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Building a broken beat kit

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Kiwipulse manual

Building a broken beat kit

A fast breakbeat asks for the opposite of a big room kit. Every hit has to be short, land hard and get out of the way, because at 172 BPM a snare that rings for 400 ms is still sounding when the next one arrives. Sample packs answer this with a tighter take. Here you build it: eight sounds that are short because you made them short, and that stay out of each other's way because you decided where each one sits.

By the end you will have a kick, a snare, a clap, a chopped stab, a bass stab, a tick, a glitch and a sub, all at 172 BPM, plus two habits the beginner guide does not cover: layering two strikes into one hit, and using the chain to cut each sound down to the part that carries.

If you have not built a kit before, start with Building a kit. This one assumes you know what a hit and a body are. Keep Drum open for what each control does, and Machines for the chain.

The two ideas this kit is built on

A hit can be two strikes. A real drum is struck once but you hear more than one thing: the mass of the beater and the click of its surface, the stick and the wires. The hit has two slots for that reason, and both are struck at the same instant. Under the hit there is a + second hit; click it and a HIT 2 node appears with its own library and its own curve.

The chain is where a sound gets short. The body decides how long a drum wants to ring. The chain's AMP decides how long you let it. On a fast track that second decision does most of the work, and it is why almost every sound below has an AMP stage doing something.

The chain row only shows the stages a sound is using, so an empty row means the sound is untouched after the machine. Add a stage from the + at the end.

Track 1: the kick

Two strikes and a falling sine. The knock is the weight, the click is the surface, and the body is the note.

  1. BODY to sine body. Set tune to 44 Hz, decay to 0.5 s.
  2. Drag the body's landing so drop is about 29 st and drop time about 10 ms. That fall is what makes a kick a kick rather than a bass note. At half the drop it starts to sound like a tom; at twice the drop time the attack turns into a slide you can hear as pitch.
  3. Give it a hold of about 2.5 ms. A short flat top before the fall thickens the first moment without lengthening the sound.
  4. HIT 1 to knock. pitch 109 Hz, length 12 ms, drop 12 st, drop speed 2.5x. This is the mass. Take its level down to nothing and the kick goes hollow.
  5. Click + second hit. HIT 2 to beater click, colour at its brightest, length 3 ms, hit 2 level at full. This is the surface, and 3 ms is the whole point: long enough to hear, too short to be a tone.
  6. bleed to 80%. That is how much of both strikes you hear directly rather than through the drum.
  7. Chain: AMP with hold 100 ms and decay 100 ms, DRIVE at 3.0x on tanh, TRANSIENT with the strike lifted about 50%.

The kick's own drive, the block on the body's wire, goes all the way up and stays inside the body. Inside means the saturation happens before the body's envelope, so the timbre holds steady as the note dies instead of cleaning up on the way out.

Then route velocity to two places on the velocity row: Drive at +15% and Hit 2 Level at +30%. Soft hits lose the click first, which is what a real kick does.

Track 2: the snare

A noise burst and a clap struck together, over a shell.

  1. HIT 1 to noise burst. centre 5.5 kHz, length 55 ms, resonance 1.5 Q, snap 2.6, width 70%. The snap is an onset boost inside the burst's first moment; without it the burst starts like a fade.
  2. + second hit, HIT 2 to clap. centre 3.5 kHz, tail 35 ms, spread 10 ms, hit 2 level 25%, width 40%. A clap under a snare at a quarter level does not read as a clap. It reads as more hands on the wires.
  3. BODY to shell. tune 190 Hz, brightness halfway, decay 60 ms, blip 0.58, blip time 21 ms.
  4. bleed 75%. On a snare this is the noise against tone balance and the most useful control on the drum. Take it to nothing and you have a tom.
  5. Chain: AMP hold 50 ms, decay 70 ms. DRIVE 4.0x on tanh. FILTER with a high pass at 150 Hz, which keeps the snare out of the kick's octave. TRANSIENT with the strike up 60% and the body down 35%, which is the fastest way to make a snare crack without making it louder.
  6. ROOM at size 15%, mix 10%. Enough to stop it sounding pasted on.

Velocity to Hit 1 Tone at +20% and to Wavefold at +20%, so hard hits are brighter and dirtier at once.

Track 3: the clap

No body at all. A clap is hands, and hands do not ring.

  1. HIT 1 to clap, BODY to no body. centre 1.16 kHz, tail 50 ms, spread 14 ms, width 80%.
  2. spread is the time between the hands. Below about 8 ms they fuse into one smack; above 20 ms you start to hear a room of people rather than a clap.
  3. bleed at full, since there is no body for the hit to reach you through.
  4. Chain: AMP hold 60 ms, decay 70 ms. FILTER with a low pass at 5 kHz and the second corner as a high pass at 400 Hz. Two corners on one curve is a band, and a clap wants to live in one.
  5. ROOM size 20%, mix 12%.

Velocity to Hit 1 Tone at +15%.

Track 4: the chop

A plucked string, struck by a click and a short noise burst. This is the sound that makes the kit sound played rather than programmed.

  1. BODY to string, tune 174.61 Hz, decay 220 ms, brightness 0.35. A string is driven rather than self struck, so it is silent until something hits it.
  2. HIT 1 to beater click, colour 0.15, length 4 ms, width 30%.
  3. + second hit, HIT 2 to noise burst, centre 6.1 kHz, length 3 ms, resonance 2.4 Q, hit 2 level 30%. Swapping what plucks it is how you change a string's character, which is why the string has no pluck control of its own.
  4. bleed 15%. Almost all body: you want the string, not the pick.
  5. Chain: AMP hold 40 ms, decay 70 ms. DRIVE 2.0x on tanh. FILTER as a high pass at 120 Hz.

Velocity to Wavefold and to Body Tone, both at +25%.

Track 5: the stab

A sine body so short it reads as a stab rather than a note.

  1. BODY to sine body, tune 174.61 Hz, decay 120 ms, hold 10 ms, drop 4 st, drop time 17 ms. A small drop on a short body is a pluck; a large one would be a kick.
  2. HIT 1 to beater click, colour 0.7, length 2 ms, level half.
  3. bleed 60%.
  4. The drum's own drive all the way up with wavefold at 0.9, left inside the body. Folding is what turns a sine into something with edges.
  5. Chain: AMP hold 30 ms, decay 40 ms. DRIVE 3.5x on tanh. FILTER low pass at 7 kHz.

Velocity to Wavefold at -30%, so hard hits are cleaner than soft ones. It is the opposite of the kick and it stops the stab from tearing when the pattern accents it.

Track 6: the tick

A hat that is mostly air.

  1. HIT 1 to hiss. cutoff 8.2 kHz, length 25 ms, colour to metallic, resonance 2.4 Q, width 80%.
  2. BODY to metal, tune 349.23 Hz, brightness 8 kHz, decay 30 ms, shimmer 0.4, and its level halfway. A metal body at 30 ms is not a cymbal, it is the ring of one, which is all a tick needs.
  3. bleed 70%.
  4. Chain: AMP hold 10 ms, decay 30 ms. DRIVE 2.0x. FILTER as a high pass at 6.5 kHz, which is what keeps a busy hat line from muddying the middle.

Velocity to Hit 1 Length at +4% and Hit 1 Tone at +15%. A small length move is enough: hats are heard as long or short before anything else.

Track 7: the glitch

No hit at all. An FM body is self struck, so it rings from the trigger on its own.

  1. HIT 1 to silent. BODY to fm, tune 349.23 Hz, decay 45 ms, brightness 0.7, ratio 3.6x, bright time 35 ms.
  2. ratio is where the metallic quality comes from. Whole numbers sound like an instrument; land between them and it turns into a bell or a bleep.
  3. Chain: AMP hold 15 ms, decay 20 ms. DRIVE 2.0x on fold, crush to 6 bits, rate 35%. This is the one sound in the kit allowed to alias. The fold and the rate reduction are the grit.
  4. FILTER as a high pass at 250 Hz.
  5. Take its level down, or its track gain: it is an accent, not a voice.

Velocity to Rate Reduce at +25% and Body Tone at +20%, so hard hits are dirtier and brighter. This is the sound to let velocity wreck.

Track 8: the sub

One sine and nothing else.

  1. HIT 1 to silent. A sub with a click on it fights the kick.
  2. BODY to sine body, tune 43.65 Hz, decay 0.4 s, drop 6 st, drop time 50 ms. The small drop is what keeps it from sounding like a test tone.
  3. Chain: AMP hold 120 ms, decay 100 ms, and a FILTER low pass at 400 Hz.

The sub and the kick share a note. That is on purpose here, and it is also the thing most likely to go wrong: two sines an octave apart on the same beat cancel each other depending on where each one is in its fall. If the low end goes weak when both play, move the sub's drop time rather than its tune.

Making it sit

Set the project to 172 BPM.

Balance with the track gains, not with the sounds: the kick loudest, the snare and clap under it, everything else well below. A kit this fast reads by contrast rather than by level, so leave more headroom between parts than feels right when you solo them.

Pan the chop and the glitch away from centre, the stab and the tick slightly the other way, and leave the kick, snare and sub in the middle. Nothing with weight moves off centre.

Then save it as a kit. Name it for what it sounds like, not for what you were listening to when you made it.

Where to go next

  • Per hit sound design for making one strike in the pattern different from the rest, which is what stops a fast loop sounding like a loop.
  • Modulation for the breathe control, which re rolls a value every pass.
  • Drum for every hit and body this guide did not use.