Dubstep can be characterized by half-time drum beats, dark sounds, and an oscillating baseline (wub-wub-wub). Here are some ideas to get you started making a dubstep track.

Where to Start

Pick a dubstep track you love or go buy a chart-topping track from Beatport who’s sound you like. Exemplar artists might include Excision, Skrillex, or Zomboy. Import the song into your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of choice (Ableton, FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc) as a new track and set that track to -6db. Now go through and lay out markers to indicate the song’s arrangement (verse, build, drop). You can use this guide as a starting point for your own arrangement.

What Key and Tempo should I use?

Dubstep is generally around 140 beats-per-minute (BPM), although it has a slower feel due to it’s half-time beat (more on this later).

Dubstep is written with big club systems in mind: it is meant to be felt as much as heard. Many of those systems roll off ultra-low frequencies, so if you use keys of E, F, or G your root notes (the lowest note of a chord which often makes up the baseline) should be hitting that sweet spot. Because dubstep often has a somber feel to it, it is often written in minor keys.

How to Make Dubstep Rhythms

Dubstep beats tend to be slower and simpler than other EDM genres. Generally you want your kick hitting on the first beat (downbeat) of a bar and the snare on the third beat to give it a half-time rhythm.

Many times in dubstep it’s the regular snare that provides the dancer the rhythm, and the kick and high-hats will move around that snare. For example:

Despite the increased complexity in the second sample notice how the snare hits dependably on the 3rd beat of each bar.

How to Make Dubstep Baselines

Think of dubstep basses in two layers: your mid-bass and your sub-bass. Double your baseline and work with two tracks separately, although feel free to add some compression and saturation to the bass group to taste.

For the mid-bass, I see a lot of recommendations for FM synthesizers such as Serum. I don’t personally have Serum, so I’ll likely pick a patch from Wavetable, Massive, or Sylinth. A key element is modulation: automate the hell out of filters to give these middle sounds a lot of motion. Try using macros to automate multiple parameters simultaneously. Ableton Live 10.1 now has some really great automation curves built in if you right click on a clip.

Once you’ve got some great squelchy sounds, set a new track to record and set the input to your synthesizer track and re-sample the noises your making. You can then chop up those audio files and use them creatively.

In terms of arrangement, try a call-response between 2-4 elements. You can hear a great example in Knife Party’s Bonfire around :55. Give each sound space to breath in the mix by checker-boarding them so each has an opportunity to stand out. ill Gates calls this a “vertical” composition. Done properly, it’s what gives the up-down motion that makes people want to break the rail. Try shorter sounds and cut out most of your melodic, more horizontal elements. Many dubstep drops are fairly atonal anyway (lacking melodic structure).

The sub-bass should generally be a sine wave: it gives you the maximum amount of resonance without a lot of additional harmonics. It gives you the vibrations your audience is craving. Ableton’s Operator has a preset called Sine Waveforms that works fine. Remember to low pass it so it doesn’t interfere with your mid-bass.

How to Mix Dubstep

As you’re going through this process, you can make rough tweaks to your volume levels. Here are some good leveling starting points for EDM tracks:

• Kick and snare= -6 db
• Sub = -12 db
• Leads/vocals = -18 db
• Risers/Crashes/Hats = -30 db

Before you move on to mastering your track (we’ll have to save this for another post) ask yourself the following mixing questions while comparing back and forth to your reference track:

• What does the kick sound like on my track vs. the reference track?
• What is the relative loudness of the bass vs. the kick in each track?
• How much sub-bass is in each track?
• Does the kick punch through the bass or does it sound muddy?
• Is the bass really loud, or is it just sitting in the mix beneath the kick?
• How bright (how much high-end) is each mix sounding?
• Is the top end sharp (harsh) or smooth?
• How prominent are the mid-range instruments in each mix compared to the bass?

Have you written any dubstep tracks? What do you recommend?