How I made this Future Funk beat

Here’s a quick look at how I made this future funk beat. I‘m really into chopping up guitar parts for inspiration at the moment and this idea started with some Telecaster notes which I chopped and then built a slow funk groove around.

Behind The Beat

Guitar Chops

This idea started with a guitar melody part which I then chopped up into the individual notes to make it sound more like a sampled part.

Guitar Sound Design

With the guitar melody part down, the next thing I did was do some sound design to try and create a bright guitar part that would fit with some hi fi drums. First I used Soundtoys Little Alterboy to mess with the formant of the guitar note.

After Little Alterboy I then fed the guitar sound into Guitar Rig running a preset called ‘Arpeggio Delays’.

After this I fed the sound post-amp into Decimort (to give a bitcrushing sparkle effect, Valhalla Shimmer for an epic reverb and a pretty steep shelving EQ to stop keep the sound in a fairly small sonic box).

Bass Line Pt 1

The next part I got down was the bass line on my Lakland bass. I wanted a funk vibe underneath the guitar. I decided to treat the bass as more of a ‘mid bass’. This meant I could process it more like a guitar and I used this Guitar Rig patch with a few tweaks.

Bass Line Pt 2

With the funk part of the bass track down, I wanted to add some Sub power. Fo this I layered an 808 underneath the bass guitar. I used ADSR Sounds Sub Zero 808 Kontakt patch.

Guitar Chords

The guitar chords are all minor triads. They sit on the 5th above the root note of each chord to give a minor 9th feeling. Each chord is the same min 9th to give a parallel harmony sound. This technique is pretty common in RnB and comes from the Jazz world.

For the guitar tone I used Guitar Rig again:

To this I added a bit of a Decimort bitcrushing effect to emulate the sound Daft Punk got on the samples from Discovery.

Synth and Keys

The synth swells were done on the Nord 2X using one of its Prophet recreation patches. I added a gain Utility plugin to automate the level to make it more dramatic

The chords were also doubled on a Rhodes patch in Kontakt. The main sound was a Kontakt library by Soniccouture:

This Rhodes sound was then fed throughout the stock Ableton guitar amp plugin for a bit more grit.

Drums

The final piece of the puzzle was the beat. Again I used Boi1da’s drum pack for most of the key sounds. I loaded up a bunch into the Ableton drum rack to play in a beat using Launchpad, and then separated them out for final mixing.

Let me know if you’ve any comments or questions below and if you want to see more on sound design on bass and guitar check this post.