In the next tutorial, we will show how to lay down and program the drums for a melodic house drum groove using RitMix.
First, let’s open an instance of the drum machine on a MIDI channel in SoundBridge: DAW. Then, we should click the Menu icon and select Initialize Kit. This will give us a fresh start with clear drum pads where we will place selected drum samples.
Importing eight different samples, ranging from kick to snare drum, hi-hat, and so on should suffice for a standard melodic house drum groove. However, since RitMix offers sixteen pads and four banks, you can don’t have to limit yourself.
We will start with a four-to-the-floor kick drum, which will be followed by another soft off-beat kick that will accentuate the groove.
Then, we will add a snare drum and click percussion for the backbeat. The snare drum hits every second kick, as shown in the screenshot below, while the click percussion has a slightly more complicated rhythm.
After we’ve laid the foundation for the low and mid components of the groove, let’s move on to the high end. To begin, let’s bring in an offbeat ride, followed by an offbeat closed hi-hat.
To complete our drum groove, let’s add a tambourine and another hi-hat to accentuate the overall groove.
Individual processing of the house drum groove’s elements
The groove is complete, but still sounds a bit raw, so we can use other functions within Ritmix to get a better mix. The mixer and effects windows of the interface are shown below. You may have noticed that I previously set the gain of the individual samples using the velocity in the MIDI editor. However, more than just volume, within Ritmix we can further control the pan, gain, and amount of reverb and delay send effects for each sample. The second image shows our chosen parameters for the effects.
Because the tambourine appears to be too prominent, even after adjusting the volume, we will try to fit it better in the overall mix with the built-in EQ.
Aside from this, there are numerous other tools that can be used to alter the tone of individual sounds. We could use the humanizer to randomize the panning of the tambourine or add a beat crusher effect. Let’s hear how the tambourine sounds before and after processing.
After following these steps for most of the selected sounds, let’s top it up by gluing all of them together with the built-in compressor.
Now, let’s hear the final sound of our melodic house drum groove.
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