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Programming a typical one drop reggae beat and adding fills

1 Here’s a reggae-style track with a standard backbeat going on in the drums. Not at all appropriate, I’m sure you’ll agree, with the sidestick landing on top of the skank guitar/organ combo on beats 2 and 4, and the hi-hats fighting rhythmically with the bass. Let’s tear it down and start again… 2 In the simplest terms, the one drop is defined by the lack of the alwaysexpected kick drum on beat 1 (hence the name – the 1 is dropped) and the emphasis in the bar moving to beat 3, with simultaneous kick and sidestick or snare hits. With just that in place, the feel is immediately transformed. 3 Although the hi-hats in the one drop don’t have to be swung, they usually are. Here I’ve reprogrammed mine with a suitably shuffled rhythm that sits correctly with the bassline. Dropping beat 1 from the hats and the kick, and leading into each bar with an open hat on the last eighthnote of the previous bar, is de rigeur. 4 It’s going to get boring pretty quickly without some embellishment, so let’s throw in some fills and offbeat accents. A sidestick on the last eighth-note of each four-bar phrase changes the groove up a bit, and moving the fourth of these to the snare and layering in a crash cymbal adds variation. 5 Laid-back triplet hi-hat fills are another one drop staple. I want it to sound like the drummer’s really hammering these out, so I move the MIDI notes to a hi-hat edge articulation for a harder sound and set them all to maximum velocity. A couple of incidental sidesticks at the end of my fourth four-bar phrase finishes things off. 6 Finally, here are two variations on the one drop that are worth knowing, both of them bringing the kick drum back to the fore. The rockers rhythm puts the emphasis back on the downbeat by placing kicks on beats 1 and 3. And the steppers beat goes for a more driving feel altogether with kick drums on all four beats of the bar.