Music Talk : Music Industry Interviews, Advice and tips for DJs & Producers · Grahame Farmer

Music Talk 060 - How to Make Drum & Bass with DJ RAP

·1 hr 8 min·2 clips

Drop your favourite track in your DAW and go locator by locator to see every ingredient in the cake.

1. Music Talk 060 is a live Monday demo-day session in which DJ Rap gives track-by-track feedback on listener-submitted drum and bass, mostly liquid, with chat reactions from the stream. 2. Graham Farmer hosts and runs Data Transmission, which streams on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, while guest DJ Rap is a drum and bass DJ, producer and label owner on her second appearance. 3. DJ Rap's central message is that technical mix problems can be learned and fixed, whereas the 'vibe' of a track cannot be taught, so she judges first whether a tune evokes a feeling. 4. Harvest, Entropy, Hey Mac and Extra Beef each earn a 'Hulk' reaction, with Entropy praised for understanding 'melody, vibe, the weight', and Extra Beef praised for its cover art and branding. 5. On sub bass, she advises adding white noise to bass lines so the sub does not vanish on laptops and phones, and suggests layering a Reese over the sub and cutting the sub from the Reese layer. 6. She repeatedly recommends 'glitter', meaning reverse reverbs, impacts, foley and small effects, and suggests searching Splice by key for reverses and effects. 7. For Blaine 86's 'Cursed Love' she suggests putting the bass in mono through a utility on the master channel to check stereo balance, and says the distortion on the bass was too much. 8. She tells Jackie that putting a favourite track into the DAW and stepping through it reveals its ingredients, and that her first eight bars were already enough for a vocal bed. 9. For the neuro track she asks for a turnaround every four bars and kick drop-outs, and urges producers to keep a reference track in the DAW, since 'drum and bass is a formula' with a drop and fixed arrangement. 10. Suited to bedroom drum and bass producers seeking direct arrangement and mixing feedback.

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