A Traditional Sequencing Technique Applied To A Mechanical Loop Rythm

I talked to a strict guitars 'n' drums guy once about Industrial Rock and electronically produced genres to see why he didn't like them. His response was that its boring. Admittedly you will either embrace electronics in music or you won't, but he seemed to have some strange purity ideal. My rebuttle is, then why use all those effects? Why not play accoustic. Its all electronic. The point is to produce music that talks to people, and if you approach it right you can accomplish that with anything.

But to address his statement that industrial rock sounds repetitive and boring (He cited Ministry) let me offer a technique I use for machine loops that electronic guys have been doing with their drum beats for years.

Let me digress a bit on what causes electronic rythms to become stale. A novice might write a drum part that maintains its precise rythm until it changes at the 16th bar for the next part. Of course the first thing he could do to improve his sequence is to make it more organic by giving a more random spacing and velocity to the hits. But more importantly he should actually vary the hits being used.

The concept is simple. By taking the first bar, changing it a little and creating the second bar, then taking those two, changing the second bar a little and creating the 3rd and 4th bars and repeating this technique until he has his 16 bars, you get something that doesn't sound so mechanical and pristine. You could infact use a recorded kit and fool people into thinking there was a drummer present. The fills, of course, are the most fun and, though you don't apply this technique to them usually, they add a convicer factor to the sequence.

I'll be honest, I don't really like sequenced drums. I'd rather have a drummer. But if I want a part to sound a certain way, I'll sequence the drums and ask the drummer to use that as a model for his rythm. What I do most though is create a blend of mechanical sounds in place of drums. This is not new, but almost everywhere ive heard it the rythm repeats for most if not all of the song. My purist friend would point to that and say "Repetitive, Boring". But working with mechanical sounds does not have to be that way, some musicians are just lazy, like the hypothetical novice I spoke of earlier.

Creating an organic machine loop takes a bit of extra work up front. Say you have a sample of a machine stamping something. It has a hydraulic woosh sound as the arm prepares to stamp then a hard crack as it comes down and hits. Its two beats. Some people might think of them as inseperable... but you should seperate them. One sound as the original and the two beats available to change it up. When you break sounds appart this way your rythm can become very inricate. Additional verisions of the atomic parts can be manipulated with effects, reversing etcetera and pretty soon you have a good group of sounds from just a two beat sample. Of course now your other sounds can also be exploded in this way to create a massive kit for just the one song. Using the technique described above, you could create progressive industrial rock with no drums (machine sounds only) that is just as dynamic and fresh sounding from measure to measure and part to part as a traditional drummer, and probably more so.

This is a technique I use a lot, but like everything else I try to change it up. I do like real drummers and try to consider their space among the electronic sounds. But I have created entire songs this way and this could actually replace a drummer in an industrial band.