Learn About Sean "LiveWire" Smith

The first step is to create a new document, or whatever you do to start up a new beat. Hell if I care how you do it, just do it. Then set an appropriate tempo for the beat in your head or that you plan to make. As a newbie, it may be hard to come up with the needed tempo. Chances are that you have no clue what a tempo is. Well, a tempo is a value, measured in beats per minute, that determines the speed that your tracker plays the samples and all. I, personally, tend to use a tempo of eighty to one hundred, usually ninety. But, I've made and heard very good beats with tempos of seventy, one hundred forty, or one hundred twenty. It's all in the way you plan on making you beat. Slower beats tend to be more hardcore, deep, or emotional. Faster beats tend to be more upbeat, humorous, or dance-oriented. You could actually make a style that depends on your tempo if you'd like. Doesn't make a difference to me.

Next, you should make sure that your beat is at sixteen step bars. How can you tell? Count, silly. In most sequencers, it is broken up into four sets of four steps. This is not always necessary, but most hip hop uses this style. It makes breakdown and mixing easy, and its traditional. You could also use twelve step bars with four sets of three, but thats rarely used. I don't discourage it because I have made only one beat using it, and it was my favorite beat for a long time, you know, until I made a much better one. However, In light of this tutorial, don't use it for now. Use it when ur experienced enough to do it, or even experienced enough to know how to actually change the steps.

In my personal opinion, drums are necessary for hip hop and, although it has been said that it isn't, I still stand strong in my belief. In order to make a good drum beat, which I refer to as a bassline, you will need two instruments, a kick and a snare. A kick is a hard hit, for example, on a drum set there is a pedal you press with your foot to hit the large drum causing a deep sound. That, my friend, is a kick. Most programs have kicks labelled as "kick". Go figure. A snare, on a drum set, is basically every other drum other than the kick. Snare are sharp, high hits. Kicks are hard, deep hits. Got it? Ok, lets move on.

The basics of a drum beat are to have a little something you can bounce your head to. Some people don't bounce their head though. Some may nod. Some may be paralyzed from the neck up. Some may have so many chins that no one could tell thier head was moving if it did. Poor guy. To make a drum beat, we shall begin with the snare. The snare is not the beat. The snare normally just keeps the beat. Now, some of you may comment on the newly popularized southern sound that uses snares very much, but thats in variation of volume and whatnot, which I'll touch on later, but not now. To start your drum beat, you need to place two snares in your beat in every other fourth place. Yes, I realize that may be confusing, which is why I have a little system for showing step sequencers. I label each row with the instrument to use there, and then put a dash ("-") for every empty spot, and an "X" for every filled spot. So, here's the basic snare beat:

SNARE	- - - -  X - - -  - - - -  X - - -

Soon, this snare beat will be your way of determining the tempo needed for a beat that you may have trapped in your head and want to produce. Now, for the kicks. The arrangement of the kicks is never definite. In fact, basically every song needs its own specific arrangement in order to fit it properly. Since we are making a beat that is nothing but drums, we don't have to worry about the drums fitting the rest of the beat. One note to take about kicks is that they always are the first hit. I don't believe that I can come up with a time when a kick was not the first hit. If you wanted to, that could be the only kick, but then again, if you wanted to, you could disclude kicks completely and make a really soft song. But for all intensive purposes, I will use a basic arrangement of kicks that sounds good without any other beat.

KICK	X - - X  - - X -  - - X -  - - X -
SNARE	- - - -  X - - -  - - - -  X - - -

Like it? Of course you do. You may be wondering why it sounds so plain though. Well, its because its only kicks and snares genius.