How to create Stutter Risers

Espen has a quick little video on creating stutters in your risers.

How I make stutters

The video above is Espen’s. Here’s how I go about the same thing in my own music.

Stutters are a quick way to add anticipation and excitement to a build. There are a few ways to do them, and each has its pros and cons.

Chop the audio. The simplest way is to cut the audio into small segments and delete them in an alternating pattern, so it literally switches on and off. Then cut the segments in half towards the end, and you get that speeding-up effect. I like how visual this is, because you can see the stutter happening.

Automate the volume. In Logic I use the Marquee tool to mark out sections of the automation lane, then drag the volume down in each one. It’s fiddly and can be a little imprecise, but it gives great results and saves you chopping up lots of audio files. This is the way I’d suggest trying first.

Use a tremolo. Set the phase to zero and turn the smoothing off. It works, but you lose some definition and it starts to sound more like a gated synth.

A stutter works best across lots of tracks at once. Rather than doing it on every channel, I put the parts into a summing track stack and stutter that group. You can do it on the stereo out, but that can be quite brutal, so I’d normally use a stem or a summed group instead.

The classic move is to double the speed of the stutter in the last bar or so before the hit. Just be careful with timing at that micro level, because it can go slightly wonky.

I also like using risers themselves as little builds. Take one bar of a riser, layer copies that start at different points so each one is bigger and higher, fade them in, and run them through some distortion, tape warmth and reverb. Used like that they behave almost like a drum roll.

For more on this, read Risers: The Easiest Way to Create Tension in Your Music, Epic Hits and Track Stacks in Logic Pro X Explained. My Action Sound Design course goes through stutters, risers and other micro builds step by step.

Happy composing!Rich