Breakbeats: In the Weeds (Studio Feed #1 Snippet)

Hey Producers,

I wanted to share some clips from the first Studio Feed track to help with your breakbeat tracks (and potentially any track where you're combining loops with MIDI). A big key to a successful breakbeat track in my opinion is using a loop to glue your midi parts together and give the overall sound more fullness and character. In this video, I get super super granular with the audio clip, splicing it up to match my MIDI parts and have maximum impact without any weird transient overlapping/timing issues. I thought it could be useful to see just how in the weeds I'll get at times to make sure things are as tight as can be.

FYI: The first 13 minutes are from the 60 Min Track #1 Pt 3 video, while the remainder is from a later session that I haven't posted. In it I add some variations to the kick pattern as well as fills, and then splice up the breakbeat loop and other parts to match.

Some things to note: 

-I always keep the original chopped version of the loop in tact somewhere in the project even as I begin consolidating (cmd+J) the spliced loop to extend out through the arrangement. This is so I can always go back to it and make adjustments and re-consolidate if needed.

-It pays to zoom in! Sometimes everything looked like it was lining up but for whatever reason it didn't sound tight. Upon zooming in I realized the entire loop was like 10ms delayed off the grid. Many loops are not perfectly quantized, especially if its acoustic elements. You dont always want to auto quantize either, because a) Ableton's transient placement might not be accurate and b) maybe you like the groove of the loop, so you extract the groove and apply it to the MIDI instead of quantizing the audio to the MIDI grid.

-Bus processing! By applying saturation, distortion, compression, etc. to the entire drum group, it helps glue the parts together because they now have a more similar tone. Especially with breakbeat, you often want your midi sounds to be a bit rougher because the loop you're using is likely nice and crunchy.