Drummers across the world are running for the hills! That’s because the world of computer music-making has never been in better shape when it comes to beat-craft, with software packages and drum machine plugins more feature rich than ever before. Now you can have practically any electronic drum machine in history on your hard drive, plus the best acoustic drum kits, played by the best players, all recorded by the most incredible mics in the finest studios in the world. There really is no reason to leave the comfort of your computer to create either the most hard-hitting electronic beats, or the most authentic-sounding acoustic drum tracks.
And it’s those two broad categories – electronic and acoustic – that we’re focusing on here. In previous features we’ve tended to discuss one or the other as separate beat-making entities, but the computer has united the two worlds. So it doesn’t matter how you create your beats: you can merge electronic polyrhythms with acoustic loops, underpin a raging metal drum track with a huge 909 kick, or even smatter some machine gun trap hats over a country drum track. Actually, that sounds awful, but you know what we mean: when it comes to beat creation, your computer lets you create them however you like.
Broadly speaking, we’re starting by covering programming – from basic to intricate – across a variety of broad-stroke genres, all demonstrated with a kind of step- or note-sequencing format that any DAW user will recognise. Then, for the humans among you, we’ll detail some of the tips you can use to make those beats sound more ‘real’. Of course electronic producers can leave humanity at the door if they wish – a lot of club genres swear by the rigidity and power of tightly-quantised beats, and that’s fine. But one of the big criticisms of computer music making is that it somehow removes the ‘proper human’ element – so we’ll show you how to bring that back.
Elsewhere we’ll cover several production techniques, including mixing a drum kit, whether that’s been recorded directly from a real one, or one from a library. And talking of those, we’ll detail some of the best libraries for acoustic drums, the best machines for electronic beats, the finest free beat makers and our choice of ‘out there’ instruments. Being 2023 and all, we’ll take a glance at AI beat-making, too.
So put your sticks away, or wish your drummer well, and prepare for better beats!
A (very) brief history of beatmaking
For the last 50 years or more, technology has already been helping us with our beats and has defined how we create them within our DAWs today. Let’s look back and see exactly where it all leaves us in 2023…
The heartbeat pounding in our bodies is not only providing the helpful function of keeping us alive, but also gives the perfect raw materials for the human rhythm track. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that getting any emerging technology to help us create beats has always been high on the human agenda. If we had all day we could potentially trace this use of ‘technology’ back to when someone decided to club some rocks in a sequence, but instead, we’re going to skip forward a few millennia to when electricity got involved.
From electronic…
In fact, we’re even going to skip over the ‘drum machines’ of the 1950s and ’60s that used basic electronics or tape to give you drum sounds and ballroom beats. We’re fast forwarding to – where else – the 1970s. This was the decade that not only gave us cheap(er) synths but the first modern drum machines, and both are directly responsible
