With countless excellent sample libraries just a few clicks and a credit card away, it’s easy to find pre-programmed loops in practically any conceivable style these days. But although they can be a convenient shortcut to producing professional-sounding music, relying on them for all your beats isn’t always an approach we’d recommend.
The advantage of being able to program your own beats from scratch is that you’ll gain a better understanding of how they work, both rhythmically and sonically. Knowing what gives a particular genre its groove and which drums are used to generate which sounds is a hugely useful skill when it comes to composing and mixing dance music.
Creating rhythms using one-shot samples or drum machines gives you a far greater level of control over the sound than loops ever can - and, of course, there’s nothing to stop you from combining both.
Of course, starting your beat production endeavours with nothing more than a blank arrange page can be somewhat intimidating, especially if you don’t even know what tempo you should be working at for your particular genre, let alone the specifics of which sounds or rhythms you need to use to create an appropriate beat for it.
Never fear, though, because that’s where this tutorial comes in! Over the following pages, we’ll show you how to make beats in three popular dance music styles entirely from scratch, either using drum kits included with your DAW or samples provided in our Tutorial Files folder. These walkthroughs are designed for everyone, so will show beginners what to do click by click, but even more advanced producers can learn from the more intricate swing and timing tips that will make your beats stand out, hopefully inspiring you to come up with ways in which you can put your own creative spin on them.
Step by step
1. Adding swing to a house beat in Cubase for a funkier vib
1 Create a new project in Cubase, then right-click the Track List and select Add Instrument Track. Click the instrument slot in the window that appears and select Synth»HALion Sonic SE. When you click the Add Track button, a new instrument track with HALion Sonic SE on it will appear.
2 To load a drum kit, click the Load Program button (the option top left of the menus). This brings up a huge list of presets. Don’t worry, you can filter these down by Category, Sub Category, Style and even by the Character of the sound.