The Making of “matt sokol - potion of increased strength (BEAT)” // More Beatmaking in Ultrabeat

Still obsessed with Logic’s drum machine, Ultrabeat… can’t and won’t stop making crazy drum beats in this thing.

The possibilities seem endless. With one prebuilt kit, I can come up with hundreds of different drum ideas. The basic ability to distort, pitch shift, or EQ each voice individually allows for many different sonic palettes to be accessed from within the set of sounds.

I’ve built three drum kits for myself… and am still exploring the basics of each one. Usually I do a lot more than drums, adding in bass and upper synths or guitars or vox, etc, but today I was in a pure drums mood.

I still don’t have a steady place to play my real drum set right now… its crazy. At least making drum beats in Ultrabeat is the next best thing.

Adding to a Prebuilt Kit

One trick that I learned today is this: You can get even more combinations out of a pre-built drum kit if you add a few extra sounds to it. Today I started by loading up the first Ultrabeat kit I ever made, “SOK1”.

I loaded up two new sounds at the top, using some of the 10+ open spots in the kit. These were a “Bellhat” and a “Splash”

Now I have a total of 16 options on the kit, up from 14. That adds a ton of new possibilities, it’s exponential, each new voice on the kit adds a radical number of combinations.

It’s important to get the kit completely set up before I start working on the beat itself. There’s nothing worse than when I am starting to get into an idea, only to run into a technical problem that I have to search the internet for help with.

It can take hours to resolve a confusing issue in Logic… and the time is wasted, after that the vibe is dead. I’ve lost many beats to that kind of situation.

But not this time cuz I got my kit ready first lol. So now it was time to get to making the beat.

Making the Beat

This beat came completely naturally to me, I didn’t think too hard about it. I just plugged a few notes in, listened, thought about it, added more notes, thought some more, etc, until the beat was done.

I think the key factor here is the tempo. It’s 98 bpm which means the kick drum can do some super fast notes around the hi hats, some 32nd note stuff, so that creates a lot of action. Then the clean hats and the bell-hats echo that idea and there’s a lot of motion all at once.

Most people’s brains can’t keep up with this, so it is an intense mental blur of sonic mayhem. Some of them love that, others hate it lol. For me it is awesome.

Here’s what the beat looks like in the drum machine:

and here’s what it sounds like:

_{image source: martin sanchez / unsplash.com}

What’s Next

I’ll let this one sit for a few days until I know how I feel about it. If I wanna work on it more I’ll probably use it for The Walding Family and maybe get @emelanson to add some guitars to it or something.

It’s never clear right after I make something, if it is any good. A few days later I have to listen again. Sometimes I think it’s great at first and then later I don’t like it lol.

That’s all for today, thanks for reading/listening!