I’m a big fan of Modeselektor/Moderat but I really struggle to pick apart what is going on in their tunes. It’s obviously very well produced/mixed/mastered. In this tune the track has a great sound and groove. Any tips on what goes into their drum sound design and programming?
Big fan here too, their live shows are spectacular.
The rythm-track on this one sounds very sample-based? I am guessing it is based on “found sounds” and real drums (but edited/manipulated). But this is of course just an uneducated guess, and you are probably looking for some more detail. 
All about the groove, more than the sum of it’s parts. On this track what stands out to me is the call and response of the percussion between rim/clap sound. & each pattern has it’s own frequency range that might overlap with another but doesn’t drown it out, notable in the three noisy layers: vinyl crackle, breathing sound, and the low key syncopated layer in the back.
That main percussive motif sounds like the product of just fucking around with a sample loop until something cool happened.
I’m a big fan of Moderat and Modeselektor and they use a lot of breaks in their tracks. I’ve been looking for 2-step drum loops to chop but without much look - they are all a bit too swung for my liking. Any suggestions for a nice 2-step loop library?
What makes Moderat and others stand out is the time and work they put in their crafting of sounds and beats. They might use a drum loop in a track but always combined with other drum sounds and/or processed with different effects. Most of the time i’d say they create the whole drum loop themselves out of a bunch of samples or small parts of a drumloop.
If i wanted to achieve similar drums i’d cut up drum breaks (r&b, soul… whatever) and combine them with several drum hits and foley sounds.
Or run some drumbreaks through effects and then cut up and rearrange them to create a new drum loop.
The most special thing about 2-step drums is the swing. The drum sounds aren’t really that special. Maybe there are some nice 2-step loop collections out there but i would start from scratch with a few samples and build my own loops. But that’s just me.
…as stated already, it’s no big rocket science…at least to them…
and involved tools, apart from long experience and know how is nothing much unusual…
sure, some of the finest studio hw but mostly logic and ableton, end of the day…
and pretty much always each 'n every next new fancy plugin there is…
but the only one here, that can really tell in detail is @treat …since he’s the background tech wizard for all monkeytown stuff from studio to stage since ages…and also does quite some mix and master jobs for them…also their dedicated ableton sound pak…which won’t cover their clever programming/piano roll skills, but gives any ableton user quite some flexible but also sound alike options at hand…
while their flavour of 2steppy is defenitly not based on any cheatcodes and prefab loop libs, readymade to chop…while sometimes, u get to really nice results, even when u just pick any ordinary apple loop from logics endless list, to run and overprocess it through an endless array of all ur latest plugin purchases and sing along a little with some standard main stage vocal make up… 
…which is covering all their live jobs on vocals…from song to song, through all the setlist…next main stage scene for next perfectly tailored vocal fx make up…same procedure as with nin, by the way…
so, never underestimate the power of lucky dips and just fooling around with what u got…
I have been A/B ing his productions… really really good on my system here…
Not Rusty Nails, but in this video (that In was lucky to find linked from another video; it’s unlisted) they explain Versions, including many details about the drums sound design. I found the entire video so interesting.
Yes, great video. As you can see, the whole drum track is based on a pretty simple loop that they program and embellish with their own sound design. I was just looking for something similar as a starting point.
i love that song so much, and that entire album. i think i read somewhere that they mixed it through some sort of million-pound vintage desk that used to be owned by David Bowie? so you probably just need to get your hands on one of those and the rest will just fall into place by itself
Sounds pretty good in that video though with no mixing desk in sight