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2. Intelligent beat-making with Playbeat 3

1 Audiomodern’s Playbeat 3 is an intelligent groove creator and drum machine that relies on always-on sonic analysis algorithms to both create and remix your grooves.

2 While Playbeat 3 can be used as a manual drum sequencer, the inviting red button at the centre of the UI will cleverly randomise any of the parameters.

3 In the step sequencer you’re provided with eight individual channels with which you can import drum sounds, then sequence up to 32 steps. We’ve built a kit by dragging in our own samples to slots.

4 Clicking on the circles within Playbeat’s step sequencer allows the manual creation of a simple beat with our samples, with controls such as Shift (to move them right and left) and manual adjustment of the tempo.

5 Now we’ve got something tight and workable, let’s let Playbeat re-think our construction. Pressing the aforementioned big red button intelligently scrambles the steparrangement, density, pitch, flam, volume and pan of all the steps in the sequence.

6 Cycling through a few ideas, we start to hear how Playbeat has intelligently re-assorted our samples based on their sound, coming up with some alluringly creative variations. We can also remix our samples subtly.

7 Another way to harness Playbeat’s Smart Algorithms is to mark presets in our collections as ‘Smart’. We can do this by clicking the ‘Smart’ Icon next to each preset in the preset browser (Playbeat 3.1 offers several free options).

8 By switching the big red button over to the Smart Icon, the step sequencer will scrutinise our samples and match them to a chosen rhythmic pattern that it thinks would work well from the selected Smart presets.

9 With this quick ability to smartly sculpt new versions of preset sounds, hours of time is saved – plus the new, instant, options can lead you down wildly fresh compositional pathways.