Beat — grid
Program a drum groove on a step grid, change the time signature and swing, and hear every change instantly. Export it to Ableton as MIDI when it slaps.
Start from a groove
Time & feel
What makes a beat feel the way it does — meter, swing, syncopation, accents and half-time. Every card has a button that loads an example into the grid.
Time signatures
The top number is beats per bar, the bottom is the note that gets the beat. 4/4 = four quarter notes (almost all pop, hip-hop and EDM). 3/4 = three (waltz). 6/8 = six 8th notes felt as two big beats of three. Odd meters like 7/8 group 2 + 2 + 3.
Swing
Swing delays every second 16th note, so pairs of notes become long-short. A little (10–20%) adds bounce; a lot (30%+) feels lazy and laid-back. It's the MPC sound of boom bap and lo-fi.
Syncopation
Accents between the beats instead of on them. A kick that lands just before a beat, a snare on the "a" — the ear expects the beat and gets surprised. Dembow is syncopation on repeat.
Accents & ghost notes
Not every hit is the same volume. Accents push the main beats; quiet ghost notes fill the gaps without cluttering. A hat pattern with accents on the beats instantly sounds more human.
Half-time
Put the snare on beat 3 only and the groove feels half as fast as the tempo. That's how trap sits at 140 BPM yet feels like 70 — heavy, with room for fast hats on top.
The theory behind it
Note values, meters and groove are covered step by step in the Music Theory course.
Genre grooves
The skeleton of each genre's drums. Load one, then make it yours — most great beats start from a classic pattern and change one thing.
Boom bap
Kick on 1 and the "and" of 3, snare on 2 and 4, swung hats. The head-nod of 90s hip-hop — swing is what makes it bounce.
Trap
A single snare/clap on beat 3 makes 140 feel like 70. Busy 16th hats with a roll at the end, 808 following the kick.
House
Kick on every beat, clap on 2 and 4, open hat on every off-beat — the off-beat hat is the whole "lift".
Reggaeton (dembow)
Kick on every beat with the snare on the "a" of 1 and the "and" of 2 — the 3-3-2 pattern that defines the genre.
Lo-fi
Lazy, heavily swung, soft hats and a sparse kick. Leave space — the dust and the chords do the rest.
Rock
Straight 8th hats, backbeat snare on 2 and 4, kick on 1 and around 3. No swing — it drives.
Half-time
Snare on beat 3 only, kick wherever it pushes. Used across trap, dubstep and drum & bass to feel heavy at high tempos.
Waltz 3/4
Three beats per bar: a strong ONE then two lighter beats. OOM-pah-pah.
6/8 groove
Two big beats per bar, each split into three — the rolling, swaying feel of R&B ballads and blues.
Into Ableton
From this grid to a Drum Rack in four steps.
Export the groove
Build a pattern here and press Export MIDI. You get a 4-bar .mid file with two tracks: Drums (General MIDI drum notes) and 808, at your tempo and time signature.
Drop it on a Drum Rack
Create a MIDI track with a Drum Rack (any 808 or 909 kit) and drag the file in. The pads line up with the standard map: C1 kick, D1 snare, D#1 clap, F#1 closed hat, A#1 open hat, C#1 rim, A1 tom.
Put the 808 on its own track
Ableton splits multi-track MIDI files into separate tracks — give the 808 track an 808 sample in Simpler (or Operator) and turn on Glide if you want slides.
Swing it in Ableton instead
Prefer to swing inside Ableton? Export with swing at 0%, then drag a groove from the Groove Pool (the MPC swing grooves are a classic) onto the clip and adjust its amount.