Speedy brush sounds
How Borsta can spice up your contemporary beats
Our plug-in Borsta specializes in brushed percussion, a staple of Jazz or Merengue for instance. But Borsta can do so much more than that, and add something extra to your beat in almost any genre. Here’s a great example of how you can use it to build a Drum & Bass groove.
Drum & Bass, characterized by prominent fast rhythms and heavy basses, might not be the first musical style one thinks of when brushed percussion is mentioned. But we think the combination works wonderfully and is a great testament to Borsta’s versatility. A signature feature of the genre is complex syncopations and very fast breakbeats – typically around 165-185 bpm. Borsta will follow the tempo in your DAW, so for this style of music you’ll want to have a fast tempo set. All right, let’s get into it.
The main groove
Choose one of the instruments (we’ve chosen “Snare 2”) and click on one shots. Have it playing 16th notes and play around with the velocity to your own liking. There’s a preset called Snare 16ths if you want a good starting point.
Under the global menu you will find a Pitch knob. Turn it all the way up. (Might not fit in with all the instruments. Play around with it!)
Add some strokes! Go to the Events editing view and add some stroke events (represented by red boxes). Note that the Envelope editing view (with the blue line) is determining the speed of the brush.
The fills
Borsta comes loaded with quite a large amount of presets. A whole category is dedicated to fills. A good method, for a convenient and quick workflow, is to start with a preset for a fill, tweak it and nudge things here and there to fit the track. Sometimes you might not even need to change a thing!
We hope this will inspire you to try Borsta in musical contexts and genres that might not at first strike you as obvious for brushed percussion. Borsta comes packed with a lot of ready to go beats, but it also lends itself really well to experimentation, so let your creativity run wild and don’t forget to save your own user presets after coming up with something cool and unique that you like.
We got to borrow this amazing track from most talented audio engineer and composer Ian Eiderbo.