I got 56 days until reaper isn’t free anymore. Who wants to help me learn how to work it? So far, I know how to arm tracks, plug in midi files, loop a crappy synth(I’m in the kitchen eating, now. That horrible loop is probably still going. Poor thing.) It sounded like generic trance or hardstyle. Then I changed it around. I don’t know what I’m doing. YouTube videos are helping a little bit. Don’t see much about dnb for reaper. Maybe I should be starting off with something simpler like ambient or dubstep anyways, huh? Yea. I finally have what I need. Gonna walk up to McDonald’s tomorrow and try to download some more plug-ins. I dont wanna wait until tomorrow to get to work, though. I really need help.
Reapers always free just after 60 days the nag screen says you have to buy it, you can still use it perfectly fine. And DnB is what you wants to make?
http://www.blumarten.com/free-stuff/junglejungle/ - there’s a bunch of great stuff sampled from famous DnB tunes to get you started plus a ton of famous breaks
Also Zebralette for leads and basses, and Karitune for pads and athmospheres. And of of course ill formed’s origial glitch vst.
1 BigUp
Good on you for getting into making tunes. It’s all uphill from here.
A typical, straight-forward and free subtractive synthesiser is Synth1. What you will learn using it is easily translatable to popular synths like Massive, Sylenth1 and Serum.
I believe Reaper continues to work in its full capacity even after 60 days have elapsed.
You wouldn’t specifically need to find resources about making drum 'n bass in Reaper, just a) learn how to use Reaper, b) learn how to make drum 'n bass and c) put two and two together to get four.
Reaper’s manual plus YouTube videos and the Cockos forum will help you with the former; YouTube and other internet resources will help you with the latter.
Dubstep isn’t obviously easier to make than drum 'n bass. It is probably about the same order of magnitude of difficulty.
If you have some money to spend on a commercially published book, there are some which may helpful, for example ‘The Dance Music Manual.’
I happen to have an extra copy of Williams and Webster ‘Experiencing Music Technology’ and Bartlett and Bartlett ‘Practical Recording Techniques,’ the acquisition of which is a slightly long story. If you’re happy to pay the postage I could send either or both to you to help you get started up.
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I too will stand behind the book Dance Music Manual. Was a crucial help for me getting into things. So many tutorials out there are just like turn this knob to here, turn that to here. You have no idea whats really going on and what the knobs do; or the mechanics behind them. That book outlines things in a really easy to understand way.
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Thanks all. Also, is it legal to use songs made on reaper for commercial use if I haven’t bought reaper?
Don’t think so.
However with the discounted license for $60 you can use it commercially if your gross revenue per year doesn’t exceed 20k.
1 BigUp
Maybe not technically, but in all likelihood they are never gonna come after you and harass you as to which DAW you used to make a track. Don’t worry about that at all at this point
1 BigUp
lool ur name
1 BigUp
Ugh. I made it when I was younger. It’s my email now. I hate it. Gonna do something about that soon. I used to think it’d be a good stage name.
not u
I think they meant me
So I’ve finally made the time to get back at learning production. I downloaded the stuff you said. I got the samples of the famous dnb songs but I don’t know their purpose. I really need a good drum program so I can make original stuff. At least make a simple drum beat to get my fan spinning. Make me feel somewhat good about myself. I appreciate the pads and stuff, but can you tell me what they are for? And then tell me a good free drum thingy and any other music thingies I can get for free so I actually have a starting point? So far, (after just messing around with he tuning and other stuff) I’ve made a bassline out of the preset synthesizer on reaper. I think it’d be pretty good if it had the right music surrounding it. HELP. I FEEL LIKE SHITE. Until someone replies, I’ll be looking for free stuff, myself. I tried ez drummer but for some reason it wouldn’t open.
I believe there is a built in sampler in Reaper.
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Yeah but something like ShortCircuit is much better.
You can use Reaper after the 60 days because I still do and it just makes you count down from 5 before you can start using it every time you load it up lol
1 BigUp
good ideas for drums in dnb:
stick with breaks and not single shots for a while - you want a cohesive and full drum sound
put your drum and perc samples straight in the audio lane/audio tracks and cut and manual fade them there
dont use drum machines and try to cut for tempo in ways you come up with instead of pitching any drum sounds
what dnb sound/style are you the most into like ?
if you look at like teebees or black sun empire or similar straight dnb - they might layer up to as much as 10 drum breaks on top of each other ! (that whole golden era basicly, like metal headz, omni, klute etc - they all layer a shit ton of breaks)
whereas like newer spor or billain will have less breaks but just layer a highpassed break with some big ass one shots and then resample the bits on different gear… to make a break
(they also map out what freqs the drums has to have to go with the bass frequncies and really techy stuff like that)
someone like calibre or some of the newer minimal peeps will probably have a similar approach to doing what i mentioned first. like classic jungle drum production tbh
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Sorry I took so long. School. Distractions. Alright so hubb I like jungle for the bouncy and complex beats. The kicks always seem to have a bass rumble attached and I like that. The cymbals. Always sound so flat and electronic. They make that “psh” sound I like. And it just sounds so old. Well, at least the old stuff does. I wish modern jungle producers would use the old-sounding percussion. I mean, stuff like Taiga by Reso is awesome. I just want to hear what new ideas for jungle would sound like through old-jungle percussion. Like, a full-fledged song. As if it were made in 1995.
I like drill n bass for the less uniformed composition of the drum patterns. The beats seem to move in a direction of their own while jungle repeats the same pattern despite how much it variates. Venetian Snares, for example.
I like the new stuff like Billain and more popular people like Wilkinson, Maduk, and Sigma have made because it simply sounds simple and beautiful. The drums really POP as if they are brand new. They sound so tight and compressed. Like fresh fruit.
I can easily say that I like jungle the most, but I’d like to sort of take a bit from everything else. I feel like people will say take it one step at a time you don’t even know how to upload a song to YouTube yet, but I know the type of sound I want.
@Test What is shortcircuit?
1 BigUp
@Test I know what it is, now. Thanks. I only asked because I thought I might have trouble finding out what it was because short circuit is a common term. For google, anyways.
No worrayz. Have you downloaded both versions 1 and 2? I can’t get v2 to work i.e. I can’t get it to load samples so I’m using v! (which is pretty funking good anyway)
1 BigUp
Dude I can’t get anything to work. Nothing will download because my reception is bad. I can only get good reception when my hot spot is working for my laptop. It’s not working, now. I can only really use my laptop on weekends because my school days last longer than public school days and we don’t have much time with our electronics. Get our of school at like 5:30pm and have to turn our phones back in at a little bit after 9:30. I’m on Reaper now because it’s the only thing I have access to. But I know nothing about it and only have downloaded breaks and sound fx from old dnb music and factory fx that came with reaper. I have nothing else. Not sure how I can make a song with this. I mean, don’t I need a virtual drum set to have kicks and Snares or is there a way I can snatch pieces from the breaks I have to make a song? Like cutting pieces from different newspapers to make a piece of art.