My Hip Hop Inspired Drumbeat
Below is my Hip Hop inspired drumbeat, made in FL Studio. I use both FL Studio and Logic Pro; screenshots of my Logic Pro sessions are in the In the DAW section further down.
Press play — the grid below tracks the audio in real time.
The pipeline
In the DAW — Production Screenshots
I produce in a mix of two DAWs: the drumbeat above was made in FL Studio, and these screenshots come from five working sessions in Logic Pro between 7 and 24 September. Together they show the whole process behind the project: programming drums step by step, choosing and shaping synth sounds, sampling, and arranging parts into a track. Click any screenshot to see it full size.
Session 1 — Drum Sequencing
7 September · 91 BPM · 4/4My first session was about learning how drum patterns are built in a DAW: a Roland TR-808 drum machine, a synth part and a bass loop, and the tools Logic Pro gives you to write, edit and play notes.
The top half is the tracks area, the timeline of the song, measured in bars. There are three tracks: Rock Legend (a software-instrument synth), Roland TR-808 (the drum machine) and Needle Drop Bitcrush Bass 03 (a bass loop, with its chords, Am and F#aug, labelled under it). The yellow strip over bars 15–23 is the cycle region, so Logic loops that section while I work on it.
The bottom half is the Piano Roll for the selected green 808 region. With a drum machine, every row is a different drum instead of a piano note. Kick 1 sits on C1 (the orange notes along the bottom), the hi-hats are the dense green row near the top, and the two longer notes on the Clap row land at bars 17 and 21.
- Time Quantize 1/16 snaps notes to the nearest sixteenth note, so hits land exactly on the grid.
- Strength 100 means notes are moved fully onto the grid. Lower values keep some human looseness.
- Swing 50 is straight timing (no swing). Pushing it higher delays every second 16th note, which gives the "bounce" heard in a lot of hip-hop.
- Velocity 48 is how hard the selected notes are hit. Lower velocity makes softer, quieter hits.
Each coloured block is a region, one section of a part. The purple TR-808 regions (bars 5–11) hold my earlier drum pattern, and the green one (bars 15–23) is the new pattern I'm writing. The small white dashes inside each region are a preview of its notes, so you can see where the pattern gets busier. The blue regions are the audio bass loop, repeated so it lines up with the drums. The chord names above them (Am, F#aug) come from the loop, which helps choose notes that fit.
The Step Sequencer is another way to write the same MIDI: one row per drum and 16 steps across, with each step a sixteenth note, so the row is exactly one bar in 4/4. Clicking a square turns that hit on.
- Hi-Hat Closed plays steps 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13 and 14. The pairs of hits make the hats feel rolling rather than a plain steady tick.
- Hi-Hat Pedal fills the gaps on steps 5, 9 and 12.
- Hi-Hat Open is only on step 15. The longer, washier sound right at the end of the bar lifts the loop back into beat 1.
- Rim on step 9 marks beat 3 with a sharp click.
The On/Off / Velocity / Value switch at the top changes what you edit. In Velocity mode each step's loudness can be set, which is how drums stop sounding robotic.
The Library is Logic Pro's sound browser. Patches are sorted by type (Bass, Brass, Lead, Pad, Percussion, Strings and so on), and choosing one loads a ready-made instrument onto the selected track. Here I'm in the Experimental category, which is full of effect-style sounds such as "Laser Brain", "Glitching Machine" and "Robot Talk", and Velocity Shifter is loaded. The Revert and Save buttons at the bottom let me undo changes to a patch or save my own edited version.
Without a MIDI keyboard, Musical Typing turns the computer keys into a piano so I can play and record parts live.
- A S D F G H J K L ; ' are the white keys, and W E T Y U O P are the black keys above them.
- Z / X move down or up an octave (currently C2), and C / V lower or raise the velocity (currently 127, the maximum).
- 1 / 2 bend the pitch, 3–8 set the modulation amount, and Tab is the sustain pedal.
A channel strip shows, top to bottom, the path a track's sound travels through. For Rock Legend:
- MIDI FX (a velocity effect) changes the notes before they reach the instrument.
- RetroSyn is the synthesizer that actually makes the sound.
- Audio FX: Channel EQ shapes the tone (cutting or boosting frequencies), then Tape Delay adds warm, fading echoes.
- Bus 8 is a send, which copies some of the sound to a shared effects channel, and Stereo Out is where everything is mixed together.
The Stereo Out strip on the right is the master. It is peaking at −12.9 dB, which leaves safe headroom below 0 dB, where the sound would clip and distort.
Session 2 — Synths & Sound Design
14 September · 120 BPM · 4/4In this session I focused on synthesis: how different kinds of synths make sound, and how layering several of them turns one part into a much bigger sound.
Tracks 1–4 (Mutant Keys, Anthemic Lead, Classic Electric Piano and Fuzzy Soul Organ) all play the same MIDI region, "Mutant Keys". Each track sends those notes to a different instrument, so the chords come out as four sounds stacked together, which is thicker than any one of them alone. Track 5, Topaz, is a drum machine playing a "Hollywood Foley" pattern underneath.
The inspector on the left shows the track's settings: the MIDI channel, Key Limit C-2–G8 (the note range the track responds to), Velocity Limit 0–127 and transpose. These can split or restrict which notes reach each layer.
Sculpture (used for Fuzzy Soul Organ) makes sound by simulating a real vibrating string rather than playing a recording or a simple waveform.
- Objects 1–3 are what disturb the string (types like Impulse, Disturb and Bouncing), like a hammer, a bow or something rattling against it.
- The big Material pad in the middle sets what the string is made of, from Nylon and Wood to Steel and Glass. It changes stiffness and damping, which is why it can sound soft and woody or bright and metallic.
- Pickups A and B set where the vibration is "listened to" along the string, which changes the tone.
- After that come a waveshaper (adds grit), a filter (Cutoff and Resonance), Body EQ (the resonance of an instrument body), a delay, and at the bottom the LFOs, envelopes and Morph pad that make the sound move over time.
ES E (Mutant Keys) is a simple subtractive synth: start with a bright, buzzy waveform and filter it down.
- Wave picks the raw waveform, and 4 / 8 / 16 picks the octave (in organ "feet").
- Vib/PWM and Speed add vibrato or pulse-width movement.
- Cutoff and Resonance are the filter: cutoff decides how much brightness gets through, and resonance adds a peak at that point.
- Attack and Release shape how each note fades in and out, and Velo Filter / Velo Volume make harder notes brighter and louder.
- Chorus I, Chorus II and Ensemble thicken the sound by detuning copies of it.
EFM1 (Anthemic Lead) uses FM (frequency modulation) synthesis: one oscillator, the Modulator, wobbles the pitch of another, the Carrier, so fast that it creates new overtones instead of vibrato.
- The Harmonic knobs set the ratio between the two oscillators, which decides whether the result sounds musical (bells, electric pianos) or clangy.
- The big FM knob is the FM depth: more depth gives a brighter, more complex tone.
- Modulation Env changes the FM amount over each note, and Volume Env (A-D-S-R) shapes its loudness.
- Here it's set to Transpose −1 Oct and 16 voices, with stereo detune for width.
Session 3 — Sampling & Drum Machine Designer
21 September · 94 BPM · 4/4This session combined programmed drums with a sampled vocal — the core idea of hip-hop production — using Logic's Drum Machine Designer kit "No Man's Joint".
Track 1 is the No Man's Joint drum kit (Roland TR-808-style regions, bars 1–13). Track 18 is an audio track holding a vocal stem from Say Say Say (Paul McCartney & Michael Jackson), used to practise building a beat around a sample.
The mixer shows the kit's effects chain, in order: Compressor (evens out the volume and makes the drums punchier), Overdrive and Bitcrusher (grit and lo-fi crunch), Pedalboard (guitar-style effects), Enveloper (reshapes the attack and tail of each hit), Stereo Delay, a reverb and Channel EQ. A second strip for the Bell uses Quick Sampler with Phat FX and a compressor, routed to Bus 2.
In the Step Sequencer the kick is syncopated (off the main beats), the snare lands once near the end of the bar, and two hi-hat rows split the groove, with Hi-Hat 1 on steps 3, 7, 11 and 15. A Bass row plays pitched 808-style notes that mostly lock with the kick.
Scrolling the same Step Sequencer down shows that the kit isn't only drums. Its pads also hold pitched one-shot samples, loaded from the Library's Pitched Samples category on the left: Bass, Electric Guitar, Guitar 1 / 2, Synth Pad 2 / 3, Vox and Bell. They're triggered step by step like drum hits. Vox chops land on steps 5, 9 and 13, and the bell answers on steps 13 and 15.
Session 4 — The "Hard Knock" Drum Pattern
23 SeptemberThis Logic Pro session uses the same pattern as the drumbeat at the top of this page, which I made in FL Studio: the same kick, rim and snare placements as the interactive grid above.
A single Hard Knock region (bars 1–5) on a Roland TR-808 track, opened in the Step Sequencer:
- Kick 1 on steps 1, 4, 6, 9 and 13. It isn't just on the beat: the hits on 4 and 6 push against the pulse, which is the syncopated kick hip-hop is known for.
- Snare 1 on step 13 (beat 4) is the heavy backbeat.
- Rim on steps 9 and 15 adds a lighter click that fills the space between the kick and snare.
The controls on each row (/16 step rate, → playback direction, the dice to randomise and × to clear) let every drum be programmed independently.
Session 5 — Arranging a Full Track
24 September · 4/4The final session moves from loops to a full arrangement: drums, bass, guitar and a synth lead over a chord progression, entering at different points so the track builds.
Five tracks: the Midtown Summer drum kit (chosen from the Library's Electronic Drums list on the left), True Love Synth Lead, Progressive Acoustic 13 (acoustic guitar), Seeking Light Vox 02 and South City Sub Bass 02. The row above the tracks is the chord track (Am7, Am7/E, Em7, then Fmaj7), which the loops follow so everything stays in key.
The Step Sequencer below holds the drum pattern: kick on steps 1, 4, 6, 9 and 13, snare on 13, Hi-Hat 1 on 1, 3, 5 and 7 in the first half of the bar, and Hi-Hat 2 on 11, 13 and 15 in the second half. Handing the hats from one sound to another mid-bar keeps the loop interesting.
- Bars 1–6: only the acoustic guitar and sub bass, a stripped-back intro.
- Bar 7: the drums come in, and the energy lifts.
- Bar 9: the synth lead joins, the full section.
- Bars 11–18: the guitar drops out, leaving room for the lead over the new Fmaj7 chords.
- Bar 19: the guitar returns.
A closer view of the kit's rows. The colours group the sounds (pink for kicks, orange for snares, cyan for hi-hats, green for melodic rows such as Electric Bass and Electric Guitar), and each square is one sixteenth note. The F2 row is a pitched pad, so the same grid can trigger notes as well as drums.
The audio track editor for the True Love Synth Lead (bars 9–10). The two lanes are the left and right channels of the stereo recording, and the height of the waveform is its loudness over time: a steady sustained lead with gentle swells. This view is where audio gets trimmed, faded and checked for level. The Smart Tempo tab lets Logic stretch loops recorded at other tempos to match the project.
My Final Track
My finished hip-hop track, created using the production and arrangement skills shown throughout this diary.