21 replies to this topic

[New to this]

I have been trying to get my double time down. But I seem to be getting no where. Any suggestions on how to practice?
Thanks

[Supacuts]

Maybe try this: If you regularly cut at say, 90bpm, grab some 160bpm Drum and Bass tracks and jam to them, increasing the bpm to 180bpm. Then when you go back to 90bpm, you should be able to easily slip into double time.

Good luck if you cut at 130bpm though!

[hipnopath]

With practice, practice, and practice. Get DJ Babu's speed booster.

[DjZee]

hipnopath, on 19 February 2012 - 02:58 AM, said:

Get DJ Babu's speed booster.

any links to where i can get that? wouldnt mind a go on that myself

[sm.ghanem]

What do people mean by double time - 64th/32nd/16th notes?

I find though, that speed boosters can be a double-edged sword. You can get caught in a race to be as fast as possible, instead of taking your time with each new tempo so you're not slopping your way to 130 bpm

[Darcyd]

I go for "duple" or "compound" before i hit double, i may be wording it wrong as i am unfamiliar with music vocab, but by increasing the speed of your cuts by 50% over the same bpm you are very comfortable playing at, 1. you get to learn new timing over the same tempo 2. you will be half way there. Just increasing the bpm, till you are fast enough to cut at double seems too boring for me. Strange timing is where it's at for me.

I do not say this is the best way to do it, it's just how i do it.

[sm.ghanem]

Agreed, I use triplets are a bridge to doubling up the speed. going from 16 16ths each bar to to 24 16ths per bar is a nice segue into doing 32nd notes. I made myself a tempo trainer in which each quarter note switches from simple 16th hats to triplet hats, nice way of drilling down rhythm changes. The difference between triplets and straight notes can be lost to your ears when the tempo goes fast enough

[Jam Burglar]

The way I always came up, cutting double time meant cutting with your flow twice as fast, and it usually meant cutting over slow BPM beats. So, over an 80 bpm beat, you're cutting at 160 bpm. Maybe 10-12 years ago you'd see a lot of really slow beats on scratch records. I had never heard of "dubstep" at that time but they were pretty much in that same vein.

If you can't cut over electro (120 bpm or so) then learn that and try to make the natural progression to doubletime. Much, but not all, of speed cutting is illusion. Certain patterns just sound fast. The joe cooley scratch is a perfect example of that. Other scratches, like chirps, are actually fast, and sound fast, but aren't so diffficult at double-time speeds.

But yeah, the big advantage is not just being able to cut fast, it's being able to go from single time to double time, using triplet patterns, etc. It's all about variation to keep things interesting. If you just cut super-fast for 3 minutes its going to sound boring after about 30 seconds.

[kwote]

Most of my speed building came from working over medium tempo beats like 80 bpm. While it is useful to kut over faster beats to increase speed, a good way to work on faster kuts is to cram more notes per beat. So for instance, instead of doing quarter notes (1 note per beat) over a 4/4 beat, go for 8th notes (2 notes per beat). Then go for 8th note triplets (3 notes per beat). Then 16th's (4 notes per beat) and 16th note triplets (6 notes per beat), etc.

Hint: Instead of trying to do this constantly over every beat of a 4/4 measure, try just fitting your notes over the 1 of a 4/4 beat. It's often times easier to lessen the work load when trying to meet speed challenges in the early stages.

[Unseen]

Jam Burglar, on 20 February 2012 - 01:57 PM, said:

The way I always came up, cutting double time meant cutting with your flow twice as fast, and it usually meant cutting over slow BPM beats. So, over an 80 bpm beat, you're cutting at 160 bpm. Maybe 10-12 years ago you'd see a lot of really slow beats on scratch records. I had never heard of "dubstep" at that time but they were pretty much in that same vein.

If you can't cut over electro (120 bpm or so) then learn that and try to make the natural progression to doubletime. Much, but not all, of speed cutting is illusion. Certain patterns just sound fast. The joe cooley scratch is a perfect example of that. Other scratches, like chirps, are actually fast, and sound fast, but aren't so diffficult at double-time speeds.

But yeah, the big advantage is not just being able to cut fast, it's being able to go from single time to double time, using triplet patterns, etc. It's all about variation to keep things interesting. If you just cut super-fast for 3 minutes its going to sound boring after about 30 seconds.

cosign. so if you cut double time over electro, youre cutting 240 bpm? in theory that sounds right, but does anyone actually cut 240 bpm? or is there a selection of cuts that sound complicated and suit this style? i have such a difficult time cutting to electro for that exact reason: im trying to fit in double time combos and it just falls to pieces.

[Jam Burglar]

Unseen, on 22 February 2012 - 01:58 AM, said:

cosign. so if you cut double time over electro, youre cutting 240 bpm? in theory that sounds right, but does anyone actually cut 240 bpm? or is there a selection of cuts that sound complicated and suit this style? i have such a difficult time cutting to electro for that exact reason: im trying to fit in double time combos and it just falls to pieces.

If you look at it like a flow thing (cutting at that pace for an extended period), I can't think of anybody cutting doubletime over electro. If you go back to the mid-late 80s there are lots of examples of DJs doing simple cuts over electro, pacing it so that it sounds fast (Joe Cooley, Cash Money, Jazzy Jeff, etc.). The Skratch Piklz took that style and added advanced techniques to the mix (crabs, flares) and then by the mid 90s seemed to be trying to push things faster and faster. The next natural progression was to go back to a slower beat, but to cut faster over it (doubltime). You'd think it might be a matter of just doing everything twice as fast, but much of it is how you phrase. Some stuff in true doubletime is so crazy taxing that you almost never hear it. For example, you don't hear a lot of transforms at that pace.

[Unseen]

Jam Burglar, on 22 February 2012 - 01:12 PM, said:

You'd think it might be a matter of just doing everything twice as fast, but much of it is how you phrase. Some stuff in true doubletime is so crazy taxing that you almost never hear it.

yeah this is how i imagined it to be. i cant get my head around how to make the cuts i have in my arsenal to sound right in this application.

[New to this]

How many 1 click flares in 1 bar @ double time?

[hipnopath]

I think two making 8 sounds with each sound as a quarter note in regular time so 1/8th notes in double.

[Unseen]

New to this, on 17 May 2012 - 03:26 AM, said:

How many 1 click flares in 1 bar @ double time?

that would be 4 1 click flares. someone correct me if im wrong. well actually to make it sound aesthetically correct, it would be 3 ending with an open foward scratch.

so it would sound like [with "ahhh"]: wikka wikka wikka ahhh. with this i mean the complete set in isolation and not in a phrase or sentence. if its part of a sentence (with continued cuts), you can do 4. the end of the 4th 1 click flare (wik-ka) just spills over into the next 1 bar measure.

[hhanonymous]

For what it's worth...Usually when I'm working a technique building speed, I use a similar method to Babu's speed booster, except doing it manually and assbackwards. I just tweak up the pitch on my PDX and ultra pitch from a slow tempo beat (70 bpm), Once I get comfortable at a certain pitch/bpm, I nudge up.

Just like drumming (real with sticks not on a turntable), climb in BPM is just as important and slowing down in BPM to get your muscles used to speeding up and slowing down. (Instead of getting used to starting slow and building speed) So when I'd reach a threshold of fatigue/comfort at high BPM, I'd take a break and then at that high BPM practice doing it at half and regular timing. Then nudge my way down in BPM.

After getting ok with that, I'd test it on different beats at different BPMs and usually by then I seem to have a grasp of being comfortable with the technique at different timings and speeds.

[New to this]

4 original flares in 1 bar is double time? Or 3 original flares with release on the 2nd snare?
Thanks

[Darcyd]

4 notes, 1 bar = reg time. 8 notes, 1 bar = double time. I did not go to music school, but that's what my brain tells me. I absolutely could be wrong, please let me know if i am.

[Darcyd]

I feel the post further up the thread by kwote gives a good explanation.

[Phonetic]

Iv been learning double time boomerangs the past couple of weeks & they're driving me mental. Iv been starting at REAL slow bpm's then gradually building up. Drilling like that is frustrating as fu*k but I do think Im getting my brain around it now.
Practice, practice, practice & all that.