Former student, Marcin Badura, talks glitch hop
Marcin Badura, better know as Beat Le Juice, talks us through a few of his latest tracks. He’s also dropped some tips on making glitch hop that he’s honed through his time on our Complete Music Production Course, and thrown in a free sample pack for good measure!
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Tracks Spotlight
The Boom, The Bang
This song came through a lot of iterations before revealing it’s true face to me. I started off with solid and groovy drum track and then played some nice summery-type chords layering AAS Lounge Lizard with Ableton’s stock grand piano. (This is where the Electronic Music Composition module on my Complete Music Production Course came in really useful.) And then played a main bassline with Massive.
After I had a main notes for bass I went and created my glitch hop drop, which in terms of notes used, was a slight alteration of the previously written bassline. Added some more sounds here and there, written a synth solo and track was almost done. The only thing that was missing was a catchy line that could appear just before the drop. I went to my songs library and searched through dozens of hip hop skits until I stumbled upon Devin The Dude’s Boom. This is when I had my “aha!” moment and The Boom, The Bang was finally born.
Alive
This was actually my final assignment for the previously mentioned Electronic Music Composition module. I was very much inspired by Griz’s album Say It Loud and I wanted to create something in a similar 90 bpm flavour. This song actually started off with me cutting out guitar sample from extended version of James Brown’s Blind Man Can See It (it’s about 5:46 in).
After that I went and programmed drum-part layering couple of old-school breaks underneath to bring more groove to the track. I have to say I’m really happy with the funk-stab sounds on this song. Thanks to Serum which is very visual and intuitive synth. My go-to tool for synthy chords. I think one more thing worth noting is the use of pitch drop device in few moments of the song (guitar part in the drop for example). This has actually been done by using the Pitch Drop device available for free for all Max 4 Live users.
Glitch Hop Tips
If You Groove it, Glitch Will Come
The one most useful factor when trying to come up with catchy glitch hop section is using Ableton’s Groove Pool. I simply cannot stress enough the usefulness of this tool. I don’t think this comes across as a common knowledge but you can actually drag and drop whatever groove template is in your Groove Pool onto MIDI channel. Voila!
Groove is going to act as a sort of ruler to give us the visual cues where to place our glitchy chops. I’d like to give a major props and credits for this trick to Slynk.
Can a Drummer Have Some?
One neat way to make your drums sound more live and funky is to layer them with real drums parts sampled from old funk and soul records. Try to chop them up and rearrange so the kick, snare and hi-hat of the drum break mirrors your own programmed drum part in Drum Rack, Battery or other favourite drum machine.
If the drum-breaks part are too loud, they can be then side-chained to the main kick and snare as they will function as a groovy texture. We’re mainly interested in the bits that are between kick and snare as this is where the groove is.
