How to Make Drum Patterns – Rhythms Every Producer Should Know

What’s up everybody, it’s Nick, and in today’s video, I’m going to show you how to program drum patterns in multiple genres.

I really think these are the rhythms that every producer should know.

While I’m using Ableton Live.

This is definitely applicable in any DAW. We’re going to be mainly working in piano roll, which is, as you know, universal. Let’s take a quick listen to the genres we’re going to cover.

As you can see, I’ve arranged the genres from lowest to highest bpm.

If you want to jump to the genre you’re interested in specifically, we’ll have the timestamp in the description.

However, I do recommend watching the entire video because you will learn some new rhythms.

Lastly, we’re going to have all these patterns available as free MIDI files; the link will be at the top right of the screen and the description.

Let’s begin with hip hop.

So in this case, I’m referring to classic 90s hip hop.

Let’s listen to this is around 80 to 95 BPM.

I’ve chosen another musical element other than the drums to support and help you complete the picture of that genre with all the genres.

All these sounds are from splice, and this is specifically a piano riff.

That’s a nice eighth note.

So let’s look at how to program the drum pattern.

So the drum sounds, we’re going to need our kick, snare and another hat.

We’re going to start all of these patterns with one measure. If you’re not familiar with what a measure is, think of it as the smallest unit of time.

Like if you’re thinking Legos, this is literally a Lego that’s just one little unit, one little piece, that’s one measure. I’m also going to refer to beats within the measure throughout this video.

When I say B two, that is specifically 1.

2.

When I say B three, that’s 1.

3.

Before 1.

4, the one indicates that it is the first measure. The point two indicates that it is the second beat. I’m going to switch the pencil mode using B and let’s put the snare drum on beats two and four.

And let’s put the kick on beating one on 1.

3, which is the third beat.

This is considered the end and a little 16th note right before that third beat.

A lot of the drums in this genre have a lot of groove to them or human feelings.

So we’re going to take these and we’re going to shorten them a little bit.

If you hold command and Ableton, you can get it off the grid.

And if I select the piano over here, I’m going to slide this over.

And maybe this one is a little late.

So it’s sometimes nice to put the snare and just the hair early.

The kicks can be a little bit late, it depends on what beat and, of course, the feeling of the melodic component, but go ahead put the hat on.

And we’re gon na swing this by dragging it off the beat.

And the velocity, we can adjust the velocity down here, or I can hold command over the note.

And we want this swing.

So we’re gon na highlight the time Command D for duplicate across.

I’m gon na put the hats and slide them so that they line up perfectly with the snare.

If we want to make the measures may be twice as long, I’ll measure length here.

And I’ll do two measures, hit enter.

Highlight size.

And we can just put a little variance by putting a snare drum maybe three cells away from that backbeat or if you’re thinking classic music theory.

All right onto reggaeton moving on, and dancehall the BPM can be anywhere from 95 to even like 125 130.

I have it at mine at 100 BPM.

A lot of these genres are based off two important rhythms: CEO and club a.

Let’s take a look at the base reggaeton rhythm at the barest Essential instruments you will need are the kick, the rim.

And the shaker, though this is what is considered a four on the floor genre, meaning the kick is on every four beats.

And the true co rhythm I was referring to is this grouping of notes.

So that is three, three and two spacing right here.

So three, three, and two very important rhythms, and we just take away the first one.

That’s a very, very standard again moombahton reggae Tom dancehall rhythm.

Here’s a variation. Let’s put in the measure four, four.

So we’re going to do four measures, duplicate this across.

So the next step is to add the shaker again before pencil mode. We’ll draw a line across.

That sounds pretty robotic.

And that’s because there’s no velocity variation between the notes. We might actually use a shaker loop for this, but for the sake of learning, we’re programming everything with one-shotsshot.

Let’s take the velocity down.

And I like doing a little crescendo.

So that’s raising velocity for the first three notes.

And then the last notes are kind of still softer.

So it’s not all the way crescendoing this pattern sounds nice duplicate bad across.

So there are some variations we can do quickly if we take away the kicks. Here is more now a dancehall rhythm.

And if we actually take that second note of the tercio, again, this relationship here is Krysia.

And if we take that second note and move it down to a kick, it also sounds really nice.

So let’s just do that.

Next up, we have a house which actually encompasses a lot of sub genres.

However, there is a general BPM range of 110 to 130.

For this genre, let’s take a listen to the bass loop.

And right now I am strictly at 120 beats per minute.

This is also another four on the floor genre.

So we’ll put the kick on beats 123, and four, we’ll put the clap on two and four.

So we have a kick, clap.

And in this case, I have a first hat and an open hat.

One of the classic places to put this is on the upbeat.

And let’s now fill in the 16th notes with just like the shakers in the moon button, we can take the velocity and make it more dynamic by putting some variation.

The other thing that’s going to be really nice for this is adding some swing to swing, as technically when we move from 16th notes to triplets.

And in Ableton, if we literally just search for swing, we’re going to get some of our groups, and these groups are meant to be put into the group.

Now that’s the 32nd note group, we want to the 16th note group.

And if we simply drag the group file onto the pattern, it applies it.

We can also access the groups here.

So yeah, let’s solo the high hats.

Here’s without any sway.

And here’s with a lot of swing.

I actually want to see what that looks like. I can just hit this commit button and watch the Hi-Hat notes move.

So that’s a nice trick to use, which is again swing, which all do have this capability.

Some variations we can do with this house beat. Let’s make it four measures long or by duplicating the loop.

We can put a little momentum into the kick by taking it and moving it across here.

And it sounds nice to drop the cake every few phrases.

So let’s go ahead and duplicate this and drop the kick out.

Moving on to techno, which is another form of the floor genre.

The BPM for this will be anywhere from 120 to 140.

So it’s a little on the higher side. The instruments we need are the kick, the ATS and some percussion.

Techno drums are generally very driving because of the 16th notes that are going on in all the percussion.

So let’s take the hat and draw it across the 16th grid.

And what we want to do it again, a little velocity. I’m going to take the first one and make it much softer and make a ramp up all the way off the beat, so it’s a crescendo every four beats.

The next thing we’ll do is take the other half and maybe put it right at the end of the block.

We’ll also have going sixteenths, but we’ll accent different notes.

So we’ll take this one really soft and duplicate it.

So slightly different velocity.

I am going to take the main one down right here too.

And lastly, the shaker can maybe go every measure.

I’m putting it on the fourth sale, which is right before B two.

We can again get that same kind of kick momentum we used in the house: the two and three.

Cool now cranking up the BPM a little further, we’re now at 135, which lands us on future bass.

And this is now not the four on the floor genre.

This is a broken beat genre.

And when I say broken beat, I mean the snares and the kicks generally don’t hit together.

That’s not always the case.

But that’s generally the rule of the beats before this had been mainly in what we call double-time where the accent of the backbeat the clap the snare is on beats two and four.

And now that we’re at 135 BPM, we’re going to start shifting into maybe some halftime genres, where the backbeat against snare clap, snap, falls on beat three.

So for our future bass kit, we’ve got a kick, snare, some other snare, and a lot more percussion.

Some textural like metallic sounds, maybe less straight up high hats.

As I said, this is a halftime genre.

So we’re going to put the snare on beat three.

And since this is half time, let’s go ahead and make the link right off the bat for measure so we have a longer phrasing to work with.

So safe places to emphasize the br beats one, four and two.

So listen to this.

I am going to move the kick rim at the end of four, which again is the third cell from 1.

4.

It can sound really nice if we get sixteenths in there by maybe putting the secondary snare into the main snare.

Or that faces on, maybe there’s some nice space right here at the beginning.

So I’m going to put the shaker right at the end, which is getting the third cell and 1.

2 and copying that pattern over.

So highlight the two measures duplicate Let’s hold command and take the philosophy.

Next we have r & b. Our BPM will be anywhere from 125 to 145.

It is also a halftime feeling for our drums. We have our kick, we have a rim, we have two hats, and an open hat.

We’ll put the rim on beat three. Let’s highlight the time and duplicate it across.

Let’s get a double bump on the cake which will be on beats one and the end, which is again a third space.

And we can put the kick right before the ramp.

For the hats, let’s do a very chill eighth note pattern.

And we want slight velocity discrepancy.

That’s good and duplicate this across.

So these are two different high hat tones.

Completing the pattern is a very, very similar hi-hat.

We’ll take this one last close and move it up at the end of this break.

All right now we’re at dubstep which is anywhere between 140 and 160 BPM. I have mine at 150.

Let’s take and for the drums. We’re going to want a halftime feeling. I’m going to sit the measure length for the drums. I have a very simple it’s a really heavy-hitting kick, snare.

And then two symbols with slightly longer sustains serve as like the bed for the bass.

So this is also a halftime beat.

So now when I say halftime, you should be thinking this snare will go on the third beat.

So we’re going to put that on. I would say the kick is less syncopated than like trap or r & b.

So we’re just gon na have the kick on one and two, maybe a little double here.

And then the same thing here.

Lastly, we’ll just have the symbols talk to each other on beats one and two.

And duplicate that.

Alright, getting up in the BPM, the second to last genre I have is trap.

And this is anywhere from 140 to 165.

I have it at 160 right now. Let’s take a look.

I got this nice Grand Theft loop going.

So for the drums, we have a hard-hitting kick, a classic clap and a close hot and open hats very simple.

Let’s do the measures for measures to start.

So the length of time to put the clap on beats three.

And a nice syncopation for the clap can be this rhythm where we put the end before and the end of two, which is a third sound.

So for the kick, we’ll put it on beat one.

And we generally want to avoid the clap.

So we’re just going to fill it in how we hear it, which I think will sound good right here.

This is right before the therapy and maybe right here on two and then this could be a double bump.

Another W.

For the hats, we’re going to start filling them in as eighth notes.

So we’ll do command to get to the eighth-note grid that again decreases the grid size and draws it across.

Now trap high hats are all about those roles, which are actually smaller values and eighth notes.

Those are generally like 32nd, or even 64th notes.

Now let’s hit command one, which now makes our grid size smaller, and it gets a 32nd.

And we can draw on some hat rolls.

One into beat three here, it’s nice to maybe lead into a clap or emphasize a kick with the roll.

So this would be like emphasizing a kick.

And then I’m gon na throw in a triplet by using command three.

And put that in.

The other important thing may be the tuning of the hat.

So let’s go to the hat.

We’re going to the transposition and we’ll just show the modulation.

Draw some points here.

Lastly, let’s put the open hat on beep to maybe every other measure.

And lastly, we have Drum and Bass, which is generally in the highest BPM range compared to these other genres.

It can be anywhere from 160 to even 190 BPM.

Right here we have it at 174.

Let’s take a listen.

Now for drum and bass, I would probably use a drum loop.

Because if you’re unaware, a lot of this genre is based off of the fact that they sample classic drum breaks such as the Amen break and speed them up.

So that is part of the genre. Let’s just try to make our own kind of a men’s break with an acoustic sounding drum set, and then an electronic drum set layering over that.

So we have the electronic kit and then the acoustic kit and I had them filtered slightly.

So the bass rhythm for this is actually double-time. It’s fast.

Let’s put the length into four measures.

Put the snare drum on beats two and four since it is double time and duplicate that across.

The kick is now going to go on beat one and then the end of three, the end of the next measure and the end of three again.

So that sounds like this.

The fast break we’re going to actually accomplish with our one shot and let’s get the snare on beat two.

And then this is a classic rhythm, so this is the classic feeling of Drum and Bass with the sampled snare rhythm being this amen brother break.

So we’re gon na duplicate that. We’ll put the acoustic sounding kick on v1 and the end of three.

High hats need to really drive the pattern by doing eighth notes.

So let’s do this.

And the last two snares we have which are a rim and another acoustic snare can fill in any syncopated spaces.

Lastly, we’ll take a brighter sounding high hat and outline every eighth note, not trade-off like these acoustic hats.

And there you have it.

Those were the drum patterns that I think every producer should know.

It will definitely help you when you want to kind of go-between genres or experiment a little bit by combining genres.

Let us know in the comments if there’s a style or genre that you would like us to take a deeper dive into.

Also, don’t forget to download the free MIDI files that we covered in this video. The link will be in the description.

Please subscribe to our channel for more production videos.

And as always, thanks for watching.

I’ll see everyone next time.