Mobile Music Production 3.1 - Basic Drums

In this video, I will be showing you how to put down basic drums.
I am only going to show you 3 drum sounds in this video.
The kick, snare, and hi-hats.

So here’s the kick drum, it mainly sits in the low end of the mix. It's loud, it's boomy, it's very punchy. This is our Hi-Hat, very short sound but also very bright. Here’s our snare, this sound occupies the high mid-frequency, has a really strong transient and little tail in the end.

Now there are a lot of different drum sounds that you can use, but if you simplify a lot of beats it mainly breaks down into these 3 sounds over here.
So here’s one of my melodies. For the snares, we want to hit on the 2 and the 4.
What this snare does is it really locks the groove in place, it's consistent and it helps the groove going. Kick you want it to hit on the downbeat.

Before we lay down more kicks, let's talk about syncopation. Syncopation means to accent a weaker beat. So when you play the metronome, 1 2 3 4 beats you hear are the strong beats, and the beats in-between are the “weaker” beats.

These are the strong beats, and these are the weak beats. Use your ears and your intuition to guide you and start laying down the kick pattern.

What the Hi-Hats are going to do is it's going to drive the rhythm forward a bit by playing a bit faster than the kick and snare. The kick and the snare are very spaced out so to contrast that we will have the hi-hats playing the 8 notes like this.

I have another sample here, this one is much faster. Since this loop is in a much faster tempo, our previous drum loop won’t work with this one, but we are going to apply the same concepts here but in half time.

So by half time what I mean is that the bar is twice as long now. So instead of 1 2 3 4, its 1 - 2 - 3 - 4. Let’s start by adding our snare. On our 2 and 4. Instead of our Hi-Hats doing this (playing 8 notes) we will be making them twice as fast.

And for our kick drum, we are doing the exact same thing, hitting on 1 downbeat, and then we are looking for syncopation.

You can also add that half-time feel to a slower sample. Here’s what it sounds like with our first drum pattern, and here is the second drum pattern. It's a completely different groove now. I might hear the first one on some bedroom pop stuff but the second one has more of a trap soul bounce to it.

Also, the reason why you can use snares and claps interchangeably is that they occupy the same frequencies in the mix.

So that’s it for today’s video on how to create basic beats, I’ll see you next time.