Sound sources
Let’s start with your core ingredients. Last time around with our acoustic beats, this was the drum kit itself but with electronic beats, the worlds of sampling and virtual instruments are your digital oysters.
Sample packs
There is an almost unlimited number of beats and loops out there for you to download and loop up. Check out companies such as Loopmasters, Splice, Mode Audio, Samplesound, Prime Loops and many more. Indeed, the number of collections is overwhelming but fear not; our very own Mini Reviews pages filter out the best collections available and there are even dedicated sample management systems, like Loopmasters’ Loopcloud, that make homing in on specific loops and shots by style, beat and pitch as easy as child’s play.
Sample packs often consist of folders containing individual beats – kicks, snares, cymbals and so on – for making bespoke, custom patterns. Many collections feature sampled loops that may be specially created for certain genres and you simply load one in and loop it across your arrangement (most of which are labelled and dedicated to one BPM but which most DAWs can now set to whatever your project BPM is).
Back at the dawn of sampling – think trip hop and jungle – these loops were often used wholesale or chopped up to create more interesting textures. Nowadays they are most often used to complement existing beats, or they’re layered together to create more interesting variants – we’ll be examining both approaches in later tutorials. Either way, loops can be a great starting point or inspiration; many producers even start with a loop as part of their scratchpad, and then go on to replace each beat with their own individual sounds. Another approach is to use the DAW’s scissors/split tool to slice up loops and rearrange their rhythm as you please. Again, more on this later.
Virtual instruments
Virtual drum machines, and indeed synths, are the other main sources of electronic beats. These often use the samples, as mentioned above, or create sounds from various synthesis methods. Either way, you usually get a lot of hands-on controls to shape the individual beats before you program them, making the instrumental approach far more flexible than just using sampled hits.
You then program beats as you would write melodies, either playing – see below – or programming using the MIDI editing features on your DAW, or using the on-board step sequencer, so often present on a virtual drum machine, to come up with a beat pattern.
Some instruments are emulations of classic drum machines – see Roland Cloud’s take on their own TR-808 and 909 drum machines, or others from the likes of AudioRealism, D16 and Wave Alchemy. Others from the likes of Auddict, Accusonus, Sugar Bytes and Rob Papen offer something a little more modern and different. Then there are instruments – some of which have been around for years – based on banks of compiled samples, like Xfer Records Nerve and Native Instruments Battery.
Lastly there are instruments that go for realism like FXpansion’s BFD and Toontrack’s EZdrummer and Superior Drummer. We’re focusing on electronic beats here, but as we saw last issue, instruments like these can still be useful when you need an element of realism in your tracks or to produce realistic breakbeats.
“Loops are most often used to add texture to a programmed beat”