Drum machines for afrobeat?

Elektron Gear Analog Rytm
1

Hi, I’ve saved around £1400 to spend on new gear, and I’m a nose away from buying an Analog RYTM, given how much I love my A4.

To cut to the point, recently I’ve been heavy heavy into afrobeat and afrobeat-inspired rhythms, like the following:

Fela Kuti:


Atoms for Peace:

Random guy’s lesson on afrobeat rhythms:

I’m trying to appropriate these rhythms into my own music.

I recognise that these are definitely more “human feel” rhythms, for a lack of a better word, made by multiple drummers playing complicated rhythms, but I’m wondering if drum machines are capable of producing beats in this style, as examples seem to be severely lacking. I’ve even considered buying a Roland sample pad and recording my live playing…

Can anyone provide me with a demo or any pointers on using drum machines for these kinds of rhythms? I just wish to hear what it would sound like. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! :slight_smile:

Edit: never forget the great Talking Heads!

2

The Elektron machine I use for all my polyrhythms is the Octatrack.
I’m a huge Tony Allen and Jaki Liebezeit fan, so I like that sort of percussion.
You could certainly do it with the Rytm, but it seems to be geared more towards single, one-shot drum sequencing ala the 808, etc.
The OT can chop up longer samples and polyrhythms and you can shuffle them and get really creative on just a single track.
Plus it’s stereo, which lends itself to a broader percussive sound.
Based on your budget you could afford it right now.

I’m sure someone will be along here soon to obliterate my findings with some hard facts about how they’ve overcome that sort of mindset with the Rytm, though. :wink:

3

Nah I’m wouldn’t try to obliterate anybody’s drum suggestions - I’m not that good at drums…

Sorry to blow my own trumpet, but heres an example of what I managed to come up a while ago for a producer that gave me “tribal feel that builds tension” as the design brief. It was done using the ethnic percussion sounds from a Korg M3-M & the logic sequencer - I haven’t tried to “humanize it”. Disclaimer: I’m no expert on drums. Also, there’s taiko drums in there - but thats not uncommon for soundtrack stuff.

https://soundcloud.com/arte_fakt/study-in-tribal-drumming

I’d also suggest learning more about west african drumming from an ethnomusicology perspective, if you haven’t done so already. It’s not so much about complex drum programming as simple rhythms that “lock together” to form a complex sound - although I suppose for a single drummer (or two) to pull off, these would be quite complex to play. My apologies if you already know all about this stuff.

Here’s something to get you started in that regard: http://r.hodges.home.comcast.net/~r.hodges/Ear.html

After that, if you want to fake that “human feel” I’d suggest all the usual tricks - small variations in velocity & not having everything sit perfectly on the grid. Slight tempo changes can work wonderfully for this too. You can do the whole call & response thing by muting & unmuting certain parts too.

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Octatrack!

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The Rytm could handle this, but I’m not sure it’s the best solution. I think you’d want to treat it much as you would an Octatrack - eight separate machines for eight separate rhythms, which you would then program and mix together. You’ve got the pads for recording live performance, but unfortunately they’re the Rytm pads.

I think an MPC might be a better hardware bet for this kind of thing. Something like a 2000XL would give you much better, much larger pads and many more layers of sound. Of course you have all the usual caveats about older gear, and there’s a lot more you can do with a Rytm. You could also add a better pad controller to a Rytm (but it wouldn’t give you 32 voices).

The OT is an interesting alternative because it offers fundamentally the same features as the Rytm (since I expect you’d be using samples for this kind of thing) but vastly expands your sampling options. So you could easily build up a beat over seven tracks with individual sounds, resample it all to the eighth and then really go to town on the resampled version, and eventually end up with eight full beats colliding together - I expect the crossfader could be used to great effect with afrobeat. Again, a pad controller would be a solid addition for capturing a human feel - I think that would be far more effective in this case than micromanaging a beat through p-locks.

Something the Rytm and the OT could offer that would be interesting is using the LFO to switch samples - a selection of slightly different hits from the same drum could be used to great effect there. Again, the benefit of the OT is that if you stumbled on a great combination you could instantly resample it.

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Love love love polyrhythms. Great vids, especially the dude doing afrobeat.

So I think you have to consider four things: how much variation in 1.) synthesized timbre and 2.) rhythm, 3.) you’re desire to work with samples and 4.) how complicated you want to make it.

So, for example, I know Thom Yorke loves his MD and probably had something to do with where AFP is now. It’ll certainly give you the most variation in timbre vis a vis synthesis. But it’s doesn’t offer as much rhythmic variation as the newer, black boxes.

But the AR won’t give you the timbre versatility (in it’s current state and/or without samples, anyway). So there’s that. How interested are you in working with samples? While I don’t have an OT and can’t speak with first-hand knowledge, I doubt everyone claiming it’s the balls for sheer fuckery would be lying. But, ya know, you’re dealing with only samples. So…

So, yeah, the black boxes are it for polyrhythms. BUT, while I don’t think anything out there holds a candle to their sequencers in terms of HARDWARE (maybe except of course an MPC), you are still limited to the strict sequencer: trigs only on the grid, reduction in steps in one direction (so a 32 step sequence reduced by 8 would go 1-24, NOT 8-32), need to program velocity (forget ghost notes on the ARs pads), a strict sequence of 16 steps per page (a 24 step sequence has to be a page of 16 and a second of 8, not two pages of 12), ect. And let’s not forget the awful Direct Jump bug currently plaguing the ARs INF mode.

So, if you’re looking for unhindered complexity, start clicking your DAW or drumsticks.

Hope this, in addition to everyone else’s good tips, helps.

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Wow, thanks for the great replies! All of them are really insightful and helpful.

As of now I’m perfectly fine with samples, but only one-shots. I tend to shy away from using loops, mainly because: a) quality drum loops are hard to come by, b) I can’t make them not sound ‘stale’, in a kind of Apple Loops way. I guess the Octatrack could help me solve the second problem.

I haven’t made my mind yet, but I’ll definitely report my finished results once I bite the bullet and produce some tracks with that RHYTHM.

Also thanks for the ethnomusicology approach, as I haven’t seen it from that perspective. I think I may have been naively thinking “kick here, snare here… ??? PROFIT”, more like just sampling the pattern rather than actually understanding the stuff at a more fundamental level. .

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You’re welcome. Good luck!

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This is true, but something that I don’t think has been mentioned yet is the Elektron sequencer’s ability to shift patterns left and right with the arrow keys, which goes a long way to make up for it - with the OT, for example, you could program a 14-step pattern with several blank steps at the end, and then shift that left or right in realtime - great for creating variations in a polyrhythm, particularly with some crafty programming. And you can do things like set up neighbour tracks with delay trigs to provide flexible rolls, for example.

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+1 Octatrack.

Everything that’s been already said plus you can setup retrig on the samples with scenes to get different roll variation.

You an also setup one shot trigs on the pattern and arm them at different times to add more variations to the pattern.

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Just experimenting

1 Like
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:+1:

great when the notes on the Ju8 get longer
maybe throw in another polyrhythmic percussion here and there
and done

very cool !

ps i once did afro style tracks just with a 606 … it does a great job when set to 12 or 14 or… steps … had the whole thing full of weird patterns and switching between them was big fun

ps2: the Tempest with it’s gongs and percussions and all that is great for afro too. plus great synth. last week i made a beat and bassline (with the digi osc) and when turning up the analog oscs and tuning and mangling them, they sounded like afro brass.

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I have AR and OT and I’d chose OT for this kind of rhythms. It has crossfader and set of scenes which is super-powerful performance feature (it is not only scene A or B – you have tones of different combinations in between).
You can also run percussion loop on one or two tracks and program your own rhythm on other two+ tracks with one-shots and so on, or even have loops and one-shots on one track.
You can prepare sample chains with different one-shot samples (even with whole drumset) and assign its changes to crossfader or LFO. Another feature of OT is that it is only one machine from Elektron (as I know) wich has tempo multipliers per track (1/2, 1/3, 3/4 etc.). You can’t do it on AR or A4.
It has midi-sequencer (you can connect drum module i.e. Nord Drum 2 and play) and can sample external sources.
But one thing to keep in mind – to be comfortable with OT you have to be comfortable with samples. And you have to spend some time for study OT as it has big set of features. It’s not so difficult as people say.