how to do everything

We open our How To Do Everything features with beats, and with our free plugins, you can get great beats… fast

Programming beats is a fundamental aspect of most modern music production and for those at the top of the game it’s a specific job. This is why we regularly dedicate big tutorials to beat production, looking at the specifics of different genres, and the various ways we can nail what defines their sound. Nevertheless, whatever your specific musical tastes, all beat production starts with some pretty basic building blocks and ultimately how you combine those aspects defines the grooves you create.

Here we’re going back to basics taking a very general approach. The walkthroughs provide three different entry points, and each uses a specific instrument. None of the instruments is particularly complex, but each has its strengths and we’ll use those to our advantage.

If you’re new to beatmaking and really don’t know where to start, our first walkthrough exploits the rather useful genre-specific patterns built into ADM CM. With various house, techno, dubstep and drum&bass patterns to choose from, you should be up and running pretty quickly. As we move onto the second walkthrough we’ll also find a bunch of handy hip-hop MIDI patterns with DopeVST Beat Machine. So, once again, don’t worry if you’ve never programmed a beat before.

Finally, although each of our walkthroughs focuses on a single plugin, it goes without saying that once you get to grips with how each of them operates, you can pick and choose from all three to build your own signature beats.

The instruments

The three instruments we’re using for our tutorials are AudioRealism ADM CM, Thenatan Trax CM, and Grooove CM from brunsandspork.

AudioRealism ADM CM is based on the classic Roland drum machines and combines TR-606-style synthesis with more than 200 samples and integrated parameter automation. Its sound set is spread across 15 kit presets and individual kit sounds can be swapped out. You can even stick your own samples in the samples folder to expand the sound palette. With various sound-specific parameters also available, you can get busy tweaking the onboard sounds. ADM CM works great as a regular drum machine instrument. But where it really comes into its own is via its 32-step pattern sequencer. Each kit preset loads with a suitable pattern, but you can copy, paste and program up to 127 patterns in total and then trigger them via MIDI. This has great creative potential and this is what we’ll focus on in our walkthrough.