Dave Taylor, also known by pseudonyms A. Brucker, Solid Groove, and Switch, is a UK-based beat creator, record producer, sound engineer, composer and dj.



Switch has collaborated on songs with M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam) on her albums 'Arular' and 'Kala'.



A 2,000-year-old Tamil folk drum — the main sound Arul went to southern India for — is the instigator behind the singular bottom-heavy bass sounds heard on BirdFlu and Boyz. Recalls Switch the recording of 'Kala': “Sometimes there would be a school of drummers called The Tapes; sometimes there would be one guy. We would have the drummers split off on seven or eight dynamic microphones, which would be fed dry through the desk into Pro Tools. The engineers were top-notch. To get the sound we managed to get with that many drummers in the same room was really incredible.”



Once the raw drum sounds were recorded, Arul and Switch would go through each track individually to find roughly half a dozen loops to single out. Following that, the drums were layered on top of each other so they could interact in a different way than the way they were originally played, still keeping the live feel intact. From these raw tracks, Arul and Switch created their new rhythms, paying particular attention to the bottom end, which comes from drum sounds rather than bass instruments/synths. Other than some occasional synth plug-ins, the duo used Apple Logic Audio 7.2's host plug-ins for processing, tuning, compressing and EQing the drums.



Continues Switch: “The bass sound on Boyz is a Roland TR-909, which we ran through a sampler, messing with the attack and the tuning of it to mold it in with the actual bass-drum samples from the drummers in India. A lot of the drums are multilayered, sampled, dropped into another and re-EQ'd. That's where the more electronic feel, like a speed-garage/UK-garage vibe, comes from. It has a similar processing applied to it.”



Alternatively, Switch used hardware synths such as the Korg Triton to enhance the organic elements, but sometimes other reinforcements were also needed. Hussel is an example of a track that was missing the driving kick drum so prevalent on 'Kala', so to make up the difference, Switch used Logic's ES1 virtual synth to create another drum sound to beef up the low end.