How to Make Beats Step-By-Step

What I’m gonna do now is add this melody pattern to the playlist window because I want to build more sounds on other patterns and have them all play back together.

So I’m gonna choose SONG in the transport control then I’m gonna draw the pattern into the playlist. Now when I hit play, it should play the entire playlist, instead of the pattern alone.

Next, I’m gonna come up to the pattern controller here and move it to pattern 2.

Now I can create a new pattern to add more sounds.

How to Make Chords for Our Beat

This time I’ll try adding some chords to build up the overall harmony of this beat. Let’s go back to the cheat sheets and figure out how to build up a Bb Minor chord. Now you can see the notes are either a lighter red or a darker red.

The darker red notes can be used together to create the root chord of that scale. So in this case I can use the notes 1, 3 5 and 7 notes – the dark red notes – together to form the chord.

If I only use 1-3-5 I get the basic Bb Minor triad chord, and if I add the 7^th note it becomes the Bb Minor 7 chord.

So let’s add that chord.

First I’m gonna choose a separate sound to make the chords. I’ll keep using the same HARMOR synth, but you can choose a different one if you’d like

So I’ll drag it into the channel rack below my last instrument and click on it so it pops open, and I’ll choose a preset that I like again…

Now I’m gonna right click on the second harmless synth and open up the piano roll

And this time I’m going to draw in the Bb Minor chord using those 1-3-5 notes – the Bb, the Db and the F

I want them to be lower in pitch, so I’m gonna scroll down on the piano roll and draw the notes in right here.

You’ll notice that the same set of 12 notes (7 white keys, and the set of 2 and set of 3 black keys) repeat on the piano roll over and over.

They’re the same notes, just higher or lower in pitch.

If I hit play now, we won’t hear it play because I haven’t drawn this new pattern into the playlist. So I’ll just come over to the playlist and this time I’ll drag in pattern 2 from the left side here, right underneath where I drew in pattern 1.

I have to stretch it out a bit so it matches the length of pattern 1.

Now I’m gonna hit play so the melody plays while I’m building the chords back in the piano roll here.

I want the chord to ring out, so I can select these notes by hitting CTRL (CMD on Mac) and clicking and dragging the mouse over top of them.

Then let go of CTRL and you can drag out the length of the notes. And this is how that sounds…

Now I wanna add a second chord in there, but I’m not sure what to use.

So let’s take a look at the melody we wrote, and see what other chord might sound good. You can go back to that first pattern by selecting it with the PATTERN SELECTOR up here, of by double clicking the pattern in the playlist window.

If we look at our scale cheat sheet we see that note that starts the second half of the melody is the 7 note.

So let’s try building a chord using that note. Now, I know a quick hack to build a chord using any note thanks to another page in the free set of cheat sheets I’m using.

You basically place down the first note (i.e. the note you’re trying to build the chord on) and then I can skip 3 steps in the piano roll, place another note, skip 2 more steps in the piano roll and place the last note. That’ll give me the major chord of whatever note I’m starting with. If I wanted to build the minor chord, I’d basically do the opposite (first skip 2 steps, then skip 3 steps).

How do I know I want a MINOR chord vs. a MAJOR chord? In the cheat sheets it shows you exactly which chord sounds best with the chords you’ve already created.

So since I’m using the 7 note from our scale to start the next chord, I come to this cheat sheet and see that that chord should be a MAJOR chord.

There’s a bunch more hacks in these cheat sheets that let you easily build other chords and even how to build entire pro sounding chord progressions (which are patterns of chords all the pro’s use to create beautiful melodies and harmonies) quickly.

Again you can download them using the sign-up form on this page.

I can add more chords if I want by using the same method, but I’ll leave it like this for now. So you should pause this video again, go back into FL Studio and lay down a couple of chords using a different sound. When you come back, we’ll add some more stuff to this beat.

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How to Add Drums to Our Beat

Alright, the next thing we’re gonna do is add some drums.

The drums are usually my favorite part of making beats because it’s where things really start to come together. I don’t usually start off a beat with drums, but you can if you want. There’s no right or wrong way to how you make your music.

If you look in the channel rack, you see FL Studio pre-loads a kick, clap, hat and snare. These are all different sounds on a typical drum set (except the clap), and are included in FL Studio, along with a bunch of other drum sounds, but they mostly sound like complete ass.

I don’t really like using stock sounds and plugins, but you can still make some heat with that stuff if you use it right.

Right now, I’m gonna use some of the drum sounds that come with the Beat Making Academy Toolkit I mentioned earlier in the video.

These drum sounds are some of my favorites and I’m always using them, but they’re not available for free unfortunately. You’d have to buy the full pack to get them. It’s definitely worth the money because you get 160 different drum sounds that slap, but for now you can use the sounds that come with FL.

I’ve already added the BMA toolkit to my FL Studio browser. To do that you just click the little arrow in the top left of the browser and choose “configure extra folders.” Then you locate where the sounds you want to add are on your computer and you’re good to go.

I’m just gonna click on toolkit folder in the browser, go to the drums folder and choose a few sounds I think will sound good with this beat.

We’ll start with the kick drum. It usually hits on “down beats” (1 and 3) to help give the groove a solid foundation we can nod our heads to.

I just have to click on the individual sound file to preview how it sounds. And when I find one I like, I just drag it over to the channel rack.

I can drag it below our synths, or I can drag it on top of the pre-loaded kick sound to replace it with the one I chose.

I like my drums to be loud, so I’m going to click on the kick in the channel rack to bring up the “sound properties” and choose ‘Normalize” to make it louder. I’m also gonna turn up the volume knob.

Next, let’s choose a snare, clap or snap sound. The snare usually hits on the “up-beats” (2 and 4), to help anchor the overall groove.

Let’s use this one and just drag it over top of the pre-loaded snare. I’m gonna turn it up as well.

Now that I’ve got a kick and snare sound, I can start building out the groove.

Let’s switch to pattern 3 and start making the Kick drum pattern.

Rather than put all the drum sounds on the same pattern, I want separate patterns for each sound. That way I have a lot more control over what plays when, and how loud everything is overall.

Before we do that, there’s something you have to understand about time.

I just said the kick is usually on 1 and 3 and the snap is on 2 and 4. That’s technically true, but because my tempo is 160, that’s gonna make it play back REALLY fast and it’s gonna sound corny.

See?

It would sound a lot better if I my tempo was only 80 BPM. But sometimes I like to work in double time. That’s why I chose 160.

What that means is that although my tempo is 160 beats per minute, I’m actually making a beat that FEELS like it’s only 80 beats per minute.

If you’re making a lot of trap-influenced music, you’ll probably be working in double time a lot. That’s how you get those crazy rapid-fire hi-hat rolls you hear in every song on the planet for the last 5 years.

So instead of putting the clap/snap/snare on 2 and 4, we’re gonna put them on the 3 and 7 beat. That way it SOUNDS like it’s on the 2 and 4 while in double time.

Watch…

Now that I have the snare/snap/clap down, I’m gonna move onto the next pattern and experiment with where I want to place my kick drums.

Let’s draw it in the playlist and stretch it out before we start.

Cool, so now we got a kick and snare pattern.

I still don’t think the drums are loud enough, but instead of turning them up in volume, I’m just gonna turn down the other instruments a bit.

That’s better.

Next up let’s choose a hi-hat. A hi-hat is a cymbal on a drum set that helps keep time steady in the groove.

Let’s drag this in and switch to another pattern in the pattern selector. Make sure you’re always drawing each new pattern you make into the playlist window so it plays back.

Hi-Hats usually plays more often and faster than the kick and snare. A really easy way to add a hi-hat pattern is to just right click on the sound and choose “Fill Each 2 Steps” and it’ll automatically draw the note in the channel rack so you don’t have to click in each one.

Press play, and you’ll hear a pretty basic full drum groove.

Obviously this is a super basic drum pattern, but it can get pretty bouncy and complex if you work at it.

If you’re completely stuck on how to put together a full drum pattern, there’s another set of pages in the free cheat sheets pack you downloaded that has drum groove templates you can copy exactly.

There are basic groove templates and even advanced templates based on the groove’s of some of the biggest legends in the game!

Again, you download ALL of these cheat sheets absolutely free using the sign-up form on this page. You’ll get all of scale, chord and drum cheat sheets instantly in your email inbox to use right away.

What I’m gonna do really quickly is send the hi-hat to the piano roll and add some more hits in various places to get things bouncing a bit more.

So here’s our beat so far… I’m just gonna turn off the click track because we don’t really need it anymore.

So now, you should pause the video and go back into your FL Studio project and add a basic drum groove using a few different drum sounds.

You don’t have to stop at kick, snare and hat. Try adding some percussion hits randomly to see how it sounds.

When you’re back, we’ll add another element to our beat.

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How to Write a Bass Line For the Beat

Alright, so now we’ve got a solid little loop going, but it needs some low end energy. So we’re gonna add a bass line to this.

We have a couple of options, we can add a synth bass or an 808. If you’re not familiar, an 808 is a type of drum machine from back in the day. But now it’s mostly used to refer to those loud boomy bass lines you hear in a lot of trap-influenced music.

We’ll start with a synth bass, then try an 808 as well.

But before I do that, I want to change things up a bit with our patterns because it’s only a 4 bar loop and is sounding a bit repetitive to me.

Here’s what I’ll do, let’s open up our chord pattern by double clicking it in the playlist and copy/paste it so it doubles in size.

All I have to do is select all the notes using my mouse while holding CTRL (or CMD) on the keyboard. Then I let go of CTRL and hold down SHIFT while dragging the selected notes.

Now that I’ve doubled the pattern, I can change up the end of it by messing around with the notes like this to add some variation.

But since I doubled the size of this pattern, I have to go back to the playlist and do a couple things.

First I have to drag out more of this chord pattern so it doesn’t get cut off half way through. Then I need to copy the other patterns that are only half the size over to fill out the empty space below the rest of the chord pattern in the arrangement.

I do that the same way by selecting the patterns and holding SHIFT while dragging them to copy them over.

Here’s what the beat sounds like now. OK Let’s get to the bass line.

Let’s drag another synth into the channel rack and find a bass sound.

Now switch over to the next pattern and we can start drawing in the notes like we did with everything else.

If you’re unsure of what notes to use in a bass line, you can’t go wrong by mostly sticking to the 1 and 5 note of whatever scale you’re working in.

You can find that out using the cheat sheets. 

Another easy way to build a bass line is to just use the root note (i.e. the bottom note or 1 note) from your chords.

So we can quickly do that by going to the chords pattern we created, selecting all the bottom notes, hitting CTRL-C (or CMD-C) on the keyboard to copy the notes, going back to the bass/808 pattern and hitting CTRL-V (or CMD-V) to paste the copied notes in.

Now if we play the beat back, here’s what we’ve got. Easy peasy.

How to Use 808s In Our Beat

If we wanted to make an 808 bass line, it’s a similar process.

Unfortunately FL Studio doesn’t come with any 808 sounds. But the full Beat Making Academy Toolkit sure as hell does. It comes with 16 different 808 sounds, so we’re just gonna use one of them for now.

Let’s browse through the 808 folder to find one we like. We’ll use this one right here, so let’s drag it into the channel rack on top of the bass synth we originally selected. Let’s press play and hear how it sounds.

Cool, so that’s a very basic bass line without much bounce to it. What if we want something more complex and bouncy?

We could just experiment with different notes and note lengths until we come up with something we like.

But since I’ve got the full BMA Toolkit loaded up already, let me show you something dope.

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The Beauty and Simplicity of MIDI Patterns for Beat Making

There are these things called MIDI patterns, which are pre-created music patterns that you can drag and drop into your project super quickly. You can also totally customize them however you want.

So let’s browse to the MIDI Loops section of the BMA Toolkit, go into 808 Grooves and find something we like. Since I’m working in the Bb Minor I’m gonna click on B Flat folder and find something that will work with my beat.

All the patterns are categorized by scale and tempo, so you can find stuff quickly that’ll match your beat perfectly, no matter what notes you’ve been using in your beat.

So this one right here, looks like it’ll work because it’s a similar tempo and the correct key we’re in.

So I’ll just drag it over top of the 808 channel in the channel rack and it automatically replaces the pattern in the piano roll.

Let’s play it and see how it sounds

Sounds a bit weird, right? The tricky thing about using 808s is you don’t want the hits to overlap each other – it makes it sound muddy and jumbled.

So we need to change the way the 808 sound hits. Just click on the 808 channel in the channel rack to bring up the sound properties and we can make a bunch of different adjustments to the sound. Play around here on your own, but all we want to do right now is make each new hit of the 808 cut off the previous hit by check this box.

Now let’s play it and listen.

Sounds much better. Let’s try out a different MIDI pattern.

Cool, I like that, but if I didn’t I could just click here to enter the piano roll and customize the notes however I want. That’s the beauty of MIDI patterns.

The Beat Making Academy Toolkit comes with thousands of these MIDI patterns – you get stuff for drums, chord progressions and melodies in every key on the keyboard, and a bunch of other cool shit. It’s essentially an entire tool kit for music producers.

Like check this out, let’s try one of their trap hi-hat patterns since that’s kinda the vibe we got goin on right now.

I’ll just browse to that folder and pick something. Drag it over top of the hi-hat channel in the channel rack. And I’ll click in so you can see how all the little rolls look.

Let’s play this and see how it sounds. Dope… so we got a nice little 8 bar loop going right now.

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So now you should pause this video and go add your own bass line to your beat. When you come back, we’ll talk about taking this loop and arranging it into something that sounds more like a full song.