I wonder if anyone can recommend a book or two that would help me learn about some basic drumming patterns - and rhythms in general. I am thinking dance music.
I am quite new to electronic music-making - and to AM - though I understand some basics and musical notation and some theory and so forth from years of playing brass and wind instruments. FWIW, I am particularly fascinated with the music of Atom TM, aka Atom Heart, aka Uwe Schmidt, who started out as a drummer, I know, and who went on to make some incredible music. Some of his rhythms are proving impossible for me to decode, they're so clever and, well, odd.
Thanks in advance.
2 Days to go.. now there's a challenge :-)
huh?
Ooops.... Sorry. Somehow my post ended up in the wrong thread. Very weird. Not sure if that was system error or user error.
While I'm here, some thoughts on your question: I don't personally know of any books to recommend although I have seen at least one on programming dance beats. Atom Heart has been through a few different styles so I'm not sure what type of stuff you're thinking of. Is there a specific Atom Heart track you're thinking of? perhaps post a link here (there's a ton of stuff on YouTube) and people can listen and suggest..
The way I would approach it is to take material you like and break it down and work out what's happening in there and how you could do it with the tools you use. Try and program the beats in an AM drums contraption for example. See if you are able to work out how to do some of it by ear (say get the kick drums in the right place).
If you get stuck, one approach is to load up a whole section of a track in your favourite wave editor, work out where the beat grid is and then transcribe it (into a sequencer, into an AM Drums contraption, or similar). That would help you understand the rhythmic dimension of it better.
Sometimes really heavily cut-up stuff is done in a wave editor with cut-and-paste rather than programmed like a "normal" drum machine pattern.
I'm not really sure what info is going to be most helpful to you without hearing the tracks you're listening too.. but let us know and I'm sure people here can offer some ideas
As Ross suggests - I'd also highly recommend transcription to help you get under the hood of someone's working method. The other approach might be to look at someone else's transcriptions, but this is less done for electronic music than acoustic - perhaps mostly for the reason that electronic music doesn't translate as well to universally understood notation. Or at least conventional notation.
I don't know the music of Atom Heart at all (doing a quick listen here on youtube), but you might find that after stripping it down to (for example) primary time signature and key, it might not look all that much - often in electronic music it comes down to innovative timbres (sounds), mashup stuff that would be almost pointless to transcribe and complex interactions of conventional time signatures that would be a headache to accurately transcribe.
So why transcribe? I'd say try anyhow - the point not being to try and create notation that someone else might understand, or even to try and copy the music exactly, but instead to help you listen as closely as possible in an analytical way. And to look for inspiration.
Of course there are loads of transcriptions of other music forms which might inspire you. I'm currently working through this:
http://www.khafif.com/rhy/
It focuses on middle eastern rhythms. I don't intend to make authentic middle eastern music. For me it's just a rich source of ideas which could become anything else.
Sorry, just to clarify - 'transcription' would be my way of 'analysing' - as Ross actually suggests.
Thanks much for the replies. I definitely have been listening more closely to music than ever before, lately, just to figure out what's going on. That clearly pays off - at least in my mind, if not in my own music! The more I listen, and especially when it comes to Atom TM, the more I realize that, for me, anyway, it's good drumming that makes the best rhythmic, or beat-oriented music work - that makes it sound human, I mean, as opposed to mindlessly programmed. Good drumming propels the music, it seems. So, I'd like to learn up on that. And what I've been looking for is a book about the basics - the rules that may eventually get purposely broken but that need to be learned first. And I think I have found just the right one, at least for now: 'Drum Programming,' by the wonderfully named Ray F. Badness. It's a simple intro to classic rock/jazz drum patterns, looking at the roles that each drum and cymbal usually plays. I am working my way through it, Drums contraption at hand and already, I hear a major difference in my own improvs in AM.
The idea of visually analyzing beats has occurred to me, but I don't think I have the right tools. I have been using a way simple audio file editor called Fission, which does not provide a time grid - only a time line, if you like. It also has its limits when it comes to slicing and dicing samples with great precision. So, I wonder what others might recommend in this area. I am on a Mac. I have heard good things about a program called Wave Editor, which I might try out. Any others I should know about?
Also, I wonder if there are any filtering tricks that can help to extract drum sounds from a fully-mixed piece of music. I know it would be impossible to fully isolate the drums. I will fool around with this.
Next step, I can see, is to use AM to create a bank of new drum/percussion sounds. What a great program!