Working on the drum grooves for Jumping Ship – very much in the mode of one of those stompy Prince grooves, but with a half time chorus thing happening (almost by mistake).
I’ve got out the Oberheim DMX, Sequential Drumtraks and the trusty Roland TR-606, which is being squished through the Dickinson P1 to remove all the bottom end and fluff it up a bit. Everything is syncing up perfectly with the Innerclock Systems Sync Gen II Pro – its so nice just not to have to even think about that stuff any more… just plug it all in and hit PLAY.
I still program all the drum parts on the machines themselves. I know its a bit geeky, but I love the feel of the buttons, and besides, the grooves just come out a bit different because you have no velocity, and in the case of the DMX, you can change the amount of swing on the groove per instrument, per beat even. So you can make some beats land a little lazier than others. Sometimes you have to run the loop hundreds of times before it feels right, and only then is it time to bang it down to hard audio. I try not to do any editing afterwards except to copy whole sections or extend bits later.
I’m quite delighted to be using a groove on the Drumtraks that my son programmed when he was six years old. He was just sitting on the bed and tapping away, and created a very cool beat with a super detuned snare on the first beat – everything was back to front, but it was cool. I swore I would use it somewhere, and here it is.
Sounding pretty good. I’ve got to get the rest of the stuff on it as a sketch as we haven’t even really heard what it’s going to sound like!