Why I Enjoy Drum Machine and Sequencer Presets
i Love making presets for synths and drum machines that loop a pattern or beat. While single sounds can be incredibly useful when in the middle of working on a piece, these looped presets can be amazing starting points or even as a way to break out of a creative zone and add new elements to your piece. I’m not talking about midi sequences I’m talking about those presets that sequence through several notes or play a full beat with melody and all. I love making these types of patches because I love making loops. I love making songs too, but too often I have started a song, ended up with a four bar loop, and just didn’t know where to go from there. When this sits as a project in my DAW, I never end up coming back to it, but when this is done with a preset in a synth or drum machine, it remains available to be used everywhere in any daw.
Advanced Loops
These presets are almost like advanced loops. Like loops they play a pattern that repeats, but unlike loops they can be pitch shifted and tempo stretched without introducing artifacts. As well, you can always go in and remove elements or shift notes around. If you have a drum loop and you don’t want to remove the kick, this will create gaps in the other elements, or weird spectral tones if you use a smart stem splitter. With drum pattern presets you can simply remove the kick. Making and having these loops and beats at your disposal can streamline some of the workflow compared to opening up a multi track setup with various plugins that you need to keep track of.
Launching Points
These creative looped presets can be great launching points for a track, simply find one that is inspiring, and jam over it, maybe throw it through some heavy distortion, or into a resonator. Because they are already set up and easy to recover you can easily mess with and destroy them to your heart’s content. Hell, after enough remixing and destruction, you may only end up with a snare, or solid kick tone that you otherwise wouldn’t have come up with, but the important thing is everything else you created on top of the original loop. I find I tend to come up with new melodies and ideas easier when I can jam on top of something, even if that something doesn’t end up making it into the final product.
Change Ups
We are all guilty of making tracks that end up feeling to repetitive, playing the same melody and beat over and over, maybe a couple instrument changes or an effect here and there, but ultimately repetitive. An easy way to introduce new variation into a track is to just load up a new looped preset. What is important is that you don’t try to layer it in with everything else, instead let your mix play for awhile, then drop all of the old tracks and introduce a creative loop preset. The key is to experiment and try a few out, once you find one that fits, you can either use it as is, or edit the patch to fit the rest of the mix better. Having these new elements at your disposal can really liven up the creative process and lead to tracks that have more variety.
I think sometimes these types of presets get a bad reputation, as though they are “show off”y or “neat but useless”. I think they have far more utility than they are given credit for. Sure, if you’re just using synths as a means to an ends to accomplish a bass or a lead, they might not be the best choice. But if you take a remixing and sampling mindset to them, they can be really powerful for glitch/IDM and industrial production. I’ve seen people use some of these presets in game audio and sound tracks, they can be a good way to just get a vibe across and build a sound track, or just strip the pattern completely and use the sounds for a new musical idea.