3 Levels Of Drum Patterns: How To Make PRO Drum Patterns

today i'm going to talk about the different levels of building drum patterns and walk you through beginner advanced and expert drum pattern techniques and how to build each [Music] first off i want to say that all the techniques i'm about to share should be used no matter what skill level you're at i make beginner drum patterns all the time when making beats and if you do too it's not a bad thing always do what's best for your beat even if it means building something that's a bit more simple so let's start off with beginner drum patterns now a good place to start that i always start at when i build my drum patterns is to place the kick on the one and then grab your snare or your clap or whatever you're using and place this on the two and the four [Music] now when i say the two and the four what i mean is to count how many groups of colored squares you have here you can see we have four gray blocks in a row and then four red blocks in a row so when i say to put the snare on the two and the four what i'm saying is to count by group so here putting a snare on the beginning of the second group and the fourth group is what i mean most all hip-hop beats share this note placement these are the fundamental notes for beat making so it makes sense to start here now already there's one thing that i want to point out i am making a beat in single time here you might see other producers say to place your snare on the three and the seven instead of the two and the four when they say this it's because they are working in double time so if i were to speed this beat up by double bringing this from 69 and a half to 139 feel free to pause this video to double check this calculation yourself now if i were to keep my snare on the two and the four this drum pattern sounds way too fast only a robot could rap this fast some kind of rapping robot mental note build a rapping robot and become a millionaire sorry so if you're working in double time instead of having your snare or your clap on the 2 and the 4 place them on the 3 and the 7 instead and there we go we have our fundamental structure down by the way if you could hit the like button and subscribe if my videos help you out it really does help my channel out so it'd mean a lot to me and if enough you hit the like button i will reveal my rapping robot to you so now that you have your fundamental notes down your kick and your snare framework is in place you can move on to your hi hats what you can do is draw in all of these blocks to create a more dense hi-hat pattern [Music] or you could draw in every other block to create something that's not quite as dense [Music] both of these hi-hat approaches are very common for drum patterns and again don't feel bad being this simple these types of hi-hat patterns work for a lot of beats and are very effective now that we have our fundamental structure down next let's add in the additional kicks and snares when it comes to adding in more kicks relatively speaking you can get away with being a bit more free and placing down kicks in different places and still have your pattern sound okay [Music] with your stare though this is a bit less true it can sound very jarring placing your snares as freely as we did with the kicks so my advice with beginner drum patterns is to be a bit more conservative with your additional snares [Music] that sounds like a bit of a mess so with our snare pattern we're going to stick closer to that fundamental structure that we built now with your hi-hat pattern changing your framework by adding removing or moving notes around can be a great way to build in your own rhythm with your kicks and your snares i would advise keeping those fundamental notes in place and don't be a fancy boy with those for those of you that remember my video on the biggest red flags for a lot of bad beats that was one of the most common errors producers make but with your high hats you can be a bit more free to introduce your own unique rhythm into your drum pattern [Music] so those are some beginner drum pattern ideas let's move on to the more advanced drum pattern ideas next here we'll start to get a bit more detailed with our tools our sounds and our note placement firstly i would recommend moving on from using the channel rack it can be a far better idea to use the piano instead because it offers up the ability to get far more detailed let me show you how we can start this pattern off the exact same way as our beginner drum pattern by placing a kick on the one and the snare on the two and the four [Music] so here i'm just going to repeat the same pattern over and over again now moving on to building the hi-hat pattern this is where you can start using your tools in order to build out a more detailed drum pattern for example i can create one long note here for my hi-hat pattern and just use the chopper tool this lets you quickly and easily chop longer notes into smaller notes this is especially useful for trap drum patterns to create those hi-hat stutters another very important tool is velocity control using the exact same velocity for all of your notes can make your drum pattern sound stiff and very programmed which isn't necessarily always a bad thing depending on the type of beat you're making but here this will sound unnatural since i'm going for more of a boom bap aesthetic so we'll change the velocity of these notes like so i can use my piano shortcuts to quickly repeat this pattern over and over again so i don't have to manually draw in my velocity notes like a real idiot so controlling the velocities of your notes can really help you elevate your drum patterns i know some people really advocate for using the randomizer this is a tool that lets you quickly and easily randomize the characteristics of your notes like the panning or the velocity [Music] personally i think these characteristics are very important and can be used to create very specific feels for your drum pattern so i recommend being a bit more manual and hands-on to craft exactly what you want instead of just depending on a randomizer another idea to play with is the timing of your notes instead of having your notes all hit perfectly on grid pushing some notes slightly off grid can be a better fit for your beat again instead of sitting here like a real dumbbell a real bird brain manually moving these notes one by one i can use a tool to do this so here i'm in my quantizer and depending on the preset or template that i use it can slightly push your notes off grid [Music] by the way if you want a full walkthrough of all the shortcuts that i'm showing you right now i made a full video on this very topic that should be showing up in the corner right now by the way the same off-grid unquantized feel can be used for your other sounds as well for my kick pattern i'm going to add a few extra notes like i did last time but once again i'm going to get slightly more detailed i'm going to take some of these notes and push them slightly forward so they hit late [Music] i can take other notes and push them slightly away from the grid so they hit [Music] early i recommend playing with both ideas pushing some notes forward others backwards and see which one you like better and what fits with your beat now one thing you might have noticed is that i changed the velocity of some of these kick notes as well and drastically reduced how loud some of them are these notes which are at a much lower volume are called ghost notes they aren't necessarily meant to have the same presence and loudness as our main notes but these can yet again help you add more detail into your drum pattern [Music] another way to add detail into your drum pattern is by diversifying your sounds so instead of just using one sound in order to create your ghost notes for example i can bring in yet another sound altogether which is what i'll do for my snare our main snare here sounds a lot more powerful and present whereas this new secondary snare sounds much more weaker it's going to help me introduce more notes into my drum pattern that aren't as overpowering or intrusive as yet another layer of detail [Music] you'll notice that i'm doing some layering here as well to reshape how my original snare sounds using multiple drum sounds and playing around with layering certain drums and not layering others can be a great way to add detail into your drum pattern as well and i can use the same approach with my hi-hat pattern here i'm just going to grab another hi-hat [Music] this helped me introduce a new rhythm into my drum pattern with this hi-hat layer and one final advanced idea that you might have noticed that i've talked about before is to play with the overall density of your drum pattern instead of having a consistent level of notes throughout your drum pattern create some variation and that's exactly what i did with my kick pattern so here for the fourth bar i introduced a lot more kicks to pick up the energy level of the beat a lot more here this is something that i covered in a video a while back on how to make better loops so if that's a problem that you have check that video out it's in the corner so those are some advanced ideas that you can use in your beats next let's move on to the expert level drum patterns these ideas can be really difficult to pull off and it's going to be somewhat dependent on the beat that you're making with this beat i'm going to start by building out my drum pattern even before i introduce my musical instrumentation the reason being the drum pattern that we're going to build is going to be pretty complex so starting off with the more complex dense piece of your beat and shaping your other sounds around that can help now one expert idea that you can try is to completely forgo using the fundamental note structure that i showed you again this can be disastrous so be careful with this approach so with this beat what i'm going to start by doing is placing the kick on the one as usual but i'm also going to place a kick on the two i'll also build this kick pattern out a bit more by using the exact same ideas that we have already covered again as you can see i played with the velocities as well as the timing of my kicks next i have this clap which i'm going gonna place on the three and the four and then for the next part i'm gonna push that clap that set on the four a few steps off now we're getting real wild here using this as our basic framework it's already providing a very unique rhythm so let's go ahead and approach our hi-hat pattern with the same idea of just foregoing that fundamental note placement i'm going to do a similar technique as last time with my hi-hat layering but i'm going to be a bit different this time here i'm going to leave the first half of each bar completely open and use these high hats in again a very rhythmically unique way usually high hats are used to build a more consistent rhythm in your beat but by using them in this inconsistent way i've just built something a little bit more unique another technique to use for your drum patterns is using more unique sounds so for example i'm going to use this tom here toms are typically not used as the chorus sounds when you're making beats but again using unusual sounds like these can really help add a new dimension to your drum patterns [Music] overall we have a very unique rhythm here with a lot of unique sounds and overall we just have a unique drum pattern and now i can come in and start building up my musical layers around this pattern [Music] so as you may have noticed the other sounds in this beat are very simple with how i constructed the patterns i'm trying to avoid using dense rhythmic patterns with these sounds just because my drum pattern itself is just so unique so here can be a better idea to be a bit more simple with my other patterns balance is always key so those are the three levels of drum patterns by the way if you want some more unique ideas for drum patterns like this one that i just showed you i did an entire video on unique drum patterns that many people have enjoyed that should be showing up on the screen right now i highly recommend checking it out or if you enjoyed this video like and subscribe head over to betterbeatmaker.com to check out my full online beat making course my free drum kits available in the description box below as well as a link to my discord if you want to join my producer community and i'll see you guys next time

Channel: Navie D

Views: 274,508

Keywords: drum pattern, drum patterns, drum tutorial, navie d, beginner drum patterns, advanced drum patterns, how to make drum patterns, how to make better drum patterns, drum patterns every producer should know, 10 popular drum patterns every producer should know, hip hop drum patterns, how to make good drum patterns, drumming patterns, drum patterns for beginners, drums patterns, beatmkaing, beats, how to make beats, beat tutorial, beat making tutorial, beatmaking tutorial

Id: CkPmKcPjSlk

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Tue May 17 2022