Creating a killer groove in your music is essential for making your track ready for a club dance floor. There are various ways to achieve this, but one technique that is proven to work, and one that humans inherently love is ‘Call & Response’. Mix that with a super interesting polyrhythm and you have the makings of a dancefloor hit! In this tutorial we look at both these methods of enhancing the rhythm in our tracks so that it stands out from the rest and has much more impact on the dance floor.

Transcript

Okay. So in this tutorial we’re gonna look at a method for enhancing the rhythm in our track so that it stands out more and it has that much more impact on the dance floor. Now the technique I’m going to be showing you is called call and response, and it is something that all humans inherently love. So it’s an excellent thing to include in your music. So have a listen to this track. We’re going to be using the base pattern here to build on for our call and response. So keep your ear tuned into that.

Now you might notice that that bass feels a little bit like it’s kind of drifting out of sync with the overall rhythm of the tune. And that’s because I’ve programmed this using a poly rhythm. And what’s going on here is the bass. It’s cycling over three quarters of a bar instead of a bar. So it feels like it’s constantly drifting out of time and then it snaps back in because I repeat the loop at the beginning of every four bars. So if you like that sound, you like the sort of feel of that. I’m not going to go massively into poly rhythms now, but do check out the melodic polyrhythms tutorial that we’ve got on this channel because I break this down and show you how to use it for everything from your melodies to your drums to your base. So it’s a cracking tutorial, melodic polyrhythms. I’ll link it in underneath this video for you. So we’re going to be enhancing in this rhythm. How are we gonna do this? Well, I’ve picked two complimentary sounds and I’m literally going to copy my pattern across. And the first one, which is a techno stab,

I’m going to zero out all of the notes so that they’re muted. And then pick one note in the pattern and remember this one, cycling over three quarters of a bar and use that to accent the bass sound. So let’s say I go for the last one is four notes in the pattern. So every fourth note, I use that as the accent. This is what we’re now going to get.

So straight away you can hear how it’s making the rhythm pop and it’s really effective when we’re using this poly rhythm as well cause you get even more of a sense of it drifting at a time. Now you can pick any note you want. I’ve gone for the last one here. It’s working well, so I’m happy with that and we’ll move on. I’m now just going to copy that same MIDI clip across, zero it all out again. And this time on my second complimentary sound, I’ll have all notes playing that the techno stab that’s accenting the rhythm in the first place isn’t playing. Sorry, let me just color this so it’s super clear for you. There we go. That’s what we’ve got going on and let’s have a listen just to these two sounds now. So they are complimenting the bass but also they’re quite different in the makeup of the sound. You want them to be a little bit contrast in the more contrast in nail, the more your rhythm is going to pop. And so this is what we get when the bass is plain and all of the other elements.

And what I typically find is as soon as I’ve got this set up and the rhythm is really popping, I can hear other little adjustments and cool things that I want to do. So in this case, I can imagine us having a note jumping up at the end and then if I duplicate this out and I come here, I’m just going to jump that up and Octavio, so let’s see how this sounds. Now again, this is going to enhance the fact that the poly rhythm in this case is snapping around to the beginning of the pattern. Again, love it. So really, really happy with that. Now keep in mind that this technique works for your melodies, your baselines, drum patterns, percussion. You can try it out on anything in any genre. Call and response is something that we absolutely love in all styles of music.

Thank you for watching

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