Make Analog Grooves without Analog Gear

Analog machines sometimes seem to be this mystical thing that create certain grooves in a magical way that you can't replicate in your DAW.

This Video aims to shine some light on techniques that you can use to get much closer to analog sounding grooves inside your computer than you might think. We Analyse how analog drum machines and groove boxes work and how you can copy their approaches to create similar sounding grooves inside the box. Important for classic 80s and 90s house drum grooves coming from analog machines are grooves created by volume variations, swing which I already covered in other videos. so in this one we well be focusing on explaining what choke groups are and how you can create a certain flow by managing the drums transients with saturation.

0:00 Intro
0:16 Recreating an analog 90s House Groove
1:07 Understanding Analog Grooves
3:31 Choke Groups explained
6:29 Grooves through Saturation
9:14 Push vs Pulling Drum Groove

[jacksonmassey]

I’ve been waiting for someone to teach me this lesson for a long long time - thank you! Great tutorial 🎉❤

[tourmaubourg]

Great, Great videos probably the moste useful one i've seen on the internet with the stuff of Btheclick. No fake promises, no "dothis to succed rule" (like there is one lol), only useful tips and concept well explained ! thanks !

Another tip I could add on how to sound more analog (or groovy?) is to play with "track delays" in ableton. When you produce in the box, everything is perfectly in sync, almost too perfectly in sync.

When u use to record music back in the days, one machine would provide clock to all the other machines, through cables, wich caused some machines to be a little "late" or "early" depending of their position in the chain. This delay might make your kick, or your hats or whatever element late or early, wich would add some groove (controlled or not). Playing with the track delay of each track can enable you to recreate this feeling. It is basically like in a band when you are playing ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat.


Reading this i have no clus if it is clear let me know if it isn't

peace

[eduardoreginaldo]

The saturation hi hat trick was very useful - appreciated.

[paulhuggins]

These videos have been a great motivator to keep trying to get into production, have been struggling massively and to see things so well explained and visually laid out are a massive help especially in emulating that real house music sound

[MyHEmpster]

Your videos are gold! Keep them coming!

[puneet-]

Very nice video. I have been struggling with getting the right drum sounds and your channel has helped me so much. Thank you ❤

[Moe-wnrc]

the saturation tames the transients/attack by compressing, rounding the singal i believe. enjoyed this video!

[AntonioVians]

This video is a real gem. Thank u mate

[cryptout]

XO is my current go to for groovy drums.

[drydessert]

Hardware is not automatically analog. The sequencers of the 909, even the sequencer of the 808, are digital, while some of the sounds in the 909 are analog (Kick, maybe also the snares and clap) and all of the sounds are analog in the 808.

[davek]

Great channel and I’ve been watching and saving your videos.

My thoughts on the subject:

- as you referred to and has been mentioned in comments, the timing of some of the drum machines of 80s and 90s is definitely not ‘perfect’ which probably helps listeners prefer the sound from that era as there is a slight human like sloppiness. I sometimes record my Casio RZ1 into Ableton and you can see it is off grid at times even when slaved. Can try to replicate that manually with timing of midi notes in Ableton but maybe not in one bar loops but in blocks of bars (as I noticed the timing can take a while to settle down and then start missing a bit again over a few bars).

- why try to replicate imperfections with powerful DAWs - as close as you shown you can get over a full song maybe it is still hard to get the full sound spot on? Let us enjoy the new tech we have and use them as much as we can as no doubt in 30-40 years musicians will be looking back trying to get the sound we have now. For me if you want the 80s and 90s sound now get the tech that was used then and use that alone without modern tech.

[chrish]

those hi hats, should you ever use a snare too? escially on the 16th note. if so does it need to pitched down?