Reggae "One Drop" Drums in GarageBand for MacOS - Cheat

[Ted]

GarageBand for MacOS doesn't come with any reggae beats. But I kind of cheated it with my cover of "Smile Out A Style" without having to import MIDI or audio, or entirely program the beat myself. I was definitely feeling lazy.

At least one person was interested to know how I did it, so here's what I did:

Caveat: I have no idea if this is possible in GarageBand for iOS. Let me know in either case.

The idiosyncrasy of a reggae "one drop" beat is that there is no bass drum on one. (Get it? They drop the one.) None of the beats in GarageBand have this characteristic, so I tried out a whole bunch of beats scanning only for the snare and high-hat feel that suited the song.

When I found one I liked, I turned off the bass drum.

Then I created a new "Software Instrument" track. In this track, I added the bass drum on three, and some rimshots. It was simple enough to use the "Musical Typing" feature, but I used my Nanopad instead hoping for a little of dynamics (i.e. not every bass kick exactly as loud as all of the others).

The MP3 in this post is a sample of just the drums. The GarageBand drummer is panned left, and the parts I added are panned right.

Something I discovered about the Drummer feature is that if you dial up the Fills parameter, it will generate fills that use drums that you have turned off for the main beat. For example: I had the bass drum, toms, and cymbals turned off, but it still used these drum sounds for the fills. In this case, I liked that. It generated some natural sounding fills in the song, and I didn't have to think about it.

[Pete C]

Much appreciated. There's a few reggae songs I'd like to try to cover but the BR600 and 800 don't do any reggae patterns even though they do have reggae kits ! Given me some idea on how to write my own patterns.

Pete

[Pete C]

Thanks again for your advice on this Ted...what I did in the end was get my old BR600 out as it has drum pads which the BR800 doesn't. I programmed an initial drum roll pattern using the pads, then using the keys programmed a pattern for the main beat which was 16ths on the closed high hat and kick drum and rim-shot on the 3rd beat. Then programmed another drum fill using the pads, put the 3 together in an arrangement then lined the BR600 into my BR800 to record the arrangement. The rest of the song was recorded on my BR800 with additional fills done in real time using Band Lab drum pads.  The velocity on the kick and rim-shots was set to max so they really pop out in the mix.

 https://songcrafters.org/forum/index.php?topic=32181.0

[Ted]

what I did in the end was get my old BR600 out as it has drum pads which the BR800 doesn't. I programmed an initial drum roll pattern using the pads, then using the keys programmed a pattern for the main beat which was 16ths on the closed high hat and kick drum and rim-shot on the 3rd beat. Then programmed another drum fill using the pads, put the 3 together in an arrangement then lined the BR600 into my BR800 to record the arrangement.

I'm lazier than you.