jungle drum programming, beat chopping and slicing

There's an excellent series of video's up on youtube taken from a Dutch documentary about the drum n bass scene in its heyday (when record contracts were being handed out from the majors to drum n bass producers like delicious molasses from down south).

It's worth checking out the entire series if you're a fan of drum n bass/jungle music, but in particular the section interviewing Photek in his studio is something else. He hasn't lost his accent yet, or adopted the Hollywood Swagger, he's in his purest form, a disciple of jungle music. You can see the fruits of that major label interest when the video starts... but I digress.

It's fairly interesting from a 2010 music production standpoint to look at the by now ancient equipment and basic computer daw he's using (is that one of the first versions of cubase?), but of particular interest to me is his method of building his own breaks, slowing them down to hip hop speeds, processing each individual element down to the point of modifying each hi hat, each bit of percussion, and then speeding it back up to dnb speeds.

This doesn't sound too interesting at this point, because it seems common knowledge to delve deep into your production, avoiding the lazy producer's greatest sin of slapping drum sounds together.. BUT once you combine his build-your-own-custom-breakbeat method with the old school drum n bass programming method of changing start points of the loop and assigning them to different key's on your daw, you can really see how he got those crazy intricate breakbeats present on those seminal albums.



and one of my favorite Photek tunes...