I love the big beat sound of people like Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim but struggle to get there on my own. Anybody got any pointers to any good tutorials on this style as they seem quite sparse at places like YouTube (only a couple of German ones on there).

Any help or pointers would be hugely appreciated!

 

drum machine samples layered with vinyl/acoustic hits or breaks. Lots and lots of crate digging for abstract samples, flipping them to varying degrees. Some sort of synth layer in the form of an arpeg or plucky sound or both. Other electronic instruments like white noise layered sounds or analog basses used in various ways. Most of their earlier stuff was really good sample choices and good composition. Lots of resampling and repetition and variance of the same sound. Sampling and pattern choices seem to be a big thing for their composition. Its like old school body rock music with an alternative variant.

 

For drums:
Layering chopped breaks and programmed MIDI kits.
Triplicating and EQing the highs, mids and lows separately
Parallel compression.
Tiny amounts of reverb.

This is how Liam did it for The Fat of the Land, anyways.

 

yeahh love that sound as well! could you share the tutorials that you found so far? (even the german ones would be useful ;)

I think it is rough sounding acoustic drums and the kick layered with something deep.

and some mid distortion on everything

but good luck finding a good groovy pattern!

i think big beat is the big brother of drum and bass. the patterns are kinda similar but big beat is much slower

 

The way Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers/Dust Brothers did it when it was called big beat was literally to take a massive loop off one record and a massive drum loop off another record. Loop them together. Sprinkle some other samples over the top, like sirens, some instructions from an exercise record (eileen fowler on bentley rhythm ace) or a snippet of a hip hop accapella (lord finesse on funk soul brother)

Then it's just a case of re-triggering the loops, the loops, the l-l-l-l-lllllloops and applying some filtering. The way the hip hop heads did it in the 90s was to have a copy of the loop with a lp filter on it and another copy of the same loop, or another looped part of the same record with a hp filter on it so they could arrange the loop a bit more while still being head noddingly repetitive. They could get away with big drum breakdowns and stuff in those days too. Basically it would be a piece of piss to produce with anything from sony acid onwards.

To be honest it was made a lot easier in those days by sampling laws being a lot more lax, or rather the record companies were a lot more lax about enforcing them.

 

You could try using the tools they used for this! An Akai sampler and recycle.
Don't forget to save it all in a floppy disk : )
This guys were very good using hardware at that time and now you can do it all that with a laptop. Ish.
Good luck !

 

Here you go, some of what I found...

(as I don't speak German, I've not really watched any of them, so can't vouch for quality)

And some interesting ones I found on a similar-ish style stemming a lot from that 90s big beat/DnB kinda sound...

 

I absolutely love me some good ol' big beat! It's all got all the grit of electronic music while retaining the soul of unquantized groove based drum music. Along with all the really great suggestions that everyone has made (those recreations of those Prodigy tunes is a true testament to Liam Howlett's creative genius BTW <3) , one of the things that has always really helped me with creating complex and some what believably realistic drum grooves, using one shots and drawing midi has everything to do with understanding the mechanics of playing the drums, even if you couldn't keep a beat on a drum set to save your life.

What I mean by that is that the nature of most types of conventional drumming has very little to do with what people that don't understand the drums consider the main element of the drum; the kick and the snare. Your typical kick-snare pattern in terms of most breakbeat based electronic music on a 1/16th note 4/4 beat grid nearly always looks like or is some variation of
(x=kick drum o=snare drum -=neither) x---/o---/--x-/o---.

The snare pattern is repetitive and holds the listeners attention and the kick pattern disrupts the repetitivenes because it is constantly switching between the upbeat and the downbeat (I actually had to look up the terms since I have no classical training and I just wanted to feel smart and know what they were called. So don't get too caught up in the terminology!). That being said no matter how fat the individual drum hits sound, the real creative aspect is the different cymbals, the hi-hats, toms, as well as the rest of the kit and how they interact and layer with that very basic pattern. It's a very simple understanding that's missing (especially in reference to some of the newer more popular DnB) that really feels robotic and lacking in a lot of the newer breakbeat based music that leaves me feeling bored and disappointed; in essence lacking soul.

If you ever get the chance and have some decent drummer freinds or just people on youtube, watch them play this beat, over and over and over again but pay the most attention to the diffferent variations in which they play them. Pay attention to the different cymbals and how they vary them between different patterns. Sometimes they play one or another sometimes they play both. Pay attention to the different variations of the the hi-hats the opening and the closing of them. Pay attention to the drum-fills and how they incorporate the toms into them. Most importantly pay attention to the timing of it all, in terms of swings and things that sound offbeat and sometimes even dramatically seemingly change BPM but still manage to stay in time, how hard they play each part of the different kit and really the most essential part of understanding of it all pay attention to how they manage to change up the kick and snare pattern, in a way that's both similar in terms of the original pattern but also varies the timing just a little bit.

Once you have done that try recreating some of those patterns on a grid, being more aware of the mechanics of drumming, (I really like Addictive Drummer 2 for more natural sounding drums) the timing, the velocity, the different structures and concepts of layering. One of the things that feels like its most missing sometimes in DAWs that are designed to remove imperfections, are the imperfections.

Don't get me wrong, I love using loops. Usually I use bits and pieces of them to add extra layers of depth and different plays on groove but being able to create a backdrop thats sometimes incredibly complex in nature and sometimes is just flat out lazy. Some of the best stuff I've heard as well as made is almost always a combination of both.

Also keep in mind the limitations of the hardware that the producers in the 90s used and how far things have come in terms of being able to visually draw out midi and analyze and edit waveforms. So even though some of the most influential breaks are always well recieved realize how they have been somewhat recycled over and over and how it effects the originality of music and limits it from moving forward.

Lastly, as a general rule of thumb when it comes to breakbeat music with very booming kicks and piercing snares, get to learn the various methods of compression, especially when it comes to layering your kicks and snares with different kinds of cymbals and hats as well as each other. They will create a much needed added layer of tension to your music that is especially critical to making big-beat.

Happy Producing =)

 

Last edited: Sep 15, 2016

In what song, for example?

 

The sounds I'm thinking is the Exit Planet Dust, Dig Your Own Hole (main one I'm looking at) and Surrender albums by Chemical Brothers and Better Living Through Chemistry and You've Come a Long Way Baby albums by Fatboy Slim.