You can create your own unique sounds too. If you’re sampling or using a synth, you’re not stuck to the defaults/presets. Then you go to your “ browser” and load up some sounds/samples. Choosing Soundsīasically what you do is choose a module (like a synth, sampler or drum machine) you want to start with. Here’s a bit more detail on the steps involved in making a beat: 1. You need to know what beats, notes, bars, time signatures, chord progressions and other musical elements are.Ĭheck out our full basic music theory section to learn all that stuff quickly.ĭetailed Look at the Steps of Beat Making But when you’re making professional music, you have to know the very basics. I know… you hear the words music and theory and you fall asleep. Sometimes you’ll just download a pre-created loop/sample and just start from there, adding drums, chopping it up, etc. Or you can have a bunch of sounds on the keyboard in front of you and just play around on it – freestyle – until you come up with something that sounds dope. Some have an idea in their head – like a melody or chorus line – and try to recreate it in the studio. There are a few different ways people make those musical ideas (patterns). You’ll also add some effects to help everything sound polished and balanced.įinally, now that your beat has been fully composed, it’s time to export/render it out into a useable format – MP3, WAV, YouTube Video, etc.

Then you’ll adjust the volume levels of each part/sound so that nothing is too loud or too quiet and everything site well together. Here you can add transitions between sections or accentuators like drum drops or drum fills, etc.

The main sections you need are an intro, verses, choruses, an outro and maybe a pre-chorus plus a bridge/departure, depending on genre. Now you’re going to combine the parts you wrote in Step 2 in various ways to form larger song sections, and then arrange the sections into a full song. The main parts you need are chords, melody, drums and bass. You write one, and then continue building on top of it with other layers using different sounds.

Now it’s time to write and record several short (4-16 bar) patterns of musical ideas. This can be a sample or an instrument like piano/keys, synths, drums, etc. Here’s a step by step process for making beatsįirst, it’s time to choose whatever sound or sounds you want to base your beat around.

What software to make beats