How To Make Beats - Beginner's Guide

This tutorial is written for someone who has never made a beat before, and has no idea where to begin. Musicians who make beats and instrumentals are called Producers or Beatmakers. Modern beatmaking is usually done with Hardware (Gear) and/or Software.

Some examples of Gear would be a keyboard, MPC, or rack. Anything with keys, pads, buttons, and knobs. Software programs simulate the features of Gear and let you do everything right on your computer or laptop. Whether you choose to use Gear or software, you will need to work with some combo of these main ingredients:

MIDI Sequencer
Synthesizer
Sampler

Gear - Part I: MIDI Sequencer

The MIDI Sequencer is what arranges all of the sounds (including drums, synth voices, samples, etc). The Sequencer does not actually store any sounds or samples, it merely creates an arrangement similar to Sheet Music to remember when to play sounds.

Gear - Part II: Synthesizer

A synthesizer creates digital sounds, even instrument sounds, by generating waves from scratch. Most people think of a synthesizer as only making simple beeps and old school "Nintendo" types of sounds, also called Leads. The "Nintendo" sounds were made from very simple synth patterns called the Square Lead and Triangle Lead, which are named after the shape of the actual waveforms.

More sophisticated synth sounds mimic real instruments. Many people mistakenly call these synth instruments "MIDI instruments" but they are actually synth voices being generated just like the Nintendo sounds, but more advanced.

Gear - Part III: Sampler

The Sampler records and stores the waves made by real sounds. Once the Sample is saved (onto a hard drive or disk), you can speed it up, slow it down, or even chop it up into smaller Samples and re-arrange them.

When producers are "sampling" an old 70's soul record, they are recording a snippet of the song as a new Wave file and saving that Wave to be added later to the Sequencer. If you wanted the soul Sample to play at the beginning of every loop, you would set the Sequencer to trigger that sample on the first note of the loop.

Gear - Part IV: All In Together Now... The MPC

You may have read our FAQ section and found that many famous producers use an MPC, whether its the Akai MPC3000, E-mu SP-1200, or Ensoniq ASR-10. What is an MPC? The letters stand for MIDI Production Center.

The MPC type of Gear is so widely used because it usually combines the Sequencer, Sampler, and Synthesizer all in one. In the olden days, you had to have each Gear separate and hook them together somehow. The ideal Gear will let you Sample, let you generate Synth sounds, and Sequence them all on the same machine.

Software - Advantages and Disadvantages

Since most beatmaking software is a computer version of Gear, they work in a similar way. Instead of an MPC, software's equivalent is the DAW which stands for Digital Audio Workstation. A good DAW will have a Sequencer, Sampler, and Synthesizer built in. Sometimes they're all crammed onto the screen together, or each in a separate Window. Unlike Gear, software allows for digital plugins called VST Plugins. VST Plugins can be filters, effects, or unique instrument sounds.

What are the disadvantages? If you don't have a fast PC/Mac/laptop the software may not run very well. Also some computers don't have good audio cards, and you may have to upgrade to a better quality audio card. Laptops especially tend to have awful audio cards and usually require upgrades.

With software, you also don't get the physical aspect of hitting keys or pads, twisting knobs, and moving sliders. Some people don't like the idea of making music by clicking their mouse a million times. For a lot of producers, the physical interface really decides if they're a software person or a Gear person.