hey guys, i’m looking for some help on something. how do you make breakcore? lol, kidding. seriously though,i have kinda gotten the hang of how to do the whole “breakcore” slice up breaks kind of stuff. that is cool, but my musical taste kinda takes me beyond the classic amen break, and i was wondering if anyone has any tips on producing the more “idm-ish” side of breakcore. basically i’m thinking the more glitched synthetic stuff that sounds like it doesn’t have any breaks in it at all. i’m looking for any tips people have regarding the drums (i know the synth side of it fine), technical, musical, whatever, i’m just having trouble getting it to sound like anything decent. soundwise i’m going for something similar to what vsnares does on “Huge Chrome Cylindar Box Unfolding”.
that answer helps me in absolutely no way.
step 1
code rhytm , process the fuck out of it , resample
step 2 …see step 1
First of all, this type of music Usually calls for pure samples, since you can pitch them, glide them, reverse and play them at various speeds which lends itself handsomely to the whole machine-gone-deranged sound you’re after.
Breaks or loose samples, it’s up to you. If you’re using breaks you’ll be working a lot with the 09xx command. Add a gater/distortion/lofi unit. Reverb can do some neat things, as can really short delays (around 20-40ms, low feedback for a “thwerp” effect.)
Part of the beauty of IDM-style drums is that the sounds themselves can be crap, it’s all about how you arrange them that matters. In that sense, it’s a very loveable genre to frolic in.
my suggestion: think monophonically as much as possible.
IDM often relies on very unique sounds, often created before hand during sample fuckery sessions. The general idea being, play whatever samples you have through some effect chains, resample, rinse, repeat. Eventually you will have enough samples to create a niftay song…then you can start laying them out all on the same track… this is to get that very defined sound that doesn’t need too much compression, and can easily lend to additional delay or reverb effects without getting muddy. Add some pads or synths, and voila… IDM.
Now admittedly this sounds much easier than it is, but generally speaking, this is how most amateur IDM producers I’ve chatted with work, at least in Renoise.
Important things to remember: Lofi kicks ass. Distortion also kicks ass. Distortion works very well on clean sub-bassy sounds… so by that logic, lowpass before distortion followed by lofi kicks much ass. Chorus is evil, but as such, occasionally has it’s place. Odd time signatures will make you seem godly, even if you’re not. With ambient IDM, well used delay and short techy samples can be your best friend. Bandpass is full of win. Filters in general are full of win. Separate your highs and your lows. Your mother likes retrig abuse. No, she doesn’t. Cans of Arizona iced green tea are economical, environmental, and hella good for you. Nipple twisting during wank-time is indeed fair game. Juggling WILL enhance your perhipheral vision and depth perception. Lower the noise floor, and drop the bass.
A mixture of processing your source samples to death + automation of dsp/vst on top will get you a long way. For it still to sound like a rhythm this will boil down to your drum programming skills. You could also experiment with for example; automating a cheap synthedit synths parameters and basically ‘gate’ a drum rhythm in it by just note-off’ing or variating velocity/volume at the right spots. If you have some bleep blooop sound that you consequently use where a drumkick, hats or snare would go, you can’t go wrong 
.
Also worth experimenting with is the ‘fx’ button in the sample editor, either use it to effect your separate drum hits, or even better to use it on (synced)drumloop-ish parts. If you use a mixture of exotic vsts in extreme settings + ‘fx’-in vsts that are synced to bpm great things can be heard. Your imagination will be the limit.
For example: render in a bpm synced delay (ohmboys?) with feedback & resonance on high(er) settings on a small percussive looppart. Now loop a section in this sample. Create different variations of this instrument by rendering in on different settings, apply different loopsettings. If you create many different intensity ‘incremented’ versions, you have more to choose from in your sound arsenal. Looping very small parts can also enhance the synthetic feel, because the loop will create a tone. Putting patterncommands to bend these ‘tone-lines’ (2XX & 1XX?) is also fun. Or then use decremented volume values in the volume column to simulate a kick or snare. Rendering parts of your programmed beats back to samples/instruments, and repeating the process etc etc
Basically a longer version of what gentleclockdivider said
thanks a lot guys, those are some great ideas i’ll have to try out.
Maybe my song “How can one raindrop make a tide” is useful to you? All drum sounds were derived from a very basic drumloop, shipped with a Camel Audio sample pack. As there were no effects allowed other than basic EQing or Camel Products, i was forced to try out various things using envelopes on drums. It’s kinda glitchy and not really breakcore. The XRNS is available in this thread too, just scroll a bit down or grab it from my website.
https://forum.renoise.com/t/beatslaughter-how-can-one-raindrop-make-a-tide/20434
Another thing i often do to get weird rhythms is playing a drone or athmo on a low key and use sequenced filters on top of it. You could simulate such thing in Renoise with building a chain of FX and using steppy point automation on various parameters to taste. Also a way to get unusual sounds is slapping shitloads of effects on the master bus of your old unfinished songs and recording the session in the background. Then cut out the nice bits afterwards. You could also hunt down field recordings and cut things out of them, like steps on stairs and the like. Here is a nice colllection of field recordings available as download: