Recreating a beat from Quantic’s Life in the Rain
Album cover - The 5th Exotic by Quantic
- Record this thing into Ableton and grab the beat.
Sidenote. Attempting this on a new mac. I was going to record from Apple Music into Ableton, but I wasn’t setup for that. I used to use soundflower to route audio, and now I’m going to try loopback.
Really annoying to install on my new mac because of the process of allowing kernel extensions. ugh. Will it work? OK, it worked.
- Here’s 8 bars from Quantic. The first 4 are a bit of cymabals, and the beat comes in on the last 4. It’s the last 4 that I’m interested.
- Set up some drums in Ableton and MIDIfy this beat.
- This took a little while. Not a huge fan of penciling in midi markers on my computer to make beats.
- Set up a basic drum rack, found some close enough sounds
- Used the EP-133 as a midi controller to pound in the beats, that was more fun
- Nudged things around etc.
- got close
I ended up with this version of the main beat:
Then, what’s fun with having everything as a midi note is to play around with note probability, and with adding hits that weren’t there, but now have a small probability of being there. Here’s an example of setting most of the sounds to a 50% probability.
It’s more airy, but still carries the groove.
Practice notes: More or less accomplished the goal for this drum recreation exercise. Did not mix the drum voices to taste.
To Do:
- [] Use this somehow.
- [] Learn a little bit more about saving midi clips/audio etc. in ableton so that it is easy for me to re-use this later.
- [] See about programming this beat into the Varigate 8+, and or Hermod, so I have a modular version