Atlas 2 by Algonaut - Generative Workflows for Drum & Bass

[00:00:00] Hey folks, welcome back to another video.
[00:00:02] So long time no see, I haven't made a video for maybe a week or so, but it was time for
[00:00:07] some kind of break.
[00:00:09] But in the meantime, I made a bit of music and I rediscovered here this kind of plugin
[00:00:15] which is called Atlas and I made a video about this a few years ago showing you the differences
[00:00:21] between this one and XO, but for some reason I settled with XO for most of my productions.
[00:00:28] But I kind of rediscovered this here a few days ago because someone mentioned it in the
[00:00:33] chat in Discord and I thought maybe have a second look and explore it a bit more.
[00:00:41] And yeah, I made some experience with it and I want to show you what you can do with it
[00:00:45] and how quickly you can sometimes create randomized or generative kind of music with it.
[00:00:54] So here it's in the more or less basic form and I try to make some drum bass with it.
[00:01:00] So I'm going here for 173 BPM for some reason and here on the left side we have a lot of
[00:01:06] pads where we can load in some samples and I want to start here by go to a more finer
[00:01:13] grained overview and what you can do in here is not only you can just index all your samples
[00:01:20] on your hard drive.
[00:01:21] You can also put them in different so called maps and we have the maps here at the top.
[00:01:28] So we can create a new map and a map consists basically you can define a few directories
[00:01:34] or maybe just one directory or maybe a complete hard drive and scan everything.
[00:01:38] That's what I did here with all.
[00:01:40] So these are all my samples.
[00:01:41] I can select this here.
[00:01:43] You can see there's a lot of samples here, right?
[00:01:46] And we can also see a hi-hat, bongo and so on so it's a map of all my samples.
[00:01:52] So I also have here the Atlas II factory.
[00:01:55] So just not that many samples, just a few just from the directory of Atlas.
[00:02:02] Then I also have your ghost which is ghost syndicate all my samples from ghost syndicate
[00:02:07] and I kind of buy these samples regularly for I don't know just to have something on
[00:02:14] my hard drive that goes more in the direction of drum and bass and dubstep.
[00:02:18] So these are pretty cool samples here for dubstep and drum bass, of course, some old
[00:02:23] polarity samples here.
[00:02:24] So I created different maps for different samples.
[00:02:28] And this is pretty dope because we can limit actually the randomization process.
[00:02:34] We can replace or create here a new kit and then have random samples in these cells.
[00:02:42] So here we have a kick drum, snare, hi-hat and so on, right?
[00:02:47] And we press new kit and then we have new kick drum, new snare.
[00:02:51] But the options are we limit basically the randomization process.
[00:02:55] We only take samples from this directory or from these directories.
[00:02:59] So these are multiple sample packs here combined.
[00:03:03] So with this we can do already a lot.
[00:03:08] And also in Atlas we have some kind of sequencer.
[00:03:11] I mean in XO we have also a sequencer but it's just limited to eight steps.
[00:03:17] Here we can do four which is 16 steps, right?
[00:03:21] And then we have also eight which is then 32 steps and so on.
[00:03:26] So I usually start with one and then we just lay down here, let's say two kick drums.
[00:03:33] Maybe hit play here, maybe loop the sequencer here.
[00:03:38] And then maybe a snare.
[00:03:44] And maybe use your hi-hat.
[00:03:48] And what I do now is here I can unfold this and then we have here the velocity more or
[00:03:53] less.
[00:03:54] So we can pull this down so there's no step or we can slightly bring in the velocity which
[00:03:59] is pretty cool already.
[00:04:00] So maybe here full velocity, half the velocity, right?
[00:04:05] And then we have just this.
[00:04:09] And then we can do something like this.
[00:04:12] We can make this lane shorter or the loop length shorter.
[00:04:18] So now we don't need to fill up here all the spaces.
[00:04:21] We have just here this two step pattern.
[00:04:26] So we have already a nice drum bass groove and then we can replace this kit here.
[00:04:55] So with this we can easily just combine different sound samples from my hard drive or from my
[00:05:01] hard drive and then find sweet combinations.
[00:05:05] We have different hi-hats, different snares, different kick drums and we can figure out
[00:05:09] what sounds best to us.
[00:05:12] I can also bring in here maybe some ghost notes here.
[00:05:17] So if you like this.
[00:05:19] Yeah, cool.
[00:05:22] And then we can maybe use a, this is a clap here.
[00:05:26] Maybe I use something different here.
[00:05:28] Maybe I use some percussion, something like this and I drag it here.
[00:05:36] It's classified as a snare for some reason.
[00:05:41] Maybe use something this.
[00:05:42] So this is a tom.
[00:05:44] So it uses some classification here.
[00:05:45] So it's generally speaking only kicks, snare, a tom, hi-hat, closed and so on.
[00:05:52] I wish there would be more like musical things where you have like a chord.
[00:05:59] Everything that's musical is kind of classified as other.
[00:06:03] Also bass sounds are other.
[00:06:09] So let's use here some kind of bass sound for this.
[00:06:13] So it's classified as other.
[00:06:15] But this is my hi-hat here.
[00:06:21] Maybe you leave this as a hi-hat.
[00:06:25] Maybe you make this a bit bigger.
[00:06:29] Hi-hats closed, bring hi-hat in here.
[00:06:32] This is the tom.
[00:06:37] Maybe I use this for the bass here, something like this.
[00:06:51] And then we make this shorter or maybe I use here mirror edit, do something like this and
[00:07:03] then I make it a bit shorter.
[00:07:21] Okay let's replace it.
[00:07:48] So this is already a nice sounding drum bass loop for instance.
[00:07:52] So this is not meant to be, I leave it as that and just release it, but it gives me
[00:08:00] some ideas.
[00:08:01] Again, bounce it out, replace the bass sound or maybe make it a bit fatter or add some
[00:08:06] processing to it.
[00:08:08] But we can also say here in Bitwig add missing chains.
[00:08:13] And in Atlas we can define, I think if you open this up here, no you don't need to open
[00:08:20] this up.
[00:08:21] We can go here for channel.
[00:08:22] So this is the kick channel and we can put this out on different channels.
[00:08:27] And what I do here is just select sequential.
[00:08:30] So now the first cell is on channel one, second cell is on two and so on, right?
[00:08:36] So three, four, five and so on.
[00:08:39] So each of these cells goes out in Bitwig here to a different lane.
[00:08:47] So here's the bass right, so we can say this is the bass and this is the kick drum.
[00:08:55] So we can put further processing on this here in Bitwig itself.
[00:09:05] We carve out the kick drum of something like this.
[00:09:17] Oh, this was nice.
[00:09:31] So it sounds a bit thin, but what we can do here after the output of Atlas, we can
[00:10:01] use some kind of, to use my X-split here.
[00:10:07] So this splits the signal up into different bands here, one, two, one and ten K, right?
[00:10:12] So this is just one, it's just a band splitter, more or less.
[00:10:21] So here I put like a peak limiter on the end, let's make this a bit quieter here for a
[00:10:29] moment.
[00:10:30] So I push up all the frequencies here up until I reach the ceiling, pretty basic.
[00:10:47] Maybe I'll use here a squash, the squash plug in, as sometimes we like to use this here
[00:11:12] just a bit.
[00:11:28] Maybe a clip at the end.
[00:11:45] Okay, so very basic frequency balancing here.
[00:12:00] So now we can just play around with this.
[00:12:03] But I also prepared just something, because I had a play with this, I can open up the
[00:12:08] browser here and I have just made some loops exactly with this trick.
[00:12:16] I just want to show you how I set this up, but here I can just load in some things, maybe
[00:12:22] hit this one, then hit play.
[00:12:47] This one is wired.
[00:12:57] So what I basically did was I created your one pattern and then I just hit new kit.
[00:13:03] And when I found something that I've kind of liked, I just saved here some kind of preset
[00:13:09] on the right side and I can just recall it.
[00:13:12] So all the samples, all the patterns, I can make some adjustments to the pattern to make
[00:13:16] it more interesting, maybe, so let's use this one here.
[00:13:41] What I also can do is I can replace some things in here, right?
[00:13:45] So we have the kick drum here and I usually just lay on my samples always with some kind
[00:13:52] of synthesized drum kit.
[00:13:55] So I put your replacer in there and with this I can find all the triggers from the kick
[00:14:04] drum.
[00:14:05] Maybe I put an EQ in front of that and just cut out here the low end, something like this.
[00:14:15] And in the generator part here, I use, I don't know, V1 kick here from Bitwig.
[00:14:27] And I have the full mix here, which is just, yeah, the generator here, the kick drum generator.
[00:14:37] And then I mix in here the top end of this initial kick.
[00:14:48] And if you don't like how it's placed in time, you can always add here a time shift
[00:14:53] device and just nudge this sample wise or millisecond wise a bit for or later, a bit
[00:15:02] earlier, a bit later.
[00:15:06] But in my experience, this is always pretty tight.
[00:15:11] All right, this is not tight.
[00:15:20] Can you, I don't know, compress it a bit here with something.
[00:15:44] Then you have more like a bit more consistency between the loops because every time you exchange
[00:15:49] it a sample, basically only replace the top end because the low end always comes from
[00:15:55] this replacer here, right?
[00:16:11] Sometimes the loudness of the top end is a bit too loud or too quiet, but you can adjust
[00:16:16] this here.
[00:16:18] So that's what I usually do on the kick drum.
[00:16:20] Sometimes I do this also on the snare.
[00:16:23] So here's the snare and I do the same thing, basically, I use a replacer.
[00:16:31] And in here, you don't need a time shift, we just use a basic.
[00:16:35] You can also use the grid if you want to, but sometimes just use here the V1 snare of Bitwig.
[00:16:46] You want to have the ghost snares also in here, velocity sensitivity or it doesn't translate
[00:17:04] here more or less the sensitivity of the input signal.
[00:17:17] So we have the top layer from the sample and we have the bottom layer here from the V1
[00:17:22] snare.
[00:17:32] And again, maybe a bit of compression.
[00:17:45] And then you can keep this as long as possible in this state and figure out nice sequences,
[00:18:06] maybe nice samples.
[00:18:08] And when you are done, you just bounce it out into audio and you have kick drum layered
[00:18:15] snare samples, hi-hats, some patterns, and you can play around with this and maybe make
[00:18:22] a song out of it.
[00:18:24] So this is what I tried recently, I also tried to do this with ambient with some ambient
[00:18:31] drum loops or drum samples.
[00:18:36] So that's what I did recently inside of Atlas, I want to show you this, maybe it gives you
[00:18:42] some ideas and maybe you can try it out for yourself.
[00:18:47] I don't know how expensive Atlas is nowadays, I bought this a few years ago and they just
[00:18:52] put out updates after update and it doesn't cost anything, so it's pretty dope to have,
[00:19:01] I would say.
[00:19:02] Anyway, so that's what I did in Atlas, I want to show you this.
[00:19:07] That's it for this video, thanks for watching, leave a like, leave a subscription, let me
[00:19:10] know what you think, maybe you already do this.
[00:19:14] I have no idea.
[00:19:15] Okay, thanks for watching, see you next video, bye.