Turning an irregular pattern into the grid
Philip Meyer found a way to make an irregular hi-hat pattern dictate the grid for the whole track—and the velocity-to-kick routing is the piece you'll steal for your next session.
published today
▶ Turn a weird hat pattern into the pulse for your whole track
You make a wonky MIDI clip, hit Command+E a few times, and suddenly that rhythm is the grid your kick and ride hang on. The real move is routing the pattern to a kick with a velocity MIDI effect tuned to only pass the accents—it locks the low end without a single drum rack edit.
◢ learn
▶ Ableton's physical-modeling devices, for people who hate synth jargon
Collision, Tension, and Corpus let you tweak ‘mallet stiffness’, ‘decay’, and ‘brightness’ instead of decoding an oscillator matrix. This walkthrough gets you a tuned percussion stab or a woody thump in a few minutes—no synth-nerd vocabulary required.
▶ CID's bass recipe: glide, re-trigger off, and LFO sidechain
Load up Anna 2, set a touch of portamento, kill re-trigger to avoid phasing, and slap a volume LFO like Kickstart on the group bus instead of a compressor—the low end stays cleaner and still pumps. A whole CID bass chain you can build with stock-style tools.
◢ the word
Beatport is now scanning your uploads for AI
Beatport's deal with Beatdapp means fully or majority AI-generated tracks get rejected at ingestion, and AI-assisted tracks get flagged for curation review. 60% of DJs surveyed won't play AI music—so if your workflow leans on generative tools, know where the line is drawn.
Nautica (UK) — Looped In Motion
the bassline that keeps looping but somehow never gets old—when the perc rolls kick in around 2:15, it's the moment. · Owner pick, pairs with the subdivision idea above.
| ▼ | Kotiēr — Smalltown Boy (Extended Mix) | #05 | ▼ 1 · 7d |
| ▼ | Brunello — Ghost Dance (Original Mix) | #09 | ▼ 2 · 7d | ▶ hear |
| ▲ | Capron (NL) — Gimme A Hug (Original Mix) | #50 | ▲ 45 · 7d | ▶ hear |
| ▲ | Bastian Bux — Iris (Original Mix) | #19 | ▲ 32 · 7d | ▶ hear |
| ▲ | Dave Spoon, Deetron — Sunrise (Deetron Soleil AM Remix) | #06 | ▲ 4 · 7d |
- 1. Create a MIDI clip with an irregular rhythm: start with a bar of half notes, then select a few and press Cmd+E to split, using arrow keys to nudge lengths and positions.
- 2. Copy that clip to a spare “Grid” track so the original pattern is preserved.
- 3. On the Grid clip, draw a velocity ramp: make some notes peak high then decay down, while the rest stay low.
- 4. Create a MIDI track with a kick instrument and set its “MIDI From” to the Grid track.
- 5. Insert Ableton’s Velocity MIDI effect before the kick, then raise the lower limit of its Range until only the high-velocity notes pass through.
- 6. Play back; the kick fires only on accents, turning the irregular pattern into a natural grid for the whole track.
🔮 Producer Horoscope (for fun) — Your studio monitors will pick up a radio signal mid-session; consider it a free sample pack.
Now make something that rattles.
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covered in this issue: beatport