Make Dubstep

Make dubstep online with a personal producer who knows where the drop goes. Free in your browser, Veena's CoProducer builds the half-time drums, the sub, the wobble and growl basses, the builds and the drops as real tracks you can edit, down to the rate of every wobble.

Dubstep is a 140 BPM genre that feels half as fast. The snare waits until beat 3, leaving a huge, slow pocket, and the bass fills it with movement. Every decision below exists to make that pocket hit harder.

Dubstep in one bar

The half-time beat is the whole genre's skeleton, on a 16th-note grid. X is a hit, g a ghost note, x a hi-hat:

Beat       1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
Kick       X . . . . . . . . . . . . . X .
Snare      . . . . . . . . X . . . . . . g
Hi-hat     x . x x x . x . x . x x x . x .

Kick on beat 1, snare on beat 3: at 140 BPM that is a backbeat at 70. A second kick near the end of the bar pulls the loop round, and a ghost snare on the last 16th sets up the next downbeat. Shuffle the hats, add a fill every fourth bar, and leave the space after the snare for the bass to talk.

Dubstep styles

Ask for dubstep with a style in the same sentence, "riddim at 145" or "deep UK dubstep at 140", and CoProducer builds to it.

The wobble: an LFO in time

A wobble bass is a synth whose filter opens and closes on a cycle, and the cycle has to lock to the tempo. Veena's Wobble Bass and Growl Bass ship their LFO at 4 Hz, an 8th note at 120 BPM. At 140, open the clip's synth panel, find the LFO card and set Rate:

MOVEMENT sets how deep each sweep goes, and Glide on the same card stretches the slide between overlapping notes. The best drops change the rate every bar or two: 8ths, then triplets, then a held note that opens slowly. Or tell CoProducer "lock the wobble to 8ths, then triplets in the last 4 bars", and it writes the change for you.

Bass: sub for weight, mid-bass for character

Dubstep bass is two sounds. Underneath, Sub Bass: a pure sine holding the root, mono and steady, the weight you feel on a big system. On top, the Wobble Bass or Growl Bass an octave or two higher, carrying all the movement. Write the line once, put the two sounds on two tracks, and keep the low end below about 100 Hz for the sub alone. The Reese bass page covers a third classic sound for darker drops, and the bassline generator writes sub lines through any chord progression.

Pads, leads and FX

• Intro and breakdown: Dark Pad or Glass Pad on minor chords, one per bar, with a Delay on its Dub preset on a single lead note.
• Melodic drops: Supersaw Lead chords riding over the wobble, the hook of melodic dubstep.
• Builds: the Riser preset climbing across 8 bars, a snare roll that speeds up, and Filter Sweep opening the pads.
• The drop: a bar of near-silence, then an impact from the sample library on beat 1 with the kick, sub and wobble all at once.

A dubstep arrangement

That is 128 bars, about 3 minutes 40 seconds at 140 BPM. Every change lands on a multiple of 8 bars, so it mixes cleanly in a DJ set.

Make dubstep with CoProducer

1. Open daw.veena.studio and sign in with Google. No download and no graphics card: the AI runs on Veena's servers.
2. Paste the prompt at the bottom of this page. It builds the full 128-bar arrangement above.
3. Choose the drums first. You get three takes of every new part, and nothing that depends on the drums is written until you choose one, so the bass follows the groove you kept.
4. Push it with plain words. Ctrl/Cmd+Z takes back any step:
   • "Make the second drop riddim: one wobble note, 8th-note triplets."
   • "Swap the drums to the Chaos kit in drop 2."
   • "Add a Supersaw Lead playing the chords over the first drop."
   • "Cut everything for the last beat before each drop."
5. Print it. A 24-bit/48 kHz WAV for the set, a 320 kbps MP3 for sharing, or every track as stems; there is no watermark and no limit on how often you export. The track is yours.

The dubstep production chain

• Snare first. In half-time the snare carries the groove: set it loudest, with the Compressor's Drums preset on the kit.
• One owner below 100 Hz. A Utility with Mono on the Sub Bass, and a low-shelf cut on the wobble, the pads and the FX.
• Grit on the mid-bass. Distortion on its Drive preset, so the wobble reads on phone speakers as well as a club system.
• Duck the bass. Ask CoProducer to "duck the bass under the kick and snare", and Veena's Sidechain keeps the low end from smearing.
• Space on top only. A Hall reverb on pads and leads, nothing wet on the sub or the wobble.
• Master it loud. Balance on the faders, then ask CoProducer to master it hot for the club. Every master effect stays editable.

Mistakes that flatten the drop

1. A snare on 2 and 4. That is a 140 BPM house or trap groove. Dubstep's snare is on beat 3.
2. A wobble off the tempo. A 4 Hz LFO at 140 BPM drifts against the beat. Set the rate to a note length.
3. A stereo sub. Everything under about 100 Hz stays mono.
4. No contrast before the drop. Take the kick and bass out of the build, and leave a beat of near-silence.
5. One wobble for 32 bars. Change the rate, the note or the sound every 4 to 8 bars.

Dubstep terms

Half-time: the snare on beat 3, so 140 feels like 70. Wobble: a filter swept by an LFO in time with the song. LFO: a low-frequency oscillator, the slow cycle that moves a sound. Growl: a vocal-sounding mid-range bass. Riddim: a minimal, repetitive style built on one wobble and triplet rhythms. Sub: the pure low bass under everything. Drop: the section where the full bass and drums arrive.

The faster, broken-beat cousin is in make drum and bass, the four-on-the-floor side of dance music is in make EDM, and every other style is under make music by genre.