DnB Battle Resurrection #1—Let's Play Bongos!

It’s baaack… again!!!

Like it says above, all you need to participate is follow these 3 simple rules:

  1. Make a drum’n’bass track using at least one of the samples found here.*
  2. Keep it UNDER 6 minutes or so!
  3. Send it to your friendly neighborhood @KingDuppy (that’s me!)
    by Midnight (or so) February 17th!

ALL ARE WELCOME!!!
We’re all here to improve our chops,
so 'nauts at every level of skill & experience
are encouraged to take part.

If your heart beats, you have rhythm, so
LET’S CHOP SOME BONGOS!

Judging:
Like the other battles, you gotta submit a song to vote—so don’t be shy!

Participants, please judge your fellow entries by personal preference AND their use of the provided samples. More judging details & instructions will be posted in the PLAYLIST & VOTING THREAD on Feb. 18th.

*(Samples are available roughly chopped and sorted by type, and also as the original sides A & B for bespoke chopping.)

DEADLINE: Feb 17th 2025 at MIDNIGHT PST!

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Bongo samples loaded into OT. Time to get to work :grimacing:

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I hate bongos. Let’s do this!

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In that case (assuming you’re not just being facetious), check out the subfolder called “Backing Music,” which has some music for the listener to play along with . . . those are all on “Side B” if you want to chop them yourself.

There are also examples of tombales, claves, congas, maracas, etc. on Side A and in the “Bongos Patterns etc.” folder.

Oh! And please feel free to DM me with ideas for future battles, if you got em!

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Pretty sure I can make an interesting break if I mash together a couple of these!

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I spent a while last night trying to make a bass out of that dude’s 50s TV dad voice. It didn’t go great.

But I intentionally left the tails long on a lot of those samples because I really liked how the surface noise sounds through the SSL’s preamps.

Gonna try to make basses & droney pads out of some of those dusty tails tonight.

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I NEVER JOKE ABOUT BONGOS. Just kidding. There’s only good vibes and gratitude here. <3

I LOLed

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Reminds me of a signature someone on GearSp*ce uses:

It’s not rocket science, it’s just bongo’s

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Going into this challenge, Im curious if any of you that have experience with producing DnB might have any tips or input for those of us that are new to the genre? Generally speaking

No prior experience.

Kicks on 1 and 11. Snares on 5 and 13. Hats on 1, 3, 5, 7 etc. BPM at 176.

That would be the absolute basic DnB beat.

Kicks are less important, you can cut the lows a bit. Snares are king.

Try syncopation if you’re feeling frisky.

This is all I know :).

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A lot of the older stuff I used to listen to in the late 90s/early 00s was at 160bpm.

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This is exactly what I’m lookin for, thanks!
If anybody has any other beginner info, I’m a sponge

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Take a classic drum break sample, stretch its tempo to 160-180 BPM, slice it into quarter notes or eighth notes, and play around until you have a 4-bar loop that you like.

Underneath it, play a Reese bass preset (most synths have one) around an E2 (80ish Hz is a sweet spot).

Presto: drum and bass!

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I’d also suggest looking up some drum n bass tunes or artists you like on whosampled.com and seeing what breaks they used. Then download a few of those same breaks and mess around with them, and see where it gets you. It might help you get a feel for it.

It helps to chop breaks into samples with more than 1 hit each (IIRC Photek called them “tri-sets”), say one pad with a kick & the hat that comes after, another with a snare and ghostnote, one that’s just hats, etc. That way you keep a lot of the original dynamics & spacing between the notes and therefore the feel of the original drummer/break.

Depending on what kind of gear you use, there’s also tons of helpful stuff on YouTube. I’d search for terms like breakbeat, etc., along with whatever gear you plan to use. Lots of good digitakt tutorials for instance.

I don’t use an MPC, but I learned a ton watching SpinScott’s performances on YT. Especially the way his samples are chopped, arranged, and grouped. Also which ones mute each other vs which ones can play at the same time.

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Spinscott is an MPC jungle/ dnb deity.

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Awesome thanks! I’ll be using an octatrack, but first, research

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Not saying I have the time to participate just yet, but assuming I did, how would I send my entry? email? Gdrive? dropbox?

It’s up to you.

You can send me a DM and either attach your song (which should work fine if it’s an mp3) or send me a link to Gdrive (if it’s a bigger file like a .wav . . . but then I’ll probably just convert it down to an mp3 to post it, so you may as well do that part yourself).

if it must be non-wav, is ALAC encoded mp4 OK?