Beat Making Programs | Tips and Tricks for Making Slick Beats

1. Know your Genre

Without knowing your genre, you'll basically be just slapping together some beats without understanding what works and what doesn't within your sound. So it's important to study and get a feel for the top artists in your field, before you get all creative thinking you can slap together a few beats and become the next big hot sounding DJ. So learn the nuances and the foundation to song making and your beats will drastically improve, big time. Of course you can just go all creative and mic and match genres, but honestly if you just stick with one, your skills will improve much faster. Remember it's not the beat making program, it's the artist behind the program that matters.

2. Making Your Beats

Now when using any beat making program there are 3 important guidelines to consider. The first is the baseline, the second is your audio loops and the third is laying out your midi drum patterns. The baseline is your foundation. It's the most important part of your sound. I know it's very tempting to get right into slapping together slick sounding drums, but create a solid baseline first and you'll have done the ground work for making sick hip hop beats that groove baby.

Use these tips and tricks and you'll be well on your way to making great sounding beats and songs. But of course your going to need a decent beat making program, so invest some time and check around and read up on some decent reviews. This is one of the best sites out there that reviews and weighs the pros and cons of the most popular beat making programs, so check them out.

The audio loops are the next component to consider especially if you want to make commercial selling beats. Ask any legit music producer, and the first question they are going to ask you is, what kind of audio loops did you use. This is because licensing is a big issue, if you use nothing but royalty free samples, you won't get very far. It's ok to use loops and VST plugins, because these are note by note samples of sounds, not a mish mash loop of sounds. So make sure the beat making program you choose is set up with these kinds of note by note sampling of sounds, otherwise your just mixing unlicensable beats and sounds.

Detailed info about hip hop production

Lastly is your midi drum pattern. I think if there is one piece of advice that truly works with drum beats is less is more. Layering and layering drum patterns until they are too complex just don't sound good to the ear. So keep your beats solid and use space as well as drum patterns to create your sound. A great beat doesn't have to be an overly complex one, often the simpler the better is what works best.