A Reggaetón Beat in Sonic Pi! aka using a BPM of 800 to make a beat

Lemme start off by saying I love reggaeton. If you aren't familiar, it's a genre of music that originated in Puerto Rico. It evolved from dancehall and hip-hop. Daddy Yankee (Con Calma was a recent-ish hit of his, at the time of writing, it has 2.2 billion views) and Bad Bunny (Mia, for example) are some major figures in the genre. I could go on about reggaeton all day but I'll save that for a future post. 

Now, reggaeton has a really distinctive drum beat and it pervades the genre. It comes from a dancehall beat (or "riddim") called Dem Bow by Shabba Ranks. When I'm listening to the one radio station in my area that plays a lot of reggaeton, I can't help but laugh: the songs might have different drum sounds and tempos, but they always have the same core drum beat. Just the same, I never get tired of it.

I've always wanted to figure out how to program that into my drum machines and I never could. I don't know why; I could just never quite get the handle on the beat. Now, I was reinvigorated with my music-making recently so I thought I might give it another shot.

I started my search, as ya do, on YouTube for tutorials. I found a tutorial with a guy named Ocean who was going to make his beat from scratch. Conveniently, for me, he said, "I'm going to start with the drums." He opens up his music-making software and places the drum beats. It's a standard set up for that Dem Bow riddim and it looks like this:



The next step is to translate that into Sonic Pi...

Let's start out with a basic loop for a kick.

use_bpm 80

live_loop :kick do
  sample :drum_heavy_kick, amp: (ring 1, 0.5).tick
  sleep 1
end

I didn't know long to set the sleep value so I started with 1. If you're curious about the amp setting, check out the earlier post where I discuss that trick. Next, was the snare and this is where I usually falter. I don't know how to set up the timing for that. This is what it looked like in the video:

How can I replicate it where the snare hits on the 4th beat, then the 7th, then the 12th? Or, for the kick above, on every 8th note? 

This is when it hit me. What if I just sleep 8? 

use_bpm 80

live_loop :kick do
  sample :drum_heavy_kick, amp: (ring 1, 0.5).tick
  sleep 8
end

But doesn't that mean that I'd be waiting 8 seconds-ish between each kick? That won't do if I'm trying to coordinate the snares. So, let's speed it up until "sleep 8" is a reasonable wait time.

use_bpm 800

live_loop :kick do
  sample :drum_heavy_kick, amp: (ring 1, 0.5).tick
  sleep 8
end

Yes, indeed. A BPM of 800. I think this is such a unique solution to Sonic Pi; it's great. Normally, the highest I'd ever go would be to a BPM of like 180 for some techno jams. But Sonic Pi allows just about whatever you want so this solution takes advantage of that.

Now that we essentially have that drum machine setup from above, it just is a matter of placing the snares.

use_bpm 800
live_loop :kick do
  sample :drum_heavy_kick, amp: (ring 1, 0.5).tick
  sleep 8
end
sleep 4
live_loop :snare do
  sample :drum_snare_soft, amp: (ring 0.5, 1).tick
  sleep 8
end
sleep 2
live_loop :other_snare do
  sample :drum_snare_soft, amp: (ring 1, 0).tick
  sleep 8
end

I added the sleeps in there to stagger the loops. It's a quick fix and I'm sure there is a better way buuuuut we have our riddim!

Let's divide the BPM by something reasonable and lo! it lines nicely up if we just divide by 10.

The final riddim is

use_bpm 80

live_loop :kick do
  sample :drum_heavy_kick, amp: (ring 1, 0.5).tick
  sleep 0.8
end

sleep 0.4

live_loop :snare do
  sample :drum_snare_soft, amp: (ring 0.5, 1).tick
  sleep 0.8
end

sleep 0.2

live_loop :other_snare do
  sample :drum_snare_soft, amp: (ring 1, 0).tick
  sleep 0.8
end

If you don't have Sonic_Pi check out the sound here on SoundCloud

There are for sure some things that I can see to improve like combining the snare loops and figuring out the embellishments that the Ocean adds in his video.

But, hey, progress is progress, right? 

Thanks for reading and joining me on my little adventure! Do you have any thoughts or suggestions? Are you a fan of reggaeton? If so, what's your favorite song? Let me know in the comments!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Very Sus chords in Sonic Pi

Bottom line: Use Suspended chords (aka sus) like Sus2 and Sus4 to add a bit of tension before releasing to a major or minor chord. So you've got a number of ways to play chords in Sonic Pi. You could use any of the following (I'm adding the sleeps in there so you can copy/paste into your Sonic Pi window) play_chord([60,62,67]) # provide the number which correspond notes (where middle C == 60) sleep 1 play chord(:C3, :major) # provide chord name sleep 1 play_chord([:C, :D, :G]) # provide the names of the notes you want to use  sleep 1  play 60 # play the notes individually without sleeps between them play 62 play 67 For the purposes of the rest of this post, I'll use the second form cause it's compact and we can see the numbers. ------------------------------------------------ Now, we've got major chords, and the music theory the notation is 1-3-5 (ie Base Note + 3 + 5). Similarly, we've got minor chords with the notations 1-2-5. In Sonic Pi l...
Read more

Sonic Pi and Play

Bottom-line: You aren't restricted to whole numbers when it comes to the play command; the microtones possible can yield some really fun results. --------------------------------------- Hello hello! The first thing you learn when starting Sonic Pi is the play command. I won't rehash the tutorial , if you aren't familiar with  play  check it out - it's solid. What I wanted to write about today was something I noticed when writing a post about chords .  When playing notes, you can provide the name of the note or the number that corresponds to that key on the keyboard. 60 is C, for example. What's 61? D? Nah, C#/D♭. 62 is D.   And that makes sense cause you're just moving up the keys on the keyboard.  But then it got me thinkin'....what about 60.5? Boom. It works. And this makes total sense too. After all, Sonic Pi is a programming language and why wouldn't it allow you to use all sorts of numbers for inputs? We can use 0.25 as a valid sleep  value, rig...
Read more

Rolling High Hat Trick with Sonic_Pi

Welcome, readers! I learned a neat trick for spicing up a high hat and a kick loop. Consider the following: live_loop :cymbal do     sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: amp_level     sleep 0.25 end    It's your standard loop. Now try modifying the velocity or amp of that cymbal: live_loop :cymbal do     amp_level = (ring 0.5, 1).tick     sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: amp_level     sleep 0.25 end  It's subtle but it gives a rolling feel to the sound. It's a really quick way to add some more flavor to the beat. Based on a conversation I had in the Sonic Pi forms , this is a way to streamline this too:  live_loop :cymbal do       sample :drum_cymbal_closed, amp: (ring 0.5, 1).tick       sleep 0.25 end You can put the ring inside the sample line. I'll explore rings more in a future post too so stay tuned! Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you think and what you've been work...
Read more