I am going to be showing you a simple guide to creating drum tracks. I know that some of you here may already be beat making wizards already. However, if you are, it’s still worth watching because I probably do things in ways that you don’t. It’s always good to get someone else’s take on it.
And if you are not good at making beats, then you are in the right place. ’cause I’m gonna show you how to do a very simple way of building beats, a simple and effective way to build beats. Okay, so this is my session that I was, messing around with building some drums for you guys to show you today. I suppose I’m going to reverse engineer a bit of this session so I can show you how I went about building the drums.
Before I do that, I’m going to build a very simple drum pattern for you. One thing I want to say is that there’s a lot of beat making things on YouTube. There’s a lot of make a track in 10 minute videos on YouTube.
Now I’ve got something to say about that because I, I think it’s all well and good to be able to come up with ideas very quickly. that, that’s fun exercise. It’s a good way to hone your skills. However, the, the most successful projects I’ve been involved with have often taken more than 10 minutes to build.
And I see lots of things on YouTube and lots of things online about doing things quickly. I am not really gonna encourage you to build a beat in five minutes. I’m gonna encourage you to take your time ’cause we’re living in a time where we have computers, we have able Ableton, we have logic, we have everything at our disposal, and, and we can afford the luxury of time.
We’re not on the clock in a studio. And when we run out of the time we’ve paid for the, the equipment goes off. In theory, the equipment’s always on and the studio is always available to you. So I’m gonna encourage you to take time when it comes to building drums on your own.
So I’m gonna take my time kind of here today. So what I am doing, as you can see, I’m working in Ableton live life. some of you will be, some of you won’t be. It doesn’t mean what I’m doing now is only exclusive to Ableton. It’s, it goes across all different kinds of daws and applications.
But what I do have here in Ableton is an instance of a 7 0 7 drum machine, which sounds like this, it happens to be one of my favorite drum machines, I’m sure on, on another one of my webinars or two.
I’ve also used the 7 0 7 drum machine. It’s an old Roland drum machine. You can still pick them up for reasonable money actually. and actual hardware version of one of these, we’d probably still be able to pick one up for around 500 pounds, maybe a bit more, as opposed to the 8 0 8 drum machine, which sounds like this, which I’m sure lots of you are familiar with.
One of those drum machines, a hardware version, we probably cost you over 3000 pounds, which is a bit crazy, but I guess it’s just one of those things. so I’m using an instance of a 7 0 7 and an 8 0 8, but inside my computer software versions of, I, I love the 7 0 7 ’cause it’s an easy drum machine.
The sounds are very easy to, to apply to different genres and it’s a good starting point for lots of genres, be it dance music or hip hop or trap. Lots and lots of things. For instance, last year before the lockdown I was, yeah, it was probably this time last year I was recording some songs with a band a they were a four piece band, strum bass guitar singer.
And we went in the studio, we recorded some songs and then I brought them back to my studio. And when the drums were not able to really hold themselves, ’cause the drummer, he was, he was in and out of time.
I put him in time. But some of, some of the hits he was making were not quite there either. So I was layering his real drums with the 7 0 7 program underneath. So it’s a very versatile drum machine. So if I open up this, this, piano role, I think it’s called in other daws, let’s get rid of that.
If I open up this midi piano roll window, which you will see in all kinds of daws Logic, et cetera, I’ve got all my drum sounds down here. There’s my kick. I’ve got two kicks. So what I’m gonna do is I’m going to go in and I’m just gonna start drawing some hits here. I’ve got my qu as you can see here in the bottom right at the 16th note.
So what that means is, as you can see there, this is beat 1, 2, 3, 4, and it’s broken up into 16 parts. So I’m gonna put a kick on the 1, 2, 3, and four. So it’s just gonna be a straight four to the floor. And I’m going to use two different drum sounds for this kick. Gonna use this one, which has got a bit of a click on it.
And this one’s slightly rolled off. There’s not so much click, it’s more fuddy. I’m going to use the thud for beats two, three, and four. And the clicky one for beat one, just so you kind of hear it coming around the signaling. The start of the beat is have a listen. I don’t wanna do that yet.
Here we go. You can hear that. Just clicking on the one slightly more than the others. And I’m running 111 BPM. There just a personal preference for me that is, I’m kind of making a lot of music sub 120 bpm these days.
I like the groove when you drop below 120 beats per minute. And I guess it’s not too fast and it’s not too slow, which is probably nice to show you all, a drumbeat in the middle there. Okay, so I’m also gonna put a snare on the second beat and the fourth beat. What’s this one like? So they’re two different sounds there.
I think I prefer the less bright one, that one as opposed to that one. So let’s put one there. Very, very simple, but very, very effective. I’m sure if some of you were sitting in front of me right now, and I asked you this question, I’m sure you would come up with the answer pretty quickly, but does this drum pattern remind you of a song that is a huge hit?
B gene is the answer. I mean, the drum sounds, it’s a, it’s a real drummer on that track, but if you hear literally just the kick and the snare from Billie Jean, you, you know, it’s Billie Jean immediately.
And all it is is a kick and a snare doing what this is doing.
