How do you make your clicks and beeps?

[ugly casanova]

whisperit - I lernt the trick from a Robin Guthrie interview. you send a guitar, or other signal into a noise gate. the opening and closing of the gate is controlled by the drum machine pattern or other external source.

this will explain it further:

http://www.audiomasterclass.com/arc.cfm ... -much-more

they call it 'sidechaining' and it's used in a lot of famous songs by the usual suspects (daft punk, justice, ...)

[haesslich]

i often use the mpc1000 for these things, and my eurorack modular, a guitar or my fieldrecorder are sound sources. the doepfer a112 sampler module is a really great source for weird, lofi and idm sounds and effects too. (i really recommend this one!)
some years ago i used the ensoniq asr10 sampler very often because of it's "transwave" stuff and it's excellent effects. i don't have it running currently... wondering if it's still working properly...

[glimmertwin]

...all that you need are unexpected sounds chopped up in odd ways. You could take a couple of longer samples and just slice them up in a bunch of pieces and then play the keyboard to isolate those sounds and pick the ones you want to build a custom kit of sounds. Play around with breaking samples up out of time(maybe just a second of the tail of a string sound for example) and try to avoid chopping something up on the beat where you can recognize the sound. You can also play with attack settings to tweak a bit too or sample start and end points if that's easier. Run them through effects pedals and they get even more bizarre. Ableton is probably the easiest for doing this since it's easy to manipulate samples and there are already a ton of effects built in although you could take many many approaches to doing the same thing all the way down to recording something on analog tape, and splicing it up physically at random points to make new sounds. All you need to do is take a random sound and recontextualize it in a new beat. I really like how the Books does this with longer sounds of field recordings but you would have the same thing if you shortened their samples and oriented to a pattern based drum machine.

[fakeplasticdreams]

ive been wanting to do this for the longest of times but man im so behind on my music technology, im embarassed,


so is it safe to say that ableton has the easiets learning curve to do all this ( as a software to manipulate beats? )

[glimmertwin]

...I'm a relatively new to Ableton and was able to pick it up pretty quickly. I'm sure there is still a ton of stuff I don't know, but it's easy to pick up the basics and for those times when you don't know how to do something, you'll find it's a surprisingly intuitive engine unlike many of the DAW software programs out there.

[sdscanz]

i generally just do that kind of stuff with the guitar. the best thing ive found is to use a lot of pedals and stop playing. find a cool hum or some weird noise (moving your fingers around, playing behind the bridge), and then use a loop pedal to get the sound short enough.