Beat Making on a Budget

Here's what I Use! 

Building Blocks for Beat Making

The ReBirth Museum

You have to try this! You will have to Propellerhead and register, which is free and simple. Then you can use your username and password to get a free copy of Rebirth. good for techno but will do hip hop well too.

ReBirth Mod Archive

ReBirth RB-338 Mod Archive. Download new drum sounds for Rebirth. After downloading unzip and copy to mod folder inside Rebirth.

Drumstation.

Download Drumstation Now! Based on the concept of the legendary Roland drum synthesizer!

I like this drum machine. It has samples from various Roland drum machines, such as the TR 909 and the Tr 808. It also allows you to import your own loops and sample to use in your beat. Effects such as delay, reverb, distortion, and filter can be put on each drum or loop independant of the other drums you are using. When you are done making your beat you can record it in a .wav file at CD quality.

Rubberduck

This is a good program to come up with bass loops to use in other programs. Does some interesting analogue sounds. Allows you to import two loops to layer with your bass program, then record the results.

Moonfish

Download the MoonFish (freeware tracker/groovebox by Bram Bos).
This is a good starter program. It only gives you 3 tracks to use. You can import loops, samples, or use the samples that are already with the program to create a drum loop. The good new is that once you have the three tracks filled, you can bounce them down to a loop and free up two of the tracks. You can keep doing this until you have a beat that you are happy with.

Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder

The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor Audacity? is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

This is a free audio editor/multi-track recorder. As an editor, there is no other software that is easier. It has built in tools for eq, noise reduction, compression, reverb, echo, nomalization, looping, time compression, pitch shifting, and more that I can't think of at the moment. I gave a copy of this program to a friend of mind who was editing down songs to go with a powerpoint presentation. She installed it herself (she is not a computer wiz) I talked her though a couple of edits on the phone. She was on her on in 10 minutes and she had never done anything like this before in her life!

You can also record audio, overdub, and mix down. There is an unlimited nuber of tracks (so long as your computer can keep up). Also the program is very stable, even on older PC's using WIN 98. Highly Recomended First Computer Audio Program!

Freeware - Free Music Software [Shareware Music Machine]

The biggest Music Software collection and
related links on the web today. Download hundreds of Free music
programs, read reviews, post your own comments

Turage Loop Sequencer

Neat sample loop sequencer that you can also use to manipulate loops into something interesting. See my review in my blog.