The Essential Drum Machine Masterclass | Feature
Building a personality-packed drum loop with Elektron’s Analog RYTM and processing To round up our drum machine adventures, let’s sample bits and bobs from Elektron’s drum computer to craft a bespoke groove
To begin, we’ve completely reset the Analog RYTM to factory settings. Hitting play starts the default preset’s drum pattern. As expected, it’s a standard analogue drum machine groove – let’s run it out through some processing.
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Now back to the RYTM. The kick and toms sound nice and ‘pushed’ with this drive applied, so we hit RYTM’s mute button and deactivate all the rest of the drums to isolate these low-frequency parts. We then tweak our drive settings to find the perfect sweet spot of distortion.
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We’ll now adjust these individual sounds to suit our distorted drums. First up, the kick: we extend its release for more length, and raise up its attack (see pic) to remove the initial punch and turn it into a gritty, wobbling bass note.
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We mute the kick and toms, and unmute the other sounds. Adjusting this hi-hat and perc combo’s decay level extends the hats to create a groovy loop. To wrap up, we take all of these sounds we recorded and sequence them in our DAW, to create a vibe-laden groove that sounds like a crazy, analogue-driven drum loop from a sample pack.
Next, for our high tom, we mix in a touch of the RYTM’s onboard delay. We also fade up the noise oscillator’s level, which imparts loads more aggression into this bleeping, overdriven perc hit. In our example audio, we’ve muted the kick from the previous step so we can capture these parts on their own.
As in our other tutorials, we’ve got the RYTM piped through our chain of three Moogerfoogers. Our first move is to ramp up each ’Fooger’s Drive knob, to cram the drum machine loop through three stages of analogue distortion.
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