Help Making Beat

[richie]

Hi everyone.
I have a big problem with making a beat for my songs,
the song genre i make is Progressive\Tech Trance.
If anyone knows any tutorials on how to make a good none basic beat
i would really like to know, Im open for any tips\hints that may help me.
Thanks everyone

[paradox_765]

My advice, :D there's no tutorial, as i know, it all cames from your head. Best tutorial is to just listen some good production that you like, and play it over and over till u find out how he got that kind of rythm....it works for me :D

[richie]

Thanks good advice i like that

[Vasting]

Do you mean like making the kick from scratch?

[richie]

Do you mean like making the kick from scratch?

No i mean how do i put all the elements of the beat together to make it work with the melody and the rest of my song.

[S1Spawn]

I think its all in how it sounds right to you. Try different patterns or add some loops to your kick and snare. Loops can help guide you sometimes..

[Betatron]

No i mean how do i put all the elements of the beat together to make it work with the melody and the rest of my song.

hehe u just answered ur own question. you need to build your beats. get samples, make little blips, find hats and diff snares, and just build.

ull get it someday :) just takes patience

[Futuremotion]

Hi everyone.
I have a big problem with making a beat for my songs,
the song genre i make is Progressive\Tech Trance.
If anyone knows any tutorials on how to make a good none basic beat
i would really like to know, Im open for any tips\hints that may help me.
Thanks everyone

You want to make sure that all your drums for the most part only contain frequencies that other elements are not already dominating. If there is a big muddy lump of colliding frequencies, everything is going to sound like shit regardless if the drum loop was created by god himself. So as a rule of thumb, don't overdo it.

You also want to make sure that your samples are of good quality. Without good sounds, you really can't make a great beat without a lot of tedius engineering work. Then ultimately when you are sure that your sample collection is up to snuff, study some loops from other sample CDs and try to understand exactly what it is you are neglecting and where exactly you are going wrong.

As a random hint it can sometimes sound great if you use drums that are somewhat in tune with the key of your song or at least rather close. If you didn't know already, many drums are not as atonal as you would expect and they can interfere with harmony; or, in ideal cases re-enforce it.

Good luck!

[chimera22]

a keyboard and synthesisers :)

[znorkie]

Where exactly are you going awry? Is it the beat patterns? Or are you getting mushy sounds where everything runs together and the sounds interfere with each other and with your other instruments? Or perhaps you find what you are getting is too conventional sounding and you want to have a much more artificial and electronic sound? Or perhaps a combination of several of these issues?

Reread Futuremotion's above post and take it to heart. Also, if you are having difficulties just working out the timing of the beats and such-like, you might try Rene-Pierre Bardet's drum machine pattern books just to get a feel for how rhythms work on a 'drum kit' when you make them from scratch. Even though a lot of the beats are pretty useless for Trance, you might try programming them just to see what's happening. And that's not to say you won't come up with an interesting idea or two from using such a book. There are a lot of disco and funk beats that could be used.

I use FL8, and I like to piece together my beats initially with the minimal template and then replace all the samples used with ones more appropriate to the song. Sometimes I might replace them quite a few times before I am happy.

But this isn't about me!:flower: If you want kewl and propulsive rhythms, I recommend programming minimal beats and then running SOME of the individual voices (hats, snare, kick, claps, bleeps, farts, etc.) through a delay with a low feedback and a ping pong echo. As your patterns play, have automated panning move the location of the voices in an interesting manner, but generally keep the kick drum dead center (or not! It can sound pretty cool if the kick sort of bounces around like a basket ball!). Use the echoes to shape the Soundspace the song occupies. Also, in FL (not sure about any of the other major DAWs, but I assume you can do this) you can oscillate a cut off filter over the samples you use, so you can have kicks that go from 'clump' to 'sproing', snares that go 'woosh' on each hit, hats that sound flangered, etc. Go crazy expiramenting with these ideas, and record everything you think sounds cool. Even if you can't use it now, you may be able to later. Also, go back and relisten at a later date to what you've recorded and see if it still sounds good to you. If so, you're MONEY, BABY! MONEY!:icon_thumright:

Oh, and reinforce and contrast that basic rhythm with your other instruments by using bass that hits on the up-beat: 1-AND-2-AND-3-AND-4-AND for instance, or by synching a trancegate thingy to your hi-hat pattern.

Hope you can take some useful advice from all that!:icon_mrgreen:

[richie]

Thanks for all the answers this has helped me very much