In this week’s Audio Premium content, Andy Slatter shows you how to design a reese bass sound from scratch, how to make a custom drum kit and program a classic D’n'B drum pattern, and edit some vocals to produce a cool timestretched effect. While the screenshots of this tutorial are taken in Cubase 5, the techniques are transferable to other DAWs. The emphasis is more about the plugin synths and effects, which are all freeware.

To learn more about what you get as part of Audio Premium, read this. To take a peek inside this tutorial, hit the jump!

“Drum ‘n’ Bass is a genre of electronic dance music which features very fast tempo drum breaks, usually between 160-180 bpm, dirty synthetic basslines and heavily processed vocal samples. In this tutorial I’m going to explore a few techniques for experimenting with this style. I’ll show how to design a reese bass sound from scratch, how to make a custom drum kit and program a classic D’n'B drum pattern, then we will move on to edit some vocals and produce a cool timestretched effect. I’ll be working in Cubase 5, but the techniques would be transferable to other DAWs, the emphasis really is more about the plugin synths and effects that I use, which are all freeware! The tempo of this project is 175 bpm.”

Here’s the kind of lively MIDI music you’ll be able to create once you harness the knowledge inside:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Make sure you come back and leave a comment to tell us how you found it.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Steps 1-20
• Conclusion

Existing Premium members can log-in and download. Not a Premium member? Join now.