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Top 10: Big up your breaks
Ballsy production, ever-changing beats and a dancefloor-friendly arrangement will ensure your breaks track stands out from the crowd, says Hedflux
Fat bass
Most contemporary breaks and electro tracks use dirty bass sounds derived from sawtooth waveforms. These basslines can sound like they're made from straight saw wave presets, but there are many ways to enhance the sounds to give maximum impact on the dancefloor. A first tip is to create a bus or group channel with a warm compressor on it, with something like a 4:1 ratio, -15dB threshold, and send part of the bass signal to this group so that both the original sound and the compressed sound play together. This gives instant analogue-style warmth. For added bite create another group channel with a distortion unit on it and send some of the original signal to it - instantly you've got new overtones and a crunchy high end. It is better to use distortions on send channels like this (rather than as straight inserts) because you can control the level of distorted signal and you don't lose the power of the original sound. You can also filter and EQ the distortion independently of the original sound. Finally, if your three bass sounds feel a bit divorced from each other, route them all to another group channel and compress the lot to make them gel together.
Expressive bass
Human brains are designed to notice change. When a record starts to sound the same for a while we start to ignore it, so to maximise the impact of your bassline you'll want to make it as dynamic and expressive as possible. The more expressive control you have over your bass sound, the more variation options you have with it. Bass sounds have many parameters which can be used for expression - attack time, filter cut off, resonance, volume, filter envelope, portamento and so on. Experiment by changing any of these as your bassline plays. A more advanced technique is to change several parameters at once. Native Instruments' Massive offers macro knobs, which can be assigned to multiple parameters at once allowing you to, for example, assign a single knob to filter cutoff, envelope release, reverb send, distortion amount, high pass and chorus. When you twist the knob, your bass stabs will get longer, more piercing, more spacey, roomy and rich - perfect for build-ups.
Fat drums
Fat drums are critical to the dancefloor success of your tune. It's the drums that make people move, by slamming air waves right into their torso. If anything can be learned from the history of dance music, it's that drums can always be fatter; just when you think you've heard the fattest drums, someone comes along with fatter ones. Layering and EQ are key to making your drums punch. Use two or three sounds layered together. Your snare, for example, might comprise a deep thuddy live sampled hit, with a clap over the top and an airy hiss over the top of that. To make effective use of drum sample layering you will usually want to choose samples that complement each other in the EQ spectrum - with each sound having its own unique sound and space, rather than fighting against each other.
Steadily building percussion
At the start of your tune each new eight or 16-bar section should introduce new percussion or drum sounds. This may be anything from a simple off-beat hi hat, or some rides or bongos, to subtle clicks and zaps. Whatever you choose, try to build percussive layers as you build the tune. It's also important to pick sounds that - even though they work well together - have as much contrast as possible between them - so glitchy crackles and zips won't work well with hi hats because they occupy a similar frequency space, while with the right programming bongos, hats, zaps and metallic hits will all sit nicely together as they occupy different EQ areas. If you're unsure of the kinds of frequencies a particular sound is playing at, most sequencers now come bundled with spectral analysers that give graphical pictures of a sound's frequency make-up.
Stabs and synths
Much funk-based music has a stab of some sort at the start of the bar, or four/eight bar section. Classic stabs consist of horns, or orchestral stabs (often used in hip-hop) but you can use any kind of sound. Stabs can be thought of as the question, to which the sounds that follow are the answer. If your tune is in the scale of A minor, then your stab might be a short synth blast of a two-octave A minor chord - it's big, bright and it sets the melodic scene. Getting your stabs sounding strong at an early stage in the writing process will help new ideas for lead riffs and so on come easier.
Fills
Loop-based music demands variation at the end of each section (typically eight bars in breaks) to lead into - and set anticipation for - the next section. You can do this with drum fills, but there are many other options, from subtle synth stabs or glitchy edits, to tension-increasing builds made by pumping up your FX sends. The key is to make the fill an indicator of what's coming after the fill - so the really exciting fills make way for the full-on sections of your track while early fills which introduces small variations may only require a few delaying zaps. A classic method for creating fills is to bounce down a bar from your track and - after muting all other sounds for your fill bar - process the bounced file on its own track in some wacky rhythmical way using processors like dBlue's Glitch or Ableton's BeatRepeat. You can get similar effects by cutting your bounced phrase into 8ths, 16ths or more and playing with the order of the cut-up sections, reversing some and completely dropping others.
The breakdown
Breakdowns can be intimidating when you first start trying to make them; the absence of bass and drums is like having a blank canvas again. The first thing to do is to build down - smoothing the transition between the full-on sound of your pre-breakdown tune and the sparse stripped-down sound of your breakdown. This is often overlooked, but it is as important as the main breakdown in terms of building a flowing arrangement.
Tried and tested tricks for building down includes delaying some elements from the end of your full-on section so they carry into the breakdown. Rythmically interesting 3/8 style delays work wonders here - especially if the repeats evolve sonically over time - by downgrading in quality, by being filtered, or by going through a more extreme processor like a ring-shifter.
When in the breakdown proper then you need to think dancefloor. Your aim is to give people a breather from all the hard dancing they've been doing, but you want to keep their minds active, so now is the time for more subtle, longer more paddy sounds. If you have a spoken word sample, now is the time to use it, as people will really hear it.
But just when your breakdown reaches its lowest point, you need to start building up again. Start by re-introducing elements from your main groove - maybe a low-passed bassline or some percussion (use high feedback delays to thicken up the sound). Then when you reach the moment of no return - the bars before the drop - you'll want a sonic ingredient to drive the crowd wild. An uplifting pitch or fliter-sweeping synth or drum roll/fill is always effective, but try to be creative with them - they don't have to be done in the same way as everyone else. Many producers also experiment with he 'pre-drop drop' - a short, well-defined apex to your build up that occurs before the main drop. A lot of tear-out breaks put clever drum fills in here, which fool the listener into thinking the drop is about to happen, when it actually happens a few bars later.
The drop
A simple and effective technique for the drop is to bring everything back in together. Make sure all parts are nicely seperated in the mix, but sounding full, and with high frequency sounds to suspend the emotional high created by the build up. You should try to have some new element in the mix now, taking your existing material to another level, and whatever it is, it should be BIG and BRIGHT. You dont have to go this way of course - a lot of tunes drop down into a deep driving groove with a bit of a twist or variation on the original groove. But make sure its worth the wait - if it sounds pretty much the same as before the breakdown then many DJs will just mix it out since there's nothing new going on.
Mixdown
Once you've got your track to a full length, and you're happy with your structure, it can pay huge dividends to reset your faders and do a proper 'ground-up' mixdown. For this pull all your volumes down, mute the automation and FX sends, then start bringing them up one by one. There is a saying that 'perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, its when there is nothing left to take away', and the mixdown is your opportunity not only to get the levels right, but to remove any clutter and streamline your track as much as possible. Start with the bass and drums. Get the basic groove as tight as possible, then bring in your synths and percussion. Good separation is key here - use the stereo field, and use EQ to remove unnecessary low frequencies which may muddy up the low-end. Chorus effects and stereo wideners are good for enhancing synth sounds and making them stand out in your mix. Be prepared to automate essential parameters, such as volume, throughout the track; for example, your percussion may not need to be particularly loud when it first comes in, but later - when the track is full on - you will want your percussion cutting through and driving the rhythm. Throughout your mixing keep your master level down; don't red-light as it will make the eventual mastering more difficult.
Master-class
You will want to master your track before sending to labels, and even if your track does get signed, it could be ages before it gets professionally mastered and released, so you will need a good quality master for DJing - and MySpace - until then. Your ears are critical here, so use them consciously, and keep your monitoring volume fairly low. The mastering process cannot be completely prescriptive because it depends on the track, but there are a few key techniques that will give your track a significant boost.
First of all, examine the track waveform visually and look for any extreme peaks - points where the level is way above average. If you have any which are really significant, go back and do the mixdown again, focusing on bringing the peak down (you may fnd it is caused by a rogue frequency that is best tamed anyway). Once your waveform looks fairly uniform, the first thing to do is put an EQ on the track, and cut out any frequencies below about 30Hz. This removes inaudible rumble, which may be quite powerful, and may affect your compression. Next, pull out your favourite multi-band compressor and set the threshold value of each band to pull back by 1-2dB on the main peaks in each band. Then pull down the master threshold to begin compressing all bands proportionately. If you have auto-gain, switch it on, to keep the level constant. Next play with the ratio values, using your ears to judge - usually i keep the ratios fairly moderate in mastering. Finally, experiment with the attack and release settings. For breaks, I usually set the attack values to be roughly the length of the main drum sounds - around 100ms. This lets the drums punch through while also bringing up the level of the sounds between the beats. I normally keep release times fairly short too - or on auto.
This approach should help you give your tune a ballsy final boost. Hit the compressor's bypass button to do regular A/B comparisons against the unprocessed signal - you don't want to be making it worse - and when you feel you've bought an extra five per cent to your tune then save it and give your ears some rest. Any final tweaks should take place on another occasion - when you, and your ears, are both fresh.
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About the author: Hedflux (aka Steve Young) blasted onto the breaks scene earlier this year with the track 'Music is My Weapon' on Sinister Recordings and recently featured on Annie Nightingale's Breaks & Beats show on BBC Radio 1. His style has infected contemporary dance music through contributions to the Sample Magic bestsellers Breakbusters and Minimal & Tech-House. He DJs regularly in Norwich and Peterborough, where he is resident DJ at Psychedelic Breakdown, and frequent guest at the long-running nights STUFF and Twisted Skunk. See myspace.com/hedflux for music and info.