Beat Dissected: Radiohead Style Low-End Layering

Radiohead Beat Dissected

In our latest YouTube Beat Dissected video, we show you how to program a Radiohead-style beat to celebrate 20 years since Kid A was released. Radiohead Beat Dissected? Let’s go!

Kid A was the fourth album by Radiohead, who helped bring the incorporation of electronic elements and textures in rock music to a wider audience. Despite the album coming after the more rock-heavy and internationally successful OK Computer, songwriter Thom Yorke chose a different route with Kid A, using modular synthesizers, sampling, and loops to bring the music into new territory. The album is also heavily influenced by ambient music and features brass, strings, and other instruments with heavy processing.

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The beat of the title track ‘Kid A’ sounds like a hybrid of acoustic drums and vintage drum machine samples, but its true character lies in the low end. A (very) swung floor tom part is layered with two kicks, with the tom’s tail adding some sustained bass.

In this Radiohead Beat Dissected, we’ll program a beat inspired by Kid A while looking at production and mixing tricks for working with multiple low-end drum samples.

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