cover feature / make better beats
This month, we’re going big on beats, the rhythmic backbone of your music, and the element that sets genres apart and gets feet tapping. Over the following 20 pages, we’ll tackle both programming and mixing better beats, with tips for better acoustic and electronic drums (and all without a human drummer in sight)
Drummers across the world are running for the hills! That’s because the world of computer music-making has never been in better shape when it comes to beat-craft, with software packages and drum machine plugins more feature rich than ever before. Now you can have practically any electronic drum machine in history on your hard drive, plus the best acoustic drum kits, played by the best players, all recorded by the most incredible mics in the finest studios in the world. There really is no reason to leave the comfort of your computer to create either the most hard-hitting electronic beats, or the most authentic-sounding acoustic drum tracks.
And it’s those two broad categories – electronic and acoustic – that we’re focusing on here. In previous features we’ve tended to discuss one or the other as separate beat-making entities, but the computer has united the two worlds. So it doesn’t matter how you create your beats: you can merge electronic polyrhythms with acoustic loops, underpin a raging metal drum track with a huge 909 kick, or even smatter some machine gun trap hats over a country drum track. Actually, that sounds awful, but you know what we mean: when it comes to beat creation, your computer lets you create them however you like.
Broadly speaking, we’re starting by covering programming – from basic t
