CircuitStomp_

Music is organised around a steady pulse, the beat. BPM is how many beats happen per minute. Four beats make a bar in almost all dance music (that is “4/4”). This sequencer splits one bar into 16 steps, so each step is a sixteenth note and every fourth step lands on a beat. The slightly brighter columns mark those beats.

Drum & bass lives around 170–175 BPM. House is around 120–128, hip-hop 85–95, dubstep 140. Halve 174 and you get 87 — which is why D&B can feel fast and laid-back at the same time.

Try: load the example, press Run, then drag BPM from 174 down to 87 and back.

Most genres are recognised by where the kick and snare sit. D&B's classic two-step puts the snare on beats 2 and 4 (steps 5 and 13) and a kick on step 1 with a second kick pushed late, around step 11. That late kick is what makes it “roll” instead of march.

Try: move the second kick one step either side and listen to how much the feel changes.

Hi-hats carry the speed. Not every hit should be the same volume: velocity (how hard a note is played) is what makes a pattern sound performed rather than typed. Tap a step repeatedly to cycle full, medium and soft. Soft “ghost” notes between loud ones create groove.

Swing delays every second sixteenth a little. Small amounts (10–25) loosen a groove; big amounts turn it into a shuffle.

Syncopation means putting accents where the ear does not expect them — off the beat. Jungle and D&B grew out of chopping up sampled funk drum breaks and rearranging the hits, which produces busy, syncopated kick and snare patterns with ghost snares everywhere.

The example is an original amen-style pattern made from robot voices. Use Robot brain → jungle to generate more, then Mutate to vary them.

Every sound has an envelope: how fast it starts (attack) and how long it lasts (Decay). Pitch moves it up or down in semitones; 12 semitones is an octave. Tone is a low-pass filter: it removes high frequencies, making things darker. Grit is distortion: it adds harmonics and makes things louder and rougher. Robotize is a ring modulator, the classic sci-fi robot-voice effect: it multiplies the sound by a tone, creating metallic sidebands.

Try: select the SNARE, turn Decay right down, Grit up, and Robotize to half. Then use pitch lock paint mode to give single steps their own pitch.

Pan places a sound left or right. Keep kick, snare and bass in the middle; spread the percussion. Reverb simulates a room; delay repeats the sound in time with the tempo (here a dotted eighth, a D&B favourite). These are send effects: each unit sends a chosen amount into one shared effect, which keeps the mix coherent and saves processing.

Rule of thumb: the lower the sound, the less reverb. Reverb on a kick or bass turns the low end to mud.

The NEURO unit is a “reese”-style bass: two slightly detuned saw waves beating against each other, with a sub sine underneath. It is tuned to A. Use pitch lock to write a bassline: 0 = A, +3 = C, +5 = D, +7 = E. Those are notes of A minor, a safe home key.

Leave space between kick and bass: if they hit at the same moment they fight for the same low frequencies.

Dance music is built in phrases of 8, 16 or 32 bars. Something should change at every phrase boundary: a new sound comes in, one drops out, or a fill leads into the next section. A typical D&B track: intro (drums thin), build, drop (everything), breakdown (drums out), second drop, outro for DJs to mix out of.

Write short patterns in A–H, then type a chain such as A A A B A A A C and switch on Song mode. Each letter is one bar.

This is an instrument, not only a sequencer. Hit units with keys A S D F G H J K over a running pattern. Press Rec and your hits are written in, snapped to the nearest step (quantised). Turn on Keys mode and play the selected unit chromatically like a keyboard.

Performance moves that work: mute and solo units to build tension; switch patterns on the beat with 1–8; sweep the master Filter down before a drop and open it on the one.

With a real kit or pad: plug an electronic kit or pad controller in over USB and open the MIDI drawer. The default General MIDI kit note map means your kick pedal plays KICK, snare plays SNARE, hats play HAT, and toms and cymbals play the robot voices. Turn on Click, play along, then press Rec. Expect a little delay (latency) from any browser: wired headphones and a computer, rather than Bluetooth, keep it tight.

Gain staging means keeping levels sensible at every stage so nothing distorts by accident. Digital audio clips hard at 0 dBFS. Leave headroom: aim for the mix to peak around −6 dBFS before any limiter, and export at −1 dBFS. The Glue limiter catches peaks; it is a safety net, not a volume knob.

Mix quietly, check on phone speakers and on headphones, and compare against a track you love at the same loudness.

A DAW is where tracks get finished. Open Export and press Reaper pack: you get every unit as its own WAV stem, all exactly the same length and starting at zero, a mix, a MIDI file, a manifest, and a .RPP project that opens in Reaper with each stem on its own named track. Unzip the whole folder first, then open the .RPP.

In other DAWs (Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, Bitwig) drag all stems in at bar 1 and set the project tempo to the one in the manifest. The step-by-step version is in the PDF guide below.