Although it is often seen as a signature move of Hip Hop producers, customizing drums through layering is a technique used by artists in every genre, and it allows you to have fresh, new drum sounds that will energize your productions. Using simple tools and sounds you already have, you can expand your sound palette. In this tutorial, Sean Duncan gets us started.

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As producing completely ‘in the box’ fast becomes the norm, it’s essential we maximize the potential of our computer set up. Of course, improving our computer hardware and investing in new sample libraries is one way to do this—but another is to seamlessly wire together our applications using Rewire.

Rewire is often underestimated and in many cases goes unused. Using Rewire correctly can actually expand your sound palette, avoid unnecessary rendering and even add extra processing tools to your DAW. Let’s take a look at how Rewire works, some of its history and a few situations we can use it in.

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In dance music genres such as house, the bass plays an important role – in many cases being the key to a successful track. This depends not only on the bassline arrangement but also on the texture of the sound. The character of this instrument must fit with other components, that create – in this case – a complete soulful or funky house track.

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The wobble bass, used frequently in the Dubstep genre, is a sound that well, wobbles! It consists of a low pass filter with a LFO assigned to the cut off. That may sound extremely complicated, but in actual fact it’s quite easy to do and master. You can find examples of this technique used in Benga’s “Drums West.”

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You may have witnessed Drum & Bass’s dramatic evolution over the past decade. From it’s Jungle origins Drum & Bass has now matured into a genre that overflows with adrenaline, excitement, strong production values and an intensity rarely found in music today. To think all of this began with the a spark of inspiration and some drum-solos (breakbeats) sampled from black soul and funk recordings of the early 1960’s.

In this tutorial you will learn the time honored techniques of manipulating one of these famous breaks and fashioning it into Drum & Bass sensibilities.

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It isn’t often that a simple, under-produced beat is the soundtrack to a song that sells millions of copies. Even more amazing was that Soulja Boy was able to create this song using only stock sounds that come with FL Studio!

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to re-create Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em’s ‘Crank That’ in FL Studio. This process will walk you through the construction of a #1 smash-hit and demonstrate that you don’t need top of the line tools to create a best-selling hip hop track.

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Ever heard a song by T-Pain on the radio and wondered how the robotic vocal effect is achieved? By the end of this tutorial, you will own the autotuning sound that is used on so many pop records right now.

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