Ever wanted to create original drum beats starting from scratch? Any style? Rock, rap, country or anything else? If you can master the concept of how a drum beat is built, you can use any software to create the beat you want, from scratch. You can listen to any beat and take it apart and mix it, remix it or recreate it. It can even help you with a real battery. No matter what tools you have, the concept is what is important.

• This is for guitarists who need backing tracks to practice.
• This is for people new to drumming.
• This is for people who have some software but don’t know where to start.
• This is for people who want to dissect a beat so they can create their own.

Let’s start with core drums and what they do.

1. The bass drum, also known as the hype
2. the snare drum
3. The hi-hat is technically not a drum but a cymbal.

The kick drum provides the low end hit, hits the heavy beats, it’s what drives the beat forward. The snare drum plays the weaker beats or “backbeat”. Helps provide the rhythm of the beat. The hi hat will play one or more times on each beat. Provides a steady pulse to the beat.

Now let’s find out where to put each drum

Music is divided into small usable units called measures. Most radio friendly music uses a 4 beat measure. Listen to a song you like and you will be able to feel the 4-beat pulse. Each beat in a bar can have 1 or more notes placed on it. So if you put 2 notes on a beat, you would have 8 notes on 4 beats per bar. This is how every drum works. The bass drum follows beats 1 and 3, like so: 1 2 3 4. The snare follows beats 2 and 4, thus 1 2 3 4. Put them together like this. 1 2 3 4. Now put the hi-hat on each beat. 1 2 3 4. That is basic rhythm in its simplest form.

There are things you can do to spice it up, like playing the hi-hat twice on each beat. You can put the bass drum in between beats to give it more drive and momentum. You can move the snare to give it more of a beat, but the techniques here are the fundamentals for building any drum beat from scratch.