Old-skool Jungle Production

General Discussion
1

I have been mostly using Reason, but I bought Renoise after researching and discovering its power specifically for this style of music.

I haven’t been doing much lately, but di.fm just released a jungle station, and listening to that mostly the last few weeks has rekindled my desire to finally learn how to make this kind of music.

I have been doing my own research and watching videos for the last few days, but I also understand Renoise just changed to 3.0 not too long ago.

Anyway, if anyone knows of any specific resources, that would be great.

I also need a source of the drum breaks, preferably ones that have been re-recorded or cleaned up a little.

I think I can hear a difference between the really old jungle tracks and new productions emulating the style, the drums programming just sounds a bit cleaner with less hiss and noise for some reason.

I am really hoping to find a full construction kit that includes not only the breaks, but all the typical sound effects and vocals that seem to be in all jungle songs. Well maybe not every song, but certainly every DJ mix set.

Two specific questions for the pros, though.

Is there a significant difference or benefit one way or the other between having the whole break (sliced, but) on the same note and using offset commands to program and having the break sliced and mapped over the keyboard using different notes on the chromatic scale to program? I have seen video of guys doing it both ways, and I am not sure why some choose one way over the other.

I saw one video where the guy recommended copying the rest of the break from each snare and bass drum hit instead of just the individual slices. He copied partials of the amen over and over, some longer than others depending on where in the break he started and then had Renoise create a drum kit of that. Again, my question is what benefit is there to this method as opposed to just slices?

Eventually, I would really like to have the skill to do Venetian Square type of stuff just to give you an idea of the kind of sound I want to achieve. Nebula is also really cool lately.

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Funny, the jungliest-sounding song I’ve ever made was made in Reason. :slight_smile:

I’m not a pro, but have you seen this? 200 free breakbeats for Renoise, in XRNI format:https://forum.renoise.com/t/200-breakbeat-instruments/36044

Also, here’s a ton of little samples & instruments notes for jungle from KVR:

early jungle was produced by mixing sped-up hiphop breaks and reggie basslines.

Actually, the reggae basslines are played at half the break’s bpm. Classic jungle had a breakbeat played back at around 160 bpm. If you speed up a reggae track to that, you’ll end up with a bassline that is way too fast. Keep it around 80.

…the typical jungle bass was usually a resampled 808 bassdrum . The relatively bad quality of most samplers back then was giving it a strong aliased sound that helped it cut through the mix better even when no distorsion effect was used. You could try resampling an 808 kick in your audio editor to get a similar effect.

…There’s a famous patch on the old Yamaha DX100 that was often used too - if you look in Banks and Patches (here at KVR) there’s a patch for FM8 uploaded by Michael Russo and named ‘Solid Bass’ that should, in theory, recreate the original DX100 patch perfectly. Orbital used the same patch quite a lot in their earlier stuff too - it provides the bass for the intro of ‘Chime’ if I remember correctly.

…Last saturday I was at a party where lots of really old jungle was played. I remember hearing the hollow SH101/MC202 type bass[1] pretty often.

That would be something like this: pulse/square wave, low cut off, medium to high resonance, attack and sustain set to zero and shortish decay. Adjust until it sounds really hollow, boomy and deep.

…novation bass station is your friend…

use saw waves, slightly detune them, mix them equaly. resonance at about 30%, lower the cutoff to taste, no env.

bingo!

one of the typical jungle bass appeared a few months after the original bassstation keyboard came out… and that’s not accidental.

…classic sounds:

  1. a simple 808 kick

or

  1. a deep square wave with a little bit of saturation and a lowpass modulation with an lfo (aka wobble)

or

  1. two sine waves (or any other classic waveforms), one semitone detuned against each other…

…if you’re talking about bass from tracks like adam f’s circles, or old PFM tracks, they were made from sine waves. we would just generate a solid tone, and edit the volume envelope or compress them to sculpt the dynamics of the sound. layering different tones together in a sampler created some really chill bass hits. oftentimes, we could replace the kick drum entirely and you wouldn’t notice it was missing! those were the good old days…

Reference:http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=230797

Oh and a bit of nostalgia…if these can do it, Renoise certainly can: :slight_smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pYBb4YmVI (good channel)

Good luck!

P.S. Some good downloads if you want to see how trackers like Renoise can build up this type of music, and maybe grab some samples too:

http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=58051

http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=137795

http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=35128

3

Maruchan,

That is some great info!

Thanks.

I certainly want to learn how to program the beats that I ALWAYS here in my head and drum with my fingers before worrying about bass lines and such.

I will probably slave Reason to Renoise and create background pads and other harmonies and such there.

I also have Alchemy VST (and functions as standalone). I also bought this after seeing a demo on some of the effects it did to a vocal. Never taken the time to learn how to use it, but I am not sure if it is a synth, sampler, or just a really complex sample playback/effects box.

Anyway, back on topic about how to programming beats!

4

Jungle breaks are nearly always pitched / sped up which gives them that nice snappy sound that works better at higher tempos. I know a lot of people will disagreed but I’m not a fan of chopping the break into indiviudal hits as this loses some of the timing and vibe of the break and defeats the purpose of using it in the first place - if you’e going to program every kick, snare, hat and cymbal you might as well just use a sampled kit. Better to do as you suggest and chop it in to smaller phrases like ‘snare-hat-hat’, etc.

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As Rex says, try chopping a break into shorter phrases. Also, you’ll get different ideas from chopping a break every three sixteenth notes, than from chopping it every four or five, etc.

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whatever works;

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I like syncing them breaks and just chopping using 0Sxx. It’s as jungle as it gets imo. You can also get pretty anal if you use phrases or high LPB. Love it.

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Hey guys,

Thanks for the info.

After reading these comments, I experimented a bit with slicing by transient, then sixteenth notes. It definitely didn’t sound right by transients, no ‘rolling’ vibe at all.

Now I guess I just have to keep playing with it until I figure out which specific combinations of different BDs and snares make up the common jungle patterns that are practically part of my DNA at this point.

If there were a class or seminar on specifically this somewhere, I would definitely be willing to pay for such an opportunity.

In any event, it doesn’t look quite as daunting as I had convinced myself it was. I tend to be a perfectionist and over-think things, and I had always thought these guys painstakingly programmed each individual sound manually.

emre_k,

Could you go into a little more detail by what you mean by syncing and getting anal by using phrases?

Thanks again.

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https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/59897139/break.xrns

I REALLY rushed this up so it sounds like total crap but hopefully you’ll get the idea. First unsynced break, then synced, then chopped, then chopped again via phrases.

Hope this helps.

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Hit me up on aim @ JungleSpliff and I’ll probably be able to sort you out with what you’re trying to do.

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emre_k,

Thanks for that file! The last part done via phrases is definitely the type of thing I am trying to do.

Now I need to just learn what exactly that means and how you did it.

It seems like something independent of the actual pattern in the pattern editor, but I will read the section of the manual on phrases.

Mr. Sensi,

I just downloaded that and tried to add you.

Thanks.

12

Cool, yeah phrases are like a mini Renoise inside Renoise where you can work with independent pattern lengths and lines-per-beat. And trigger them via single notes in the pattern editor. Definitely check that out in the manual. They help alot when you wanna go into detailed editing. Or you can also “store” complex patterns in single notes which is awesome. Love 'em.

The break I’ve picked didn’t turn out to be very organic but that kinda editing should do the trick for you if you work with classic breaks like apache, amen etc.

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Hi, a breakbeat is not a breakbeat, there’s so many ways to deal with this. I’ve also enjoyed early jungle mixtapes in mid-90’s when they were peddled like narcotics and parties where rare, up to stuff like dj hype, dj ss, dj whatnot and whatever, when drum&bass had just started with the “intelligent” stuff like aphrodite or bukem becoming popular.

I think there’s different ways to compose/use breaks, and each gives different results, it really depends on what kind of sound/rhythm you want to make. Some early stuff that didn’t loop a single break but somekind arrange it a bit really just bounced on having snippets of the breaks, mostly only 2 or 3, and triggering them at intervals. For example one starting at the bassdrum, and one at the snare, playing on in the break whatever comes next, and then making up the rhythm with it. The advantage is you got the “groove” of the original break within your song, and composition is easy, only few triggers to make up good rhythms. Often you could hear another break treated the same way just layered up on the first. Then maybe layering shaker/hihat chops above it, also with multiple hits to get groove instead of linear tempo.

I think it was “drum&bass” that introduced single hit chopped breaks to the genre, and even drum machine type stuff. With simpler rhythms, but more potential of finetuning the break. But it can be hard to get real “groove” into single note hits. When I was a ft2 junkie I even worked with samples that deliberately had short silence in the beginning, to fake some groove somehow. At the moment I’m freaky with single hit chopped breaks and massive multichannel processing of a beat, trying to get a compromise of the “break feel” and soundwise pimped up audioscape.

Regarding other samples, well do like the original producers, make your own. They’ve mostly sampled records, cut out some stuff and put it into their songs. I just thought the Idea to combine breaks with a halftime-slowdown bassline from some other tune is great somehow - real deep base, some natty reggae-dub tunes and a little overdrive should do the trick. Now you only need to find some hyperspeed drillseargent or raggastuff type mcs for your performance :slight_smile:

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What your doing… is chopping the break. Take the Amen break and resample it from ‘The Winston’s - Amen Break’ if ya have to :wink:

Great break to start on to learn jungle styles… and it’s potential for greatness is known by its reputation. =P infinite.

Anyways, if you find your not able to get the hang of it, try starting with a nice HipHop break. Get the flow of when the hit starts, mark it, stops, mark it… repeat. Or simply zoom into the sample to get a better view and you should be able to make it out. Each hit of that drum your going o make a drumkit if some kinda sample bundle or however you throw them together for it. Ok, when you have this set to the keys you have successfully set the drum kit! ! (Create drumkit up in that sample editor… now enter the pattern editor as your fresh as dinner son!

Aight now get down this flow boi! Remember thatretriggers are fresh as fuck in rags! , sticking to the old method? Listen to some Ruffneck Breaks like DJ SCOOBIE… etc… basically your just slowing it a bit… newer rags is more related to jungle and break ore then it’s slower days :wink:

Have fun and then step up to the next level son! It’s all about feeling it. Sound you heard lately? Work with it! Mess about learning the skills of Renoise with the effect commands before moving to into the depths of in to deep. Jungle is a ballsy first style to Roll worth man! Mad respect and good luck!

Bless!
_o0mZ

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I hope OP got the hang of it by now… You’re replying to a 7 year old thread :joy:

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meh, catching up =P

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Additionally info and a bump is always welcomed by me. Nice to have some of there old threads pop up!

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