Beat it!

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 beat making 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.