As with dancehall, there's no need to have percussion and bass constantly erupting all over the place - indeed, the silence between the beats is an important ingredient that gives grime its distinctive dynamic. If you find your beats are too rolling, try cutting out excess hi-hats or rides before any accented kicks or snares - this will provide more punch.
Avoid using excessive gating as this may mask any quieter yet rhythmically important percussion elements, such as shakers or hi-hats. You can change the feel of a beat by playing with individual hits' velocity values. This can create more human sounding snares and hi-hats. More individualistic sounding beats can be developed via the use of unusual percussion.
Eastern sounds work particularly well, but any quirky percussion used tastefully can help liven up a rhythm. Because of grime's lopsided rhythms, you may find that percussive loops, or indeed any looped samples, are tricky to get sounding right alongside your beats.
Consider chopping up such loops and mapping them up the keyboard so you can trigger them in a manner that fits your track's overall rhythm. Remember to cut each sample accurately or you may find that the release portion of certain hits clash with the rest of the track's flow, especially if using samples of loose live playing. Rather than the warbling, warped bass of what was once known as speed garage, grime's basslines are generally less obvious.
By sending pulse waves through a low-pass filter tied to an envelope, you can create the sort of round bass employed by Lethal Bizzle's chums More Fire Crew. By experimenting with different decay times and envelope amounts, a wide variety of tones can be created, and by turning up the attack time, an old-school reverse bass a la Double 99's RIP Groove can be fashioned.
If you want to experiment further with filter envelopes, try using different slope types if your synth supports them. If it doesn't, you may be able to force it to if it has a capable modulation matrix. This can be done by using the filter envelope amount to modulate the attack or decay time - positive modulation creates a convex slope, negative modulation a concave one. This will give the filter sweep a different sound, so try experimenting and see what happens.
If you're after that old-school hardcore-esque buzzy bass sound, as rocked by MIA on Bucky Done Gun , route a simple sine synth sound through a degrader plug-in - a setting of 8 bits will give you a none-too subtle effect.
Does your bass sound a little lacklustre? Don't worry, there are plenty of ways to spice it up. If your synth has multiple filters, try routing individual oscillators through each, using different envelope times to create yet more complex bass sounds.
An independent platform for contemporary culture Design and build by Plinth. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Order your copy. Aesthetic: D Double E. D Double E is synonymous with grime music in its present state. We shot the unique and striking grime emcee for our styled fashion shoot: Aesthetic. Connect with Crack Magazine.
D Double grew up in Forest Gate in the 80s and 90s, surrounded by reggae and American hip-hop. He clearly loves making people laugh, an entertainer whether the mic is in his hand or not: doing silly voices, impersonating a subwoofer, and doing theatrical renditions of everything from jungle MCs to CeCe Peniston.
That gave us the platform, it helped so much. After Dizzee was signed and won the Mercury prize, he wanted to bring through his teenage hero, and approached D Double about joining his new label, Dirtee Stank.
It put us in a spot where we had to learn how to entertain differently.
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