7 8 Drum Beat
Victoria Steigerwald
A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument that can imitate drum kits and percussion instruments. Some can also produce artificial sound effects. Most drum machines allow users to create their own beats.
A drum machine is commonly used for recording electronic music, often used in house, dance, and hip hop genres. It may also be used as a metronome, as a backing track for practice or as a way to explore a variety of drum rhythms.
Click the squares to create your drum beat. Double click the squares to toggle between the hi-hat and open hi-hat, snare drum and cross stick, and high tom-tom and low tom-tom. Click the instrument names on the left to mute the sound.
Select tempo, time signature and swing at the top. Click "Presets" to see the most common drum beats. You can vary drum beats easily. For example, you can choose the ride cymbal instead of the hi-hat, and cross stick instead of the regular snare drum.
Although it's a cool feature it just doesn't feel like it's me doing it and I'm not sure I'd be able to get one of the "drummers" to play exactly the beat I want, so I'd rather make my own beat from scratch.
I once took an ableton course where one of the things we learned was making your very own drum beat using the drum samples included by placing them all onto a beat grid/piano roll. It was so much more rewarding and fun!
Now, I am a novice producer and only purchased Logic Pro X a few days ago, but so far I have searched endlessly for tutorials on how to do this and all I'm finding is stuff based around the session drummers.
I am sure by now you figured out what you needed to..but I had this same issue the past hour or two, and I found the answer. This is for anyone in the future who, like myself, find themselves needing to make their own beat. If you right click on the drum track once the drummer is set up, and go to convert-> convert to MIDI region. This will do it. It makes it go into the 'piano roll' mode same as is used for any of the instruments. Hope this helps!
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GarageBand's main solution for adding drums and rhythm to songs appears to be through pre-made drum loops and the new session drummers. I desire more customizability with the beats I add to my songs. How can I create custom beats in Garageband?
GarageBand employs loops as one way of creating drums, but you're right, it is very limited especially if your interested in keeping up to date with pop music (trap, EDM, etc). There are a couple of solutions:
Drummer Tracks
This was originally a feature with Logic Pro X and has since migrated to GarageBand (OS X only). As Dave mentioned in the comments below your question, you can select a drummer from a set of styles (R&B, songwriting, etc) and select from several drummers within each style. Each drummer can be further customized by decided how many fills they perform, what sub-set of drums they use and even more. I feel it is a large step above using loops, but can be limiting if you don't use it properly. If you have all of your drummer regions set exactly the same it can be very boring so make sure that for each region it is tweaked to account for the varying dynamics that are part of most songs.
Software Instrument
This by far is the most flexible way to create drums. Create a new software instrument track, select a drum kit and get to it! The one issue with this method is that you need to know how to create a drum beat. I teach a music production course at the high school that I work at here in Toronto and lesson one with drums is that for most styles of music, the most basic drum beat possible is playing the bass drum on beat 1 followed by the snare drum on beats 2 and 4. This is a good starting point.
Another technique that I employ with my students is getting them to copy existing drum beats (bass and snare only) so that they get a feel for how producers put beats together. Of course, there are other aspects to drum like using the hi-hat, toms and cymbals.
Of course, any time you create rules in music there are a ton of examples that break those rules. I think the ultimate rule is that if it sounds good, then go for it (very subjective, I know). Hopefully this gets you started.
EDIT - Extra Info
Beat Grids (Note: Not available in GarageBand)
There are some DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations, which is what GarageBand is) that feature a tool that I call a "beat grid". There may be a more correct term for this. Here's what it looks like in a DAW called FL Studio:
It allows you to toggle on/off each sound of a drum kit. Each row represents a sound in a drum kit and each column represents a point in time in which that sound is triggered. This allows the producer to hear what their beat sounds like in real-time without having to worry if they are playing properly because there is no playing involved, only clicking of the mouse on the grid. If you have the funds, Logic Pro X is almost a carbon copy of GarageBand, but under the hood it's much more powerful. It has an instrument called Ultrabeat that allows you to use a beat grid.
Another tip in GarageBand is to set up the Drummer to play something close to what you want. Then you can copy that track that it creates into a new Software Instrument Track. You can then edit that as you would like. This gives you a lot of flexibility, but also gives you a nice full sound to start off with.
By the way, when I am referring to beats, I'm specifically referring to drums. If you'd like to know how to make a beat from scratch from the perspective of an instrumental song that you could sell on, for instance, beat stars then you might prefer this video on how to create an indie songwriter song. Also, make sure to browse my youtube channel too, I have many other videos on how to make beats.
Some times, I will use all three as well, since, for instance, it's possible to start with drummer tracks and then convert them to midi tracks. Or vice versa with the step sequencer. The step sequencer was added to Logic Pro with their big 10.6 update. Here is a great video tutorial on how to make a beat with the step sequencer.
Logic Pro has built-in features designed for quick access to great sounding drums. These tracks are yellow in colour and also a feature that is available in GarageBand. With these yellow drummer tracks, you can get up and running with a groovy beat in a matter of seconds. Let's talk about how you would do that below.
You have many different options to choose from. Each "drummer" has their own name and style. Notice below, the Electro Trap drummer is Ronnie. If you make a mistake, you can always switch drummers later on.
After you choose your drummer, you'll want to choose your drum set. This is the sounds section in the left hand music library. Each drum set will sound a little different. However, the genre or drummer won't change. For example, if you choose Ronnie as your drummer, then you need to set Ronnie up with a drum set.
Now that we've chosen our drummer and the drum set. We can now choose and edit our drum pattern. Start by opening up the editor window. You can press the shortcut "E" on your computer keyboard.
Inside the drummer editor is where we really make our drummer track come to life. We can either start with a beat preset. For instance, notice on the left hand side of the image below that there are many different presents to choose from. These are beat patterns that Logic has created for us.
We can also start a beat from scratch. I prefer starting a beat from scratch because I often have an idea of how I'd like to produce the song. Start by dragging the yellow dot within the grey shaded square.
If you leave the yellow dot in the middle then you'll get a nice balance of all four aspects. However, if you move the yellow dot in the very top left corner then your beat will be very simple and very loud. Play around with the yellow dot to experiment how you'd like your beat to sound.
You'll notice there are sliders below each of these elements as well. The sliders represent different beat patterns. For instance, what should the kick and snare pattern beat in your beat? Will you have hi hats doing a 1/8 note pattern? Or will they doing a 1/16 note pattern? You use the sliders to choose this information.
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