Tuning drums & strategies with Farhan Rehman

Farhan Rehman is a Mumbai based DJ, music producer & radio host known for his groovy music productions and funky beat-driven disco, house & afro sets featuring unconventional, multi-cultural elements.

  

Farhan first broke into the scene when his Beatport remix competition entry for Josh Wink’s track ‘Balls‘ was chosen for an official release by the Techno icon on his label Ovum Records. With collaborations and remixes for some of the symbolic figures in the world / jazz genres like Asha Putli, Bassekou kouyate, Farhan’s music has garnered supported from some of the biggest names in the electronic music fraternity such as Hernan Cattaneo, Nick Warren, and Eelke Kleijn, along with many others from the home grown DJ community. 

Farhan has co hosted the much hyped Cosmic Disco Bar at Magnetic Fields festival 2019, closed for Jodhpur Jazz Safari and has also performed at leading venues in the country such as Kitty Su, Bonobo, Whiskey Samba, Antares Goa amongst others. Currently the host of the popular show “The House of Juju” on boxout.fm where he pushes his musical boundaries by inculcating genres like disco & house music along with jazz, afro and funk. He has also shared the stage with leading industry figures like Red Rack ‘Em, Toto Chiavetta, Wanklemut, Undercatt, Big Miz, amongst others. 

With a slew of releases lined up this year, this young powerhouse is definitely one to keep an eye on!

We caught up with Farhan to speak about making music and learn a few of the tricks off his sleeve.

“Hey Guys, thanks for having me on board for this. I’d like to start with a simple trick that I do to tune my kick.

"You can try this with any kick sample. I’ve taken a standard kick sample that I’ve chosen randomly and loaded it into Ableton’s Simpler/Sampler. 

Earlier, my method would be to use a kick with more top end and layer it with this kick that I have but this process takes longer and you may over process the sound. The trick I’m going to show you now is something I learnt while teaching one of my own students.

You can do this with Ableton’s Simpler/Sampler, I’m going to use Sampler to show you how. You can hear that it has a nice sub/low end to it. My preference is to have a more rounded kick, what I mean by this is I’d like my kick to have a bit of high frequency/top end to it as well.”

Steps:

1. Load your kick sample into sampler
2. Turn on the pitch envelope under the Pitch/Osc tab
3. Start up by turning up the Amount. (I’ve used -12 st to start with but you can adjust these settings by ear
4. You can hear the kick sound has changed, but this isn’t near to what I want
5. Next, we’ll start adjusting the Peak and bring it down to somewhere between 30-40%
6. You can now start hearing a slight difference
7. Play around with the amount and peak settings till you find your sweet spot. For this i’m keeping my Amount at -12st and bring down the peak to about 31%

“On it’s own you hear this sounds pretty okay, with the rest of the track this kick will now stand out in the mix because the transient is more present now.

You can further play around with the decay and fine tune it.

Now we can go to the Filter/Global settings tab on Sampler and tighten this kick sound with the Amplitude envelope. Let’s adjust the decay and sustain just a bit.”

“If you compare the before and after, we started with a kick that has a good low end but not enough transient. And now with this process so far we have a kick with a more overall presence and that will cut better in the mix as well.

We can take this a notch further and add a little bit of drive to this.”

Steps:

1. In the Filter/Global settings, select OSR under Circuit
2. Adjust the drive to your liking. You can already hear the kick has better body
3. Add a shaper. Select Soft Type and adjust the amount

“We can go another step further and experiment with the frequency modulation under Pitch/Osc”

1. Activate OSC
2. Set the coarse value to a higher pitch. This will ensure it won’t interfere with the lower frequency as that’s the driving part of the kick and the track as a whole
3. Now we adjust the volume accordingly
4. Tweak the decay to tighten the sound

“You can now hear the kick sounds more full, it has a better transient and presence.

We can also take this a step further by adding a sub to this. Let’s see how that sounds.”

1. Load Ableton’s Operator on a new MIDI channel
2. Select a Sine wave on a single oscillator (by default this will be it when you load Operator)
3. Reset the transpose to match the key of the kick (In this case it’s -22st)
4. Tweak the sustain and decay till you find the sweet spot

“Group the kick and sub channel together & a little compression on it. I usually like to turn off the make-up gain because that’s one of the last things I would want.”

Compressor settings:

• Ratio - 2:1
• High release - ~ 230 khz
• Attack - ~ 1-2 ms
• Threshold between -5/-6 dB

“These are minor tweaks as we only want a max of -2dB gain reduction. Now we can hear that the kick is much punchier and this is because of the higher attack on the compressor which is allowing the initial transients to pass. This gives my kick that's `Knock” and the rest of the kick is well rounded."

"This is one of the few ways to tune your kicks without overly processing them with plugins. 

We can use the similar method and layer 808 kicks and Cymbals with your original kick to achieve a similar result. But layering again will take up a little more time.”

“Something to note, if you’re layering kicks, it’s always a good idea to transpose each sample by a few semitones up and down to ensure that they are in key."

“I do this method for tuning my kicks because it saves me time. I’ve come to believe that most of what you want is there within your stock plugins itself. For me, I think going through samples takes a lot away from your creative time. The time that can be spent writing musical ideas can go away very easily in the pursuit of finding the right sample. So if you’re able to develop better strategies on how to approach your music, it will save you a lot of time."

"I can apply this same exact process on a Bass sound. Let’s try that out now."

“See that? I picked up a random bass sample from Ableton and in less than 10 seconds we have a slap bass sound.”

DJP: Considering you strategize your approach when you work on your music, we’re guessing you have some go to synths that you use for your particular style?

“The Arturia Prophet is my go to synth. I’m so fond of it and the other Arturia plugins because it’s very close to the analog sound in terms of warmth & is so easy to use. I love the filter on the Prophet, it has its own flavour to it. For the kind of sounds that I want for my music, it’s very effective and a great sounding plug-in. I LOVE using this a lot. I use it for my leads, bass and other melodic elements.”

“I also like using Ableton’s operator for main sounds and to layer around my core sounds.

One of the great things about the operator is, it is an FM synth and you have options for modulating chains for your oscillators.

Other plugins I like to use are the Fabfilter Pro Q and C (EQ & compressor), they’re both very powerful and easy to use. Every 3rd party plugin comes with it’s own coloration of sound and I quite like the Fabfilter ones for the final output they give as I can do my processing without too much added color to my sound.”

DJP: Any advice/points you’d like to give upcoming producers?

“If the foundation of your track is good, all your workload will be reduced to just choosing the right samples and sounds, sticking to the musicality and the arrangement. The rest is just tweaking and fiddling with things. It’s like your diet - the better food you have, the better your body will function otherwise you’ll have some ailments or the other."

“There’s also a lot of influx of information and products out there which sometimes make you feel like having or wanting things you don’t really need and that can deviate you from the creative possibilities. You should be exploring creative possibilities. Essentially what you’re doing otherwise is throwing something at a wall and hoping it sticks. That’s great for your learning curve but it’s always better to have a maximum of 2-3 synths and getting to know them better as opposed to having 10 different synths for 10 different sounds and having no clue of what each one is capable of.”

“Keep things as simple and organic as possible.”

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We’re very grateful to Farhan for taking the time to do this and share these valuable tips. If you liked these tips, try them out and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

You can follow & listen to Farhan's music on the following links:

Farhan Rehman on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farhanrehman_/

Farhan Rehman on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6ErzjIzJFGx5e3dQKEduhD

Farhan Rehman on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/farhan-rehman/982134691

https://open.spotify.com/track/5fDf36Ghdn9hUyjombIe9T?si=R5DxWLmFSiOleh4Ul0VE_g&utm_source=copy-link&dl_branch=1

Would love to hear from you'll :) 

Love light and boom! 

Dha - song by Ahamm | Spotify

Ahamm · Song · 2021

A Breadboard (69 INR)

Arduino Leonardo Microcontroller with USB Cable (749 INR)

4 Resistors (10 INR)

4 Push Button Sensors  (100 INR)

4 Rotary Potentiometers ( 130 INR)

Plastic Knobs for Potentiometers (50 INR)  

XY module (Joystick) (55 INR)  

Ableton Live Standard or Suite (9 or higher)

Arduino IDE (software) 

Du Pont Jumper Cables - Male-Female (60 INR)

Du Pont Jumper Cables - Male-Male (55 INR)

Loose Jumper cables (89 INR)

Amazon Cardboard Box 

2 L Clamps with screws [cheaper to buy from a local hardware shop] (20-30 INR)

Glue gun (170 INR)

Cutting Blade

Prerequisite Softwares on your computer

• Download and Install Arduino IDE software
• Download and install Ableton Live  (Ignore if you already have a working suite/standard of version 9 or above)
• Download and install Max For Live Connection Kit for Ableton Live.

• For the outer +ve and -ve rows, the signal is internally shared across the pins row-wise.
  

•  For the middle section (i.e - a,b,c,d,e rows and f,g,h,i,j rows) signal is internally shared column-wise. Now let's start building our controller.

Step by Step Guide:

A good place to start is by testing if all our equipment works! So we'll start by wiring our sensors while understanding how they work.

Connecting and testing the Sensors 

• Use 2 Male-Male Du Pont Cables to connect the Arduino’s 5V and Ground (GND) pin to the Breadboard’s +ve and -ve rows as shown below.
  

This ensures that the power supply is distributed across the rows.

• Connect a Potentiometer to the Arduino, via the breadboard.

Notice that the outer left & right pins of the potentiometer go the -’ve and +ve rows respectively. Don’t worry if the order is reversed. This basically powers up the Potentiometer.

• Hook up the middle pin to any one of the six Analog Inputs (A0 to A5). This is the live pin that relays a message to the Arduino Controller, whenever we turn the potentiometer knob, clockwise or anticlockwise.

• Connect the Push Button to Arduino via the breadboard.
  

We need 3 jumper wires and a resistor for every button we connect as described below.

• Wire 1: Connect one terminal of the Button directly to +’ve row on the breadboard. Connect the other terminal.
• Wire 2: Connect another terminal of Button to the row labelled ‘g’ on the breadboard. Make note of the column number. (here, its column 26).
• Resistor: Connect one leg of a resistor, on an adjacent pin (row h) on the same column and connect the other leg directly to any column on the -ve row. We can use any resistor of values between 100 Ohms to 10MegaOhms.
• Wire 3: Connect one end to another adjacent pin (row f) of the same column on breadboard. Other end goes to one of the Arduino’s digital pins - 0 to 13. (digital pin 0).

This ensures that when button is pressed, current flows across the button, and the digital pin should receive an ‘ON’ message.

• Connect a Joystick to the Arduino, via the breadboard.

Joystick pins from left to right - Ground, 5V, X pin, Y pin, button.

We only need the first 4 pins here. The joystick can be understood as 2 potentiometers mashed up together, one in the X direction and the other in the Y direction. They share a common power supply. Thus, moving the joystick knob can vary the live readings from both X and Y pins.

• Connect the Ground and 5V pins to the breadboard's power rails just like we did with the potentiometer. Connect the X and Y pins to any two remaining Analog Inputs (here, A1 & A2 as we used A0 for the Potentiometer)

• Connect the Arduino to your laptop with a USB cable (micro USB to USB Cable for Arduino Leonardo)

• Run the Arduino IDE software and open the ‘Standard Firmata Code.

• Upload the code onto Arduino hardware by hitting the Upload button.

Once uploaded, this code will sit inside Arduino's memory. The Standard Firmata code prepares the Arduino to easily communicate with external devices and softwares; in our case we use this to pair with Ableton's Max for live device.

• Once it is done uploading, start Ableton Live and open the installed Max Connection Kit Pack. Under Devices - Find and load ‘Arduino’ max device onto a track.

The Arduino device is part of the Max for live Connection kit. It has been deviced to communicate with the Arduino inputs and outputs via the serial usb ports, and interact with parameters within Ableton Live!

• Test the sensors by mapping them via the max for live device!

Here, we see two tabs Analog and Digital. Analog refers to the set of 6 analog inputs on the Arduino Hardware. Digital refers to the set of 14 digital I/O pins.  In our illustration, we had connected the potentiometer to A0, and the joystick pins to A1 and A2 respectively. We connected the Button as digital input 0.

• Click on the Map button next for the A0 pin.

• Next, click on any device parameter that you’d like to control. If the connection is assigned successfully, you will see the parameter color greyed out.

This means we can control it with the potentiometer sensor connected to A0 on Arduino, and no longer directly move it. So try moving the potentiometer dial to verify.

• Do the same with the pins connected to the X and Y inputs of your joystick controller and verify 

Here we used A1 and A2 to map to arpeggiators Rate and Steps respectively.

• To test the buttons, switch to the digital tab. Click on Map for pin D0 and click a parameter that works like a 2 state button. 
  

In this case, we assigned it to the track on/off switch. Verify if the track stays on while the button is pressed. 

Once we've tested and understood the connections for our sensors, we can prepare the cardboard housing!   

Prepare the housing

• Place the cardboard box as shown and cut out the top panel at the left and right edges.
  

• Hot glue the lower half of the front panel to the side flaps.

• Hook a pair of L clamps on either side of the top panel to give it stability. Start by taping the sides, to help the L clamp screws sit properly.

• Place the L clamp on the inner edge corners and thrust the screws in from the other side. Secure the clamp screws with nuts.
  

• On the Plastic takeaway cover, measure and mark positions where we have to cut holes for our sensors.

Be sure not to set them too close as every sensor needs space for wires sticking out of them. 

• Outline a circular trace with a marker pen matching the form of the respective sensors.  You can use the washers/nuts that come along with potentiometers/buttons to help trace these.  Use a blade to cut along the circular trace and make holes.

The holes to secure the joystick may be too slim for the blade. You can use a ballpoint pen or a screw driver to force tiny openings in the marked positions.

• Finally, test if all the sensors can actually fit into the openings meant for them. Make adjustments as necessary.
  
  
•  Use the blade to trace against the plastic cutout and make openings in the cardboard box top panel as well. Hot glue the plastic to the top panel of the cardboard box.

• Use double-sided tape to secure the breadboard and Arduino inside the box.
  

The Arduino will have to be connected to the USB cable for use, so make sure to stick it appropriately so the cable is easily accessible.

Install all sensors to the housing

• Push the Button sensors into the top panel openings. If it's too tight try turning clockwise to use the threading and screw it in.
  

• Secure them with washers/bolts.

• Do the same for the potentiometers. Drive it in from the inner side of the top panel.
  

• Lock them in from the top side using bolts.

• Now is a good time to place some fancy knobs on to the sensors.

Before you do place them, turn the potentiometer dials fully anticlockwise, and ensure that the plastic knob’s position indicators align in the same way as you place them.

• Faster the Joystick to the box using screws.

It helps to pull out the cap for easy access.

• Make an opening on the front panel adjacent to the joystick. 

This is to make way for the joystick wiring.

Wiring them all up

Now that everything is in place, it's time to wire up our sensors to Arduino via the breadboard. Refer to the first set of instructions under ‘Connecting and testing the sensors’ steps as a guide. The below schematic should give you a clear reference of how all these connections should look like.

• We start with the power connections - Arduino's ground pin and 5V pin to the breadboard as discussed.
  

• Start connecting the buttons

Here we connect the 4 buttons to Arduino's digital input pins 0, 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

For every button, replicate what we did in the test connections parallelly. This means we'll need 3 wires and a resistor per button. Make sure you've cut sufficient lengths on the loose single lead jumper wires, for the 2 terminals on the button. 

• Connect the 4 potentiometers and the joystick similarly. Here we’re connecting them to A0, A1, A2, and A3 for the potentiometer; A4 and A5 for the joystick's XY pins. 

Your fingers will be swimming in a pool of wires when you're close to finishing!

• Tape the Joystick wiring on the top panel just to secure them in place.

Unlike soldering, hot glue works with plastic! 

Use hot glue on every connection, on your buttons, potentiometers, joystick, and breadboard.  

Finally, use the USB cable to connect the Arduino to your computer. The Program that you already loaded while testing should still be active, so there's no need to run Arduino IDE software again. Open Ableton, run the Arduino (max for live) device, and start mapping all your inputs to Ableton Live's parameters as we discussed.

That’s about it! 

We hope this article helps you build and play your very own DIY midi controller! Also hope that you learned something about electronics along the way. Let us know if you have any questions or comments about making this in the comments below :)