Genre recipes
Complete starting points: which track, which machine, which knobs, which steps.
This page is being written. Two recipes are shown in full below as the format; the rest are outlined.
Each recipe is a place to start, not a rule. Build it, then break it.
House · 124 BPM
| Track | Machine | Steps | Knobs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Kick | Analog Bass Drum | 1 · 5 · 9 · 13 | Decay long, Tone low–mid |
| 6 Clap | Clap | 5 · 13 | Decay mid |
| 4 Hat | Hi-Hat 1 | 3 · 7 · 11 · 15 | Decay long — the offbeat “tss” |
| 9 Bass | TBD03 | root notes under the kick | Cutoff mid, Reso mid, Env Amt mid |
Four on the floor, clap on the backbeat, and open hats on every offbeat. The long kick decay is what makes it house rather than techno — see lesson 4.
Techno · 134 BPM
| Track | Machine | Steps | Knobs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Kick | Synth Kick | 1 · 5 · 9 · 13, plus a ghost on 15 | Decay short, Tone mid–high, Dirt up |
| 2 Kick2 | FM Kick | layer on 1 only | short carDec |
| 4 Hat | Hi-Hat 1 | 3 · 7 · 11 · 15 | Decay short |
The extra quiet kick just before the bar ends is the whole trick — it pushes you into the next bar. Short decay everywhere; techno is about space between hits, not sustain.
Planned recipes
| Genre | BPM | The idea |
|---|---|---|
| Acid | 130 | TBD03 on Track 9, Cutoff low and Reso high, slide and accent doing the work |
| Boom bap | 88 | Kick and snare on the backbeat, ghost snares, swing at ~20% |
| Trap | 140 | Halftime — clap on step 9 only, 808 kick with very long decay, hat rolls via Rep. |
| Drum & bass | 174 | An Amen-style break from the factory LOOPS bank, chopped with Start locks |
| Dub | 75 | One drop — no kick on step 1, delay Feedback high, filter sweeps on the Audio In |
| Disco / funk | 118 | Four on the floor, open hats on the offbeat, syncopated bass, live-recorded percussion |
Sources & further reading
The rhythms on this page are common practice — four on the floor, the 2-and-4 backbeat, the dembow, the one drop and the clave are shared musical vocabulary, in some cases centuries old, and belong to no one.
The selection and the wording here are our own, arranged to follow the order these lessons teach in. Where a pattern is associated with a specific recording we describe it by feel rather than by title, and no audio from any recording is used — every sound on this page is synthesised live in your browser.
Worth your time if you want to go deeper:
- Pocket Operations — a free booklet of drum patterns for small hardware, and the inspiration for building this page at all. shittyrecording.studio
- René-Pierre Bardet, 260 Drum Machine Patterns
- Zoro, The Commandments of R&B Drumming
- Rick Latham, Advanced Funk Studies
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