34,000 Views Later: Looking Back at My Drum & Bass Tutorials

In April 2020 I uploaded my first drum and bass production tutorial to YouTube, a narrated walkthrough of processing the Lyn Collins Think break in Logic Pro X. Over the next sixteen months I made four more. Together they've been watched more than 34,000 times, and they did more than rack up views: they helped me earn a name in the scene, grew a Patreon that people still find and subscribe to for the content, and led to teaching another producer one to one.

I've just added them to the Work section of this site, which meant watching them back properly for the first time in years. The content is solid. The delivery was rough around the edges.

Why I Made Them

I've been making YouTube videos since 2008, back when it was Call of Duty 4 ProMod frag movies, so making content was never a new idea for me. I love sharing what I know, and by 2020 I had something worth sharing.

It was also an opportunity. I wanted a name in the drum and bass scene as more than another artist with a SoundCloud link, and tutorials let me show I knew what I was doing technically. That kind of authority travels quickly in a scene this size, and it helped me earn a name faster than I could have planned. Within the first year of releasing music from effectively nothing, I had Stargazing and Love Drops out on Goldfat Records, and UKF Drum & Bass featured it, which for a producer at that stage is a huge achievement.

The five videos covered processing the Lyn Collins Think break, layering and processing breaks into a full drum section, chopping breaks into MIDI with Logic's Sampler and Quick Sampler, a tour of my drum and bass project template, and a breakdown of the drums on Stargazing, billed as the first part of a series that never got a second.

What Makes Me Wince Now

They're live narrated screen recordings of Logic Pro X on my Mac, and that's all they are. No camera, barely an edit, and no script or notes either: every one was freestyled, which explains the odd gap and the moments where I over-explain. Watching them back with the eye I have now, the production is honestly quite lazy, and some of the language makes me wince too.

The habit that bothers me most is detail. I go granular on everything. The layering video runs to 32 minutes and works through sample selection, chopping, EQ, stereo widening, levelling, sidechaining for groove, parallel compression, effects sends, soft clipping, saturation and limiting in a single sitting. All of it is useful. Not all of it needed saying at that length, and there's a point where being thorough stops being generous and starts taking time the viewer never agreed to give. That's an odd habit for someone who now edits video for a living.

And for all that detail, I still managed to leave a step out of the Think break video. Taming two sharp resonant peaks between 15 and 20 kHz never made it on camera, so it went in the description as a note instead.

What Still Holds Up

The techniques. I'm still in Logic and I still chop breaks the same way I showed in those videos, so the core of what they teach is how I work today.

The template is the exception. I don't use it any more. These days I work from custom channel strip settings instead, saved plugin chains and routing I can load straight onto a track rather than a whole project to start from.

The people who watched them seemed to agree the content was worth sitting through. The comments were all positive and encouraging, and at the time they were a big part of what kept me making more. The lowest rated of the five still sits at around 98% likes, and some of them were shared on Dogs on Acid, one of the scene's iconic forums, and in drum and bass communities on Reddit.

The Patreon That Outlived the Channel

Alongside the videos I ran a Patreon with exclusive content. I announced in 2021 that I wouldn't be posting exclusive content any more, but people still find it, subscribe and buy the digital products there. It's been largely successful, and encouraging too, because people are still finding value in something I stopped actively running years ago. You can find those producer packs in my shop. None of it would have happened without the videos.

Why I Stopped

My priorities changed. I took on more shifts at the job I had then, I was being a dad, and I was trying to be a better partner, and there were only so many hours left over.

It wasn't only the hours. With more being asked of me at work and at home, there wasn't much mental capacity left to get into a creative mindset and stay there, and that's something I've always struggled with. I'm quite a sensitive person. When a free hour did come along, which was rarely, trying to force myself into creative mode never worked.

Social media played its part too. I consumed a lot of content from other producers, and it was a double-edged sword. Plenty of it was genuinely useful, and through the scene I met some great people I'm still in touch with today. But a lot of it was quite destructive, mentally and spiritually, and it knocked my focus. The same feed can be hugely positive and awfully negative all at once.

Life genuinely just changed, and the music and the channel were what gave.

Where It Led

Making things for a screen has been part of who I am since those frag movies, and it didn't stop when the channel did. Recording, narrating, editing and packaging a tutorial on my own was all practice for what came next.

The videos also took the teaching off the screen. They led to one to one tutoring sessions in person with Nick, who makes music as Rid, and we worked together for around three months. Sadly I had to say goodbye when I took a full time role at Maudsley Learning, because we couldn't find a time that worked around both our commitments.

At Maudsley Learning my own learning sped up. All of it was self directed: I found the gaps in my own knowledge and skills at work and closed them, building on the editing and design I'd picked up making videos like these. That's how I built a career as a media production professional.

Would I Make Them Again?

Yes. I'd love to refresh what's on the Prspktv channel or make new tutorials, and this time I'd do them properly: filmed on a real camera, edited tightly, and respectful of the viewer's time. I've also got a photography and camera channel and a car channel in mind, neither started yet. If you've read about my X-E5 or my driving test, you'll know where those came from.

The breaks haven't changed. The production values will.