Beat This: producers making a beat, from nothing to done, in 10 minutes

January 17, 2014 3:11 PM

Don't Watch That TV is a rabbit hole of fun and weird videos, mostly focused on urban/ dance/ electronic music, sorted into 20 different "channels" or programs. To make this timesink more manageable, I'd like to bring your attention to their Beat This channel, wherein producers are challenged to create a new beat, from scratch, in 10 minutes. The first mix is from a young producer who goes by Swindle, and he pulls off a pretty nice track in the time allotted, joking he should do all his tracks in ten minutes. But if that doesn't catch your fancy, and all those producers names don't mean anything to you, may I present Kieren Hebden, aka Four Tet, making a beat with nothing but MJ's Thriller album as the source material, sampling and distorting it into something weird and new.

If you're looking for more weirdness from Four Tet, you might enjoy his two hour Just Jam mix, with audio and visuals mixed live at the time of recording. If you want a TON of music, definitely check out the Just Jam channel, but note that the early days were fun but pretty rough, and those episodes are streaming through Ustream instead of YouTube.

posted by filthy light thief (8 comments total)

The Thriller beat with Ableton is fascinating. I am still rusty on Ableton, but damn he moved that smoothly.
posted by Benway at 5:11 PM on January 17, 2014

What I'm most impressed with is how spacious his house is; either he's made of money to be able to afford that kind of space (I'm guessing he's in London or Brighton) or he truly lives the life of a Zen ascetic, with only a laptop, some monitor speakers, a crate of vinyl and some tastefully alternative art prints.
posted by acb at 5:56 PM on January 17, 2014

Coincidentally, I am putting together a track in Maschine as I web surf.

I wonder when this got called "making beats" though. My resistance toward using that terminology has pretty much broken down, but it used to really bug me.
posted by Foosnark at 7:46 PM on January 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's fun to watch this. Interesting to see how different producers go through their composition process.

I don't know how loaded that 4tet guy is if his monitors are KRK though. Nice house, if it is indeed his. Then again, if you're listening in an untreated room, I suppose there isn't much sense in dropping a load of bread on some expensive monitors.

There isn't necessarily anything strictly new about what he's doing - you could pretty much do the same thing with an MPC3000 back in 1994, just without the GUI (& plugins for delay & EQ). Maybe not quite as quickly.
posted by faceattack at 8:30 PM on January 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

When watching Hebden's, I really wished YouTube had a kind of picture-in-picture thing where you can have a screen capture of what's going on in Ableton in the corner synced with the video of him working and switch between the two on the fly.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:22 PM on January 17, 2014

Fans of this series may also enjoy Rhythm Roulette
posted by confabulous at 10:07 AM on January 19, 2014 [1 favorite]

Fourtet's new mix, 1234567890qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm (Soundcloud stream/download), includes his Thriller rework.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:54 PM on January 28, 2014

If you're listening to the mix and listening for the track, it's one of the last one played. It starts near 1hr 4min 30sec, and runs less than a minute and a half.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:35 PM on January 30, 2014