How to make liquid drum and bass with Logic Pro X

In our video tutorial, we show you how to make a liquid drum and bass track completely from scratch on Logic Pro X. Here is an in-depth summary of what’s covered in the video. 

Choose a tempo

Change the tempo at the top and in the centre of the Logic Pro X interface. The default frequency is set to a glacial 120bpm. When making a liquid drum and bass track, we want to set it to anything between 172-176bpm. We recommend cutting straight down that line and opting for 174 bpm. 

Start with a drum break 

A break is a great place to start to inspire the rest of your track. You can use Loopcloud, an online sample library. When you sign up you get access to a library of free samples, or you can easily buy a sample from their store. 

To find a drum break in Loopcloud click on “Genres” menu and select “Drum & Bass”  and set your bpm in the range of 172-176. 

Under “Instruments” select “Drum”, and listen through the samples to find the one you want. 

Once you’ve made your purchase, you can click and drag the drum break straight from Loopcloud into Logic Pro X. 

Slice up your sample track

You can create a much sharper sound by deleting parts of the sample.

With your channel selected, hit “T” on your keyboard to bring up the tool menu, then hit “I” to select the “Scissors Tool”

Hold Ctrl and click on the first eight or sixteenth in the channel strip of your sample to divide it by 8ths/16ths.

Delete sections that don’t have anything in them. 

Divide sample across channels

Now that your sample is cut up, you can separate instruments into different channels. In our tutorial, we decided to add reverb on the snare in the sample. 

First, we created a new channel by clicking on your existing channel and hitting “Cmd+D”.

Then we selected all sections with a snare by clicking on them whilst holding shift and clicked and dragged them to our new channel.

Once they’re on your new channel, you can play around with them. Add effects, transpose sections, whatever your artistry compels you to do. 

Don’t forget to relabel “Audio Track 2” at the bottom of the mixer. In our case, we labeled it “Snare1”.

Add reverb

In your mixer, above “St Out” and beneath your plugins is your bus section. Click on it, and select “Bus > Bus 2” to create an auxiliary. Relabel “Aux 2”. In our example, we named it “snr vrb” for “snare verb”.
Click on the plugins section and add reverb. We used ChromaVerb. 

Play around with the curve and the different dials and effects in the popup window. 

Add other percussion elements

You can use Apple loops to add in percussion instruments such as shakers, bongos, and extra kicks. 

Additionally, you can add in a new drummer channel.

Click “+” above the channels.

In the popup window, select “Drummer” and in the dropdown menu select “Songwriter”.

Select the part(s) of the drum kit you want to use.

Then have fun playing around with the dials and options, increase the pace, etc. 

Copy bars and add variations 

To duplicate your existing bars, hit “Cmd+A”, click on them with Option held down, and drag them onto your new bars. Add variations in the duplicated bars. 

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