Electronic Grooves & Rhythms

A comprehensive guide to building electronic beats

A great electronic beat is about more than just the sounds – it takes a little composition knowhow to craft that killer groove

From the primitive sequencers Kraftwerk built to trigger their percussive synth sounds, to the all-in-one grooveboxes of the ’80s and ’90s, the electronic musician has always cultivated a fascination with drum programming. Today, of course, many of us lay out our drum patterns on a computer screen, by drawing them into a piano roll or rearranging audio regions directly on the timeline; while others keep the tactile dream alive by bashing rhythms into the computer via a dedicated MIDI controller such as NI Machine or Ableton Push.

Whatever the method, it’s all about the same end result: programming drum grooves that get heads nodding. So on the next few pages, we’ll deconstruct exactly what makes electronic beats tick – from swing and groove tips through to genre-specific considerations – so fire up your drum machine or DAW and give your beatmaking a boost.

Programming electronic drums is one of the most enjoyable parts of music production – and that’s down to its accesibility. Whereas playing a

synthesiser requires some music theory competence, and programming one demands synthesis skills, anyone can program an analogue drum machine: simply light up those buttons in different orders, then tweak those knobs to shape the drum sounds! Rhythms and percussion are a primal instinct in humans. But even if we’re all born naturals, there’s still plenty to consider when programming electronic beats.

What goes where?

Before we get going, although we’re primarily discussing where the notes

go throughout this feature, it’s the sounds themselves that will determine the sonic quality of your beats, and equally contribute to your artistic aesthetic overall. For example, ’90s New York-based house producer Kerri Chandler famously modified his Roland TR-909 drum machine himself, to fatten the bass drum and customise the sounds to his own signature style. And to use modern tastes as another example, simply programming a hip-hop/trap beat with raw TR-808 sounds isn’t going to help you reach the uber-processed heights the genre demands. So, to begin, you must define your sonic palette – or even design your own drum sounds to taste – before you begin laying those notes down.

So, assuming your drum sounds are timbrally on point, it’s time to get programming. The majority of Western music adheres to a 4/4 time signature, meaning there are four beats in every bar, with each beat divided into subdivisions: quarternotes, eighth-notes, 16th-notes, and so on. The bass drum, the primary element of a drum kit, almost always fires on the downbeat – ie, the first beat of the bar, then the subsequent ‘onbeats’ – think ‘1, 2, 3, 4’. This is interplayed against the snare (or clap, depending upon your genre), which mainly hits on the onbeats, and is typically laid down on beats 2 and 4 of the bar in Western music. This solid back-and-forth motion of the kick and snare is, for example, what gives a hip-hop beat its ‘boom-bap’ nature, or a house rhythm its fist-pumping framework.

Once locked into this solid interplay between kick and snare, the hi-hats are brought in. These