattern over the top and you've just made a very generic 2step beat.

Hurtdeer wrote:but generally the best route to go down, and to get your own personal 'feel' of the groove, is to move the hits around in the piano roll manually.

Azair wrote:
Let's take "untrue" by Burial as an example. I'm not trying to copycat him, but I like the drum rhythms he makes. I've top swing etc, but it doesn't sound it like. It's too... mechanic or something like that.. Perhaps I should do I manually, by playing the kick and the drum on the keyboard?

Hurtdeer wrote:
No matter how good you are at velocity mapping, moving the hits around out of quantize is an essential part of achieving Burial's 'swung' feel. Azair asked how to get that feel, and that was the answer. Velocity mapping should be standard practice anyway (and actually is among many Techno musicians), but avoiding hard quantization is an extra thing you can do that gives you a different feel. Also, hard quantization always sounds like hard quantization, as the entire purpose of it is to make the beats as robotically on time as possible, velocity doesn't change that. It can sound nice, and it's a perfectly valid thing to do, but it feels very different to 'loosened' grooves.

And yeah, alright, but down that argument anything you do to a sound can effect the tone relative to the mix, and when talking about how drums are produced, nobody would realise you're talking about velocity if you refer to it as 'tone' unless you where being very specific.

I take advice all the time and have learned a lot since I registered on these forums, but the problem here is that your advice was misinformed and inappropriate to the question asked. If you want me to ever take anything you say seriously, don't say dick-headed things like "Take a bit of advice, rather than giving it, and try it out."

nowaysj wrote:The point of what I'm saying is that hard quantized beats will not sound hard quantized with the proper velo adjustments,

nowaysj wrote:Way way back, when most of you were likely in kindergarten (w/ your mpc's and whatnot) cool edit pro was A LOT of fun.

thecatinside wrote:

spliffy wrote:On a more general level, I'm finding making 2 step drum patterns really hard, anyone got any tips?

They are hard. I've been trying to teach myself 2step drums and I've understood few things:

1) Kick on First beat and somewhere between the main snares. Snares on 2nd and 4th.
2)Have two hihats. One will be the "main hihat" that'll be strategically yet freely be placed between the kicks and snares. The other is the skipping, annoying shuffly hihat that gives the 2step feel. I'm doing these with mpc and the swing function is a godsend but I suppose software can have Swing aswell.
3) Drums seem to have a good amount of interplay in 2step patterns. ie. high hihat, low highhat an so forth. I'm pitching up my main kicks and snares too for ghost shots.
4) Invidual drumhits seem to be clicky, tappy and high pitched.
5)Reverse-engineering 2step patterns by placing your kicks and snares where they are in classics gives a good background to drop your own hihats.

Here's a picture of a pattern I've recorded