BED 'N' BASS
Jul 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
Penny-wise and cautious, High Contrast (aka Lincoln Barrett) wanted to test his interest in producing music before throwing down a lot of money to build a studio. He found a free demo of Steinberg Cubase in a magazine and downloaded samples from the Internet. And he got sucked in.
The 22-year-old Welsh native bought enough equipment to produce his first album, True Colors, out of his bedroom. Barrett got only the basic necessities: a PC, a Creative Sound Blaster Live Platinum sound card, Cubase 5.1 hard-disk recording software, a Sonic Foundry Sound Forge software sampler, Numark Pro TT-1 decks (for the 20-percent pitch difference and backward-playing features), a Technics SH-DJ1200 mixer, a bunch of sampled WAV files and an E-mu Proteus 2000 sound module for strings, pads, analog bass, Rhodes and “garage-y” organ patches. Using that setup, Barrett has already earned the distinction of Best Producer at the Welsh Music Awards last winter.
“I would love to have a full string section and really get hardcore into it like Quincy Jones or something,” he says. “But sampling allows you to step back from the actual production and creation process and look at things objectively. You can pick and choose what sounds you want rather than artistically getting caught up in the moment of creating a whole new thing.”
However, getting a bunch of samples to play fair with each other is another matter. Barrett loves the occasions when samples naturally snap together. “It's just these cosmic connections that occur,” he says. “I find something from a silly disco track and then find something from an Italian horror film, and just by magic, they happen to be in tune with each other. I like bringing contrasting sounds together.”
The fluid drum 'n' bass mix on True Colors — which Barrett says covers disco, early house, garage and old-school jungle — isn't just about lucky sample connections. The real fun for Barrett is sound manipulation: “This thing I'm working on at the moment, I've just taken a really small, less-than-two-second-long sample, played it backwards, put a highpass version of that running with the strings and then made a lowpass version of it and added some bass underneath it. And it's turned into this whole track just from this two-second sample.”
Lucky for Barrett, he also has a natural instinct for mixing (which he did internally in Cubase). “When I took the album tracks to be mastered in London at a place called Metropolis, the mastering engineer said there were only a couple tracks that required any boosting on the bass,” Barrett says. “He said it was pretty much on the nose.” Part of his success was in paying close attention to the definition between the bass and the beats. “I generally go for the subbier bass lines,” he says. “And with the kick drums, I try to get something with a bit of lower midrange thump to it, a bit more treble-y and usually take off the very low end. With house music, the bass drum is so dominant, but with drum 'n' bass, it doesn't have to be. The focus is more on the snap of the snare. I'm really fussy with snares. For so long, drum 'n' bass had a real focus on the crunchy, distorted snare, which I wasn't totally into. I usually go for more rim-shot-sounding snares, a bit more wooden and a bit more like you get in garage.”
Barrett intends to keep meshing and mutating electronic subgenres to push his music forward. “I guess drum 'n' bass has been around arguably 10 years,” he says. “Right now, I think it's sounding better than it ever has. Before, there was kind of a closed idea of what made a drum 'n' bass track. And the new producers who have come through, and myself as well, have kind of pushed what you can put into a track. There don't seem to be as many limits on the music as there used to be.”
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