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Join Ron Headback in The DarkLab™ for an exciting tutorial about Drum n Bass and Jungle! Ron will teach you how to use the Pattern Mutator to rearrange new breaks for you, then push them to the max with Pulveriser and Polar FX. You’ll tackle making your own beats with sneaky synchronous FX, pair those breaks with smooth chords via Grain, and breathe new life into old rave stabs with Mimic and Alligator!

And oh, there’s a bonus—Three free combinators for you to download and enjoy!

DOWNLOAD COMBINATORS

Requires Reason 14, Pattern Mutator, Polar and kHs Trancegate

Transcript

What’s up, folks? It’s your man Ron Headback, and welcome back to the DarkLab. This time we’re going to be covering jungle and drum and bass with a lot of sneaky tricks. First off, we’ll be taking Pattern Mutator to make new breaks for us, like this. We’ll be programming our own breaks with some sneaky Synchronous tricks, like this. We’ll be pairing those breaks up with some smooth chords courtesy of Grain and Human, like this. We’ll be pulverizing our breaks with Pulveriser, like this. And we’ll be breathing life into some old samples with Mimic and Alligator, like this. So let’s dive in, and I’ll see you in the wrap.

Now, the Amen break has been around forever — well, since 1969, to be specific. That was from “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons. Now, just six seconds from that song had such a massive impact on music history, specifically with jungle. In the early days, people were just using that break as is, but then as the music was evolving, they began to meticulously slice, chop, pitch, and rearrange all the elements within the break, and they made entirely new breaks. That’s what we’re going to be doing today. We’ve taken a bit of the old with Octorex, and a bit of the new with Pattern Mutator, so we’ll dive in and have a look.

So, starting out, what we have here is the Amen break in Octorex, so we’ll just play that back. Even though it’s old, that break never gets old.

Now, you probably know that with Octorex, when you have a loop playing back, you can just hit the “Copy Loop to Track” button, and what that does — you see in here how it transcribes all those slices in order that they occur within the sequencer. And what you could do, if you want to kind of mash around with breaks, is you could be meticulously swapping those around, but that gets pretty old pretty quick. So what we’re going to do is have Pattern Mutator do that for us.

So if we come back to the rack, we’ll just get that back into the sequencer again, and we’re going to take an empty slot in Pattern Mutator, we’re going to hit record, and you’re going to set your length to 64 and your rate to 16 — and the reason we’ve got quite a big length is because we want to get as many variations as possible. So we’ll just hit record there.

Okay, that’s recorded into Pattern Mutator, and then what you want to do is you put the swap up a touch, and just the octave and pitch a tiny little bit, and then you just start mashing the Mutate button, and it’s going to give you loads of variations, like this. Let’s just try another, and another.

Now, you’ll notice some of them there just don’t quite hit the mark — like, for example, here’s ones that I’d done earlier: number one is the original, and up to six is just variations. So we’ll just check that — there’s the original.

So, in those occasions where it’s not quite hitting the mark, what you can actually do is send that back into the sequencer — just click “Send to Track.” And if we come into the sequencer, you’ll notice that’s taken the Pattern-Mutated version of your break, and this is where Pattern Mutator has done enough randomization for us, rather than us meticulously juggling slots around. But if there was just one part you weren’t too sure about — like, for example, that little double hit there — I could take that out, and then I could come back into Pattern Mutator once more, find an empty slot, clear this one, and then I could be recording that right back in.

So, there you go, and I could start mashing Mutate again, and just like that, bringing endless variations to the Amen break — as if there weren’t enough already, but you can get more.

So that’s pretty cool. And another thing that you can do to add to the variation-mutating madness is, when you find a whole bunch that you like — and you might sort of get them in order, maybe put some of them back in the sequencer and tweak them — you can just hit Redrum automation. So you could come in here, double-click, and that’s going to make a little instance of the pattern switch — say, pattern number one, you can put like pattern four, put like pattern three, three, have like pattern two — and then you could do little micro-slices, you could go down into quarters, and you can just be switching those as well. Let’s take it back to one and then put it onto like five or something like that, and then you can just play that back, and that’s going to be switching the patterns back and forth, like this.

So, that’s pretty cool. It doesn’t always hit, because you’re taking different breaks, putting them in, and then — okay, that one works, you’re probably going to stick with it. You don’t have to go too far with mutation madness, but as I say, that gives you way more variations on the Amen break than you would have been able to do normally. But rather than just sticking with the Amen break all the time, let’s move on and look at making our own breaks in Kong and Drum Sequencer.

Okay, now having a look at making our own break — we — using the Amen break all the time, I think it’s been used a little bit too much in the past, so we’ll make our own break. But that was just kind of a sample for you to start off, doing your own switching back and forth.

Now, what we have here is just taking our little kit — we’ve got our kick, something really boxy, we have the snare from the Amen break, so recycling some of it, some nice 808 hats. We’re going to have some kind of crazy bongo, like that — I’ve called this one “Tonk and Bonk.” And then we have, just as I’ve done with the garage video I did, it’s all about the off-snares — here’s a kind of high snare, and that’s complementing — alright, here — quite a different sound there.

So when you’re programming jungle, drum and bass, you really are going to have to use the pattern switches — there’s no way that you could get a break, or a decent enough break, into just, you know, 16 steps. So what I’ve done here is you’ll see that I’m doing a whole bunch of pattern switches — I’m cycling through three specifically, kind of juggling back and forth between them. So we’ll just have a look at what we’re actually doing — we’ll have just our kick and the Amen snare.

Now, that’s kind of sounding a bit stilted, because we’re going to have to get some hats in there, and then also add in our high snare and our low snare, like so. So if you just check out here — now you’ll notice that there’s just a little something missing on step two, three. So what we’ll do here — this is where the kind of bongo sound comes in — and just see how they’re kind of accentuating the break.

And last but not least, if you were a drum and bass or jungle fan back in the day — I mean, it still gets used a lot — is that sound. God knows where it comes from, but it’s just tattooed in every junglist’s brain. So I’ll just play this all back complete.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what’s that kind of crazy, squirty, filter-type effect that’s going on there with the break, because I’m not doing anything in the drum sequencer? But what that is, is I’m using Synchronous. Now, Synchronous is pretty cool for its LFO-based filter, delay, and reverb modulation, and in this case I’m just using one and three — number three is controlling reverb, and then number one is controlling, quite aggressively, the filter — it’s just coming up, dropping down, making a crazy effect.

But what I’m also doing with that is — here’s the break just on its own. That’s doing nothing for me, you know, it just sounds a bit stale. So this is — I’m doing some automation on the solo of my Synchronous channel, and also on the volume level. So you’ll see what’s happening here if I just take these side by side — and what we’ve got is some automation coming in here, and what it’s going to do is Channel 4 level will be boosted up, and Channel 4 solo will be up, because we just want to cut out the clean version and just have that effect coming out, like so.

So, that’s a pretty cool effect. I mean, this one that I’m using was actually one of the stock Synchronous effects, just dropped in there, and I just killed channel two, and then channel one I just played around with the frequency a little bit. And you know, agreed, it’s a pretty interesting effect. But let’s move on to creating some other effects, and this time we’ll be doing it in Octorex, again using Pattern-Mutated breaks.

So, we’ll see what that’s like. Now, just having bare breaks is no fun, and as you saw a moment ago, how adding that Synchronous effect can add some nice squelches to what’s going on with the end of your break — and what I’m doing here is very similar to the first technique I’d taken. It’s called the JB break — have I listened to that just on its own? Because it’s a nice short break, got loads of really good Pattern Mutations for this — again, just the same thing, recorded it into Pattern Mutator, a little bit of swap, a little bit of octave and pitch, and some really good variations.

But what I want to do — you may or may not know there was a really good track called “The Helicopter Tune,” and also there was “Terminator” by Renegade — and they had this kind of effect I was using a lot — jungle tracks used it a lot because time-stretching was so prevalent — they would be taking the break and pitching it up but keeping tempo. And of course, Rex just does that perfectly.

So a way we can do that is you can be editing the automation of your Loop Transpose. So if we have a look here, what I’m doing is I’m taking the Loop Transpose just at base value zero, and then up by three, up by six, and up by nine. So we’ll just hear what that sounds like.

Now, of course, doing that technique, it sounds kind of okay, like that, as is. But a better way of doing that is with Polar. So what I’ll do here — and you can download this Combinator and tear it apart, see what’s going on — we’ve got here Pitcher, or Pitching, sorry, and what we have is Polar, and we’re going to have a very similar technique — we’re going to be taking Shifter 2, editing the automation of that, and the same kind of thing — I’m starting, in this case, seven semis, 10, 12, 14, and then dropping back down. So we’ll just check what that’s like.

And a thing that you might want to do with that, just to kind of get a really rough-neck kind of sound, is we have Pulveriser here, and this is just one of the factory presets — it’s called “Basic Pulverization,” and you’ll hear this is just a far rougher sound that you can be using.

So that would be an interesting thing that you can use as a break from your breaks — you just have your plain break going on, and then just as you’re stopping in your song, let’s just do something crazy and different with a beat, and then return to the original break, so that everyone’s kind of making the return home to the break that they liked.

So here’s another effect that we can do — I kind of called this one “Grunter.” If we just go and check this and enable that — and again we’re using Polar, and what I’m doing here is it’s just very basic — Shifter 2, semis — hooking that up to a Pulsar, as always. Pulsar, the Swiss army knife of Reason, I can’t stop using it. What we’re going to do is an LFO1, we’re going to bring that into Pitch Shift 2, and that is on a sawtooth with a rate of 84, and not going too mad with the level, but 37%. And you kind of hear what that’s doing.

Surely you’ll agree that’s quite a departure from just that, you know. So there’s some kind of crazy, more junglist kind of breaks.

So with that given, we’ve just focused on the beat side of things, but let’s go in and see about pairing something up with this. Now, a staple of jungle and drum and bass tracks is those kind of nice, ethereal chords going on in the background. So I’ll just check what’s going on here — just matching up nicely, the contrast of the kind of hard breaks and then just the softness of the chords.

Alright, this is coming to us courtesy of Grain — drop any sample into Grain, it sounds awesome. If you’re not using Grain for your samples, I’d recommend you use it, give it a go. What we have here, of all things, is Human — because what we’re going to do with Human is just have a slight female-lead sound coming over the top, and we’ll just see what that’s like.

And we’re getting that effect by running Human through Alligator, and this is just very simple — I’ve just chosen one of the patterns that happened to stick, and I’m banging up the delay, and just a very minimal change from the high-pass, band-pass, and low-pass — nothing else — tweaking that in itself. It’s being run through into Trancegate.

And so what we have here — and you might say, well, I don’t have Trancegate — head over to the Reason Studios Store, and the whole kHs FX bundle is available for free, so you can get it. You can download this Combinator once you go and grab it, you can grab this too.

And what that’s doing is we’re getting our gate. Now, what we have is with Alligator, I put this down on Resolution 18, and I just shifted it a bit, because as it is, the gates were occurring at the same time, so I kind of wanted the gate being gated, so to speak. And we’ll just see what that’s — I’ve put in another couple of controls here, and that is the Gate Release, and you’ll hear what that’s doing to the effect.

It’s a touch more staccato as soon as we make it longer — and how they’re beginning to kind of mesh into each other. Now, what we also have is just a swap between 16 and 32, and for that, that’s going to be changing the resolution of the Trancegate — so instead of 16 steps, that’ll be jumping to 32, like this.

And I’ve also put in there the patterns, so that you can switch between the different Trancegate patterns that are in there, or have a go at making your own ones — they’re real simple, just like wanting notes on, notes off. It’s a very handy tool for visualization of your actual gates. So let me just twist the pattern knob, and that’s just giving us a different resolution, like so.

So, that kind of having the original chord just on its own, and then bringing in a bit of the Human vocal, if you’re wanting to build up tension in things. Now, that would be okay if we want to build tension, but I have another video on instrumentation, and here’s another little instrumentation technique for you — that would be okay for making a kind of sense of anticipation.

But if we really wanted to roar things in, what we can do here is Faithful Thor, like — bring this up a touch, that is the sound you want. And what I’m doing with that, as you’ll see in Sequencer — you can do this in the sequencer if you don’t have Sequences — but there’s just my chords, and that’s G, F, and D-sharp, exact same here. And then what I’m doing is I’ve taken that down a whole octave. So we’re just going to check and see what that sounds like.

So, you’ve got a nice little bit of instrumentation there — you get three different sounds just from the same chords that are going on there, and vastly contrasting and complementing each other. So we might want a little something extra on top of this, so we’ll move on to the next sound.

Okay, we’re going to want to take things a little bit in a more old direction here — that’s kind of having nice ravey stabs, but we’re going to breathe a bit of life into some old samples. And this is a really old sample — here we go. I think everyone knows that sound — it’s been used so many times in different places. If anyone knows where that sound comes from, tell me, because I need to know.

And this is like a really old sample, and just to maybe embarrassingly admit this — when I went and dug this out of my old sample library, I was kind of like, why does it have such a short name? It’s only six characters. I was like, okay, way back I used to have a sound card that could only fit six-character file names in it. I was like, how old is this file? So I had a look, and — yeah — created and modified in 1995. So it’s almost as old as jungle, but not as old as me, maybe, who does.

But what I’m going to do with this — we don’t want to use it just as is, so we’re using Mimic here, and what I’ve done with this is I’m enabling the loop and shortening the loop length a touch. As you’ll notice here, just cut it very short — when you’ve got short stabs like this, this is an interesting thing — it’s enabled a loop with a very short loop, you get — it sounds kind of like a strange elongation, kind of reverb sound. So we could be using it like that.

But because we’re trying to take something a bit old-school and make it a bit new-school, what we’re doing is we’re going to take this through Alligator — again, Alligator, I just can’t stop using it, because it’s such a multi-purpose tool — and playing quite a lot on the band-pass here, quite high up in the LFO amount, knocking up a lot of the delay on the high-pass and band-pass as well. And also we’re coming to 16th, and we’re enabling the shuffle in that.

And then this gets run through the Echo, like so, and what this is doing is a reasonable amount of feedback, and that is on 18. So going from that kind of cheesy rave stab that was like this — enable this, and the Echo — and now we’re getting far more of a kind of dark-core sound, that style, and that pairs up just perfectly with our breaks.

So you can download this one, and that really old sample as well — nothing fancy here in terms of the controls, I’ve got like one called “There Can Be Only One,” and that’s just because the only thing I’m really going to do here is with the frequency, because it’s just such a good sample — but then running it through Alligator, giving it a kind of modern touch. Only thing I really want to do with it is filter it, so that’ll be kind of like so.

So, there you go — just a really old, cheesy sample, and just turning it into something far more complementary for the song.

So we’ll just move on to the last finishing touch on this. No jungle or D&B track is complete without some vocal samples going on there. Now, I was kind of like, should I tell people where I got these from? They’re really, really old samples, but if you Google “blue note jungle” — you’ll find that there’s a sample pack you can buy, and it’s collected all those old classic jungle sounds. They’ve all been used so many times, and I sometimes use them for garage tracks as well.

So we’ll just go through them — for example, “6 Million Ways to Die” — if you like jungle and you don’t know that sample, I don’t know where you’ve been. Here’s another old faithful — again, that one I don’t know where it comes from, but if you know, tell me.

So, what I usually do with vocal samples is, rather than when I want to get an idea down really quick, rather than putting things into an NN-XT or NN19, I’ll put a whole bunch of vocal samples into a Kong, and then run it into an MPD18 — it’s just for triggering the loops, and I can just hit and see where they’re coming in, okay. And then if I want to record them, I can do it very, very quickly, rather than jumping into the sequencer and such.

So what I’m doing here is quarter speed on both of these, and we’re having that one coming in there, and you’ll see how that’s complementing things really nicely.

So, there you go — hopefully this has given you lots of new tips and techniques if you’re going to be writing jungle. And it’s not just applicable to this genre — you could be using that whole pattern cut-ups idea with Pattern Mutator and any Rex loop, you can just bang one in there, record it, have things juggled around, and you’ll be really surprised at the kind of different results you can get.

And similarly with those old samples you’ve got — I’m sure everyone’s got these kind of older samples that you’ve heard and think, “ah, that gets used too much, it gets used in too many places” — but you can breathe something new into it. So I hope this gives you many reasons for using Reason. My name’s Ron Headback, and I’ll catch you in the next one. Peace.