Goal

Okay! We're going to make a versatile and useful four to the floor beat from scratch in Milky. If you're not familiar with this beat, check out wikipedia. It lays the foundation for disco, house music, and a whole host of other danceable tracks.

Not familiar with MilkyTracker? Check it out. It's a great tracker and way to make some music on your PC like it's 1992. The below should be accessible to anyone who has simply downloaded and started MilkyTracker, but I'd definitely recommend reading the Guide first.

Setup

Before we begin, let's make some quick adjustments to make sure everything is right before we begin hacking. This will mostly focus on the top left section of the window.

Important here is to set the rows. In our case, we want the number in the Rows column to say "10", note this is hexadecimal, so this means actually 16 total rows. There is sadly no hotkey for this in MilkyTracker. Also note that there're two buttons "*" and "/" that add and remove, respectively 10 rows.

Let's set our BPM. We'll go with something decently danceable and let's set BPM to 125 (CTRL K increases by 5, CTRL J increases by 1, CTRL G decreases by 5, CTRL H decreases by 1).

TPB should be set to 6.

Let's set our Step to 4 (adjust up with Shift J and down with Shift H). This will move us down automatically 4 spaces when we place a note, handy for something like four to the floor.

OCT (i.e. octave) should be set to 4.

Kick

Hopefully you've loaded the kiarchive. Let's work with some famous 808 sounds today. These should be located in this directory : kiarchive/CATEGORY/PERCUSS/DRUMMACH/ROLAND/TR808B/. Let's load the kick (i.e. 808kick).

Immediately after loading, if you press the "C" key, you SHOULD hear the sound of the kick in the fourth octave key of C. Hopefully it sounds like a drum!

Let's paint some drums in this pattern. On the 00 line, make sure you're selected the three dots to the left (highlighted in blue). Make sure you're in record mode (the entire row is backgrounded in red), otherwise press Space to enter record mode. Finally, press "C" four times.

You should see "E-4 1" appear on the line 00, 04, 08, and 12. This means the note of E in the fourth octave is being played on instrument 1.

Press space to get out of edit mode (it's good practice so you don't add anything unintentional). Then press Enter to play your music. Groovy. We've made a metronome. Press Esc to stop playing.

Clap

Let's do the same, but in the second channel (i.e. the channel to the right of our kicks). First we need to load the instrument into the 2nd instrument. Make sure to move down one from the kick, then press Load and find the claps which are in a different directory: kiarchive/CATEGORY/PERCUSS/DRUMMACH/ROLAND/TR808D/ . Let's test those suckers out by pressing the 'C' key again. Ooh, C-4 is a bit low for a clap, the sample is even too slow. Let's try out octave 5 (either increment with the + button or press F5). Better! I actually like the sound of the B key (i.e. note G-5).

Let's put our claps on the two and the four, that is go to line 04, second channel, the first three dots and press the B key when in edit mode. Do the same on line 12.

Let's press Enter and hear what we got. Nice! A little more rhythm and whatnot going on there.

I'm a little unhappy with the volume of the claps. There're a number of ways to adjust the volume of instruments in MilkyTracker, but I will use this opportunity to explore more of the pattern editor area. So far, we've only worked with the first five spaces of a row (for example, the clap row shows "G-5 2" which fills up the entire five dots. As we know, that means "play a G in the octave of five on instrument two".

The two dots to the right of the light blue 2 represent volume percentage. These will be highlighted in green. Next to our two claps, let's put in the number 20 which represents the volume at half (40 max, 0 is ... zero)..

This sounds much better!

Hats

Okay, want to round out the the pattern? Let's add some high hats. The closed hat sample I am going to use is yet again from TR808B folder and named 808hhcl1.xi (directory : kiarchive/CATEGORY/PERCUSS/DRUMMACH/ROLAND/TR808B/). Playing around with it on the keyboard, I hear it sounds best to me at an E-5. Let's put these hats on the off beats (i.e. row 02, 06, 10, 14). Awesome. This is getting somewhere.

I personally think these beats could be brought down in volume, but maybe you don't agree. If you think so, follow what we did with the claps and put them at 20 volume (green section, 5 dots over from the left).

Let's make use of our first effect (the last three dots of the section). For the hats it would be nice to have a bit of a shuffle effect. MilkyTracker does not have a shuffle/swing button like certain audio applications and therefore we replicate this with effects. An effect, as documented in the manual, is always a letter in the first dot indicating the TYPE of effect and then number in the next two dots that give value to the effect. In our case, we're going to use the effect with the letter F. F is set song speed/BPM. From the manual, this says that any number below 1F will set the speed (i.e. TPB, ticks per beat) of that row and any number above 1F will set the BPM.

In our case, we want to go between 5 and 6 TPB in every other row to get that swing effect. Let's go line by line and alternate F05 and F06. Play it again and you'll notice there's much more of a swing. Want to try to hear the difference? Highlight (either with the mouse)

Add Some Variation

Okay. We have the basic four to the floor, we even added some swing. Let's add some weirdness.

Those kicks could use a bit of some variation. Let's add some more kicks at the end, but maybe a bit higher in pitch. I added a C-5 kick at row 13 and row 15.

Now you try: Go add in either a Tom or a Cowbell. Don't go crazy. Let's add three hits. Two close to eachother (one beat separating), the other farther away.

Congrats! You've just written a drum pattern in MilkyTracker. Go build off of this. Add a b ass track! Explore more effects! Put in a melody!