Solid, on-point beats are absolutely central to hip-hop, pop and dance music, but when you’re new to electronic production, wringing the requisite energy, groove and vibe out of your DAW, samples and drum machines is often easier said than done. With this collection of tips, then, we’ll tackle half a dozen of the most frequently encountered drum programming and engineering errors made by the novice producer, and serve up a few advisory nuggets to help you up your percussive game along the way.

1. Humdrum Hi-hats

While tight, driving hi-hats are an important element of house, DnB and other dance music styles, beware the compositional pitfall of sticking a flat, equidistantly-spaced stream of monotonous hits over your backbeat and calling it a day. There are endless subtly transformative parameters within the fundamental eighth, or 16th-note, framework to play with, chief among them velocity and timing. For example lower the strength of every other note to add on or off-beat emphasis. Or spend some time designing more intricate velocity curves; and break up the regularity of the notes a little to elicit more interesting rhythms.

2. Lack Of Groove

Expanding on the previous, hi-hat-specific advice, most dance genres demand that their drums (and, for that matter, everything else!) be swung to a greater or lesser extent, so don't make the mistake of always locking yours to the metronomic diktats of the straight quantise grid. No doubt about it, if you want to maximise the authenticity of your house, techno, EDM and garage beats, you need to explore your DAW’s swing and/or groove controls, whether that means dialling in MPC-style off-beat offset with Logic Pro’s Quantize and Q-Swing parameters, or applying extracted rhythmic templates from Ableton Live’s Groove Pool. And as it’s the hits between the main beats that are modified by swing, program your hi-hats, snare drum ghost notes, toms and percussion (see below) with that in mind. 

3. Reliance On Prefab Sounds

These days, there’s certainly no shortage of superb professionally produced kick and snare samples on the soundware market, enabling even the greenest of beat makers to throw together top-notch drum kits in minutes – but you’ll have a far more artistically satisfying experience if you learn how to roll your own. As with so many things in music production, layering is key to successful drum design, so combine samples and/or synthesised sounds for character and depth. Offset stacked snares and claps to ‘smear’ them on the timeline for heft and thickness. Or merge separate ‘click’, ‘body’ and ‘sub’ layers to composite fat, hard-hitting kicks.

4. Feeble Kick Drums

On the subject of kicks, if your rhythm tracks are coming across as weak and lacking in power, an undercooked bass drum may well be the culprit. Weight and toughness are the primary sonic qualities to consider here, and your go-to processors for bringing them out are EQ, compression, transient shaping and distortion. The specifics of how these should be deployed will depend on the particular kick in question, but the general idea is to dovetail the impact and presence of the transient with the body and sub-bass energy of the sustain stage.

5. Formulaic programming

Having lovingly crafted your own glorious library of bespoke drum sounds, it would be a shame to squander them on predictable, cliched MIDI patterns, wouldn’t it? Stylistic tropes are, of course, essential for maintaining form and structure in any genre, but understanding how to subvert those themes – however surreptitiously – is a must if you really want to set yourself apart from the production hoi polloi. Try a wonky, loping hip-hop hi-hat over a four-to-the-floor house kick, for example; or play your DnB beat in live on your MIDI controller, rather than drawing it into the piano roll, for a radical change of shape.

6. Not Enough Cowbell

If you’re not integrating hand drums and percussion into your beats, you’re missing out on a world of colourful and dynamic rhythmic possibilities that really could make all the difference to your mixes. Something as seemingly innocuous as a 16th-note cabasa pattern or syncopated clave riff can liven up an otherwise pedestrian groove, but even greater musical rewards await those prepared to learn how to program realistic conga and bongo parts and invest in a serious sample-based instrument with which to generate them.

What Tips Do You Have?

Hopefully our tips will help you get over those drum-related humps, and inspire your to try some new techniques. Why not share your go-to beat-making techniques in the comments?