making beats?

D

djbleach

New member
I'm pretty new w/ sonar, but my problem goes to other things as well. i'm trying to make beats(mainly hip hop) onto my computer. the hardest part is laying down the basic drum beat part of it. once i get that done i can go on to samples and different instruments w/ no problem, but the drum part is killing me. i have a yamaha keyboard w/ i am using for midi i/o, and i'm using some of the drums that come w/ sonar thru the keyboard.
i've tried doing it w/ cool edit pro as well, but my biggest problem is looping i guess. i can make a pretty basic beat, but once it's time to break it down and loop it, it sounds off beat at the begginning of each loop. (i don't know if that makes sence to anyone)
am i doing this all wrong?

could anyone who makes beats tell me how you do it?
ANY input would be great-
 
maybe someone who uses cakewalk's looping can help you.

i don't. i copy and paste.

lets say I make a basic beat that is 4 measures long. I copy the 4 measures and paste them starting at measure 5. now i've got 8 meausres of the basic beat for the chorus (aka the hook). now i add a marker and call it chorus.

typically in hip-hop, the chorus is 8 measures long and verses are 16 measures. take those 8 measures from the chorus, do a copy, and then paste them twice. now you've got 16 measures for the verse. now add a marker and call it verse.

now you can augment the measures in the verses and chorus to distinguish them from one another.

once you've got your chorus beat, verses beat, and a break beat, modify the verses so that they are a little different from one another. drop a snare here, add an extra kick there to give it some spice.
 
I loop beats in GT Pro, which is all audio so I'm not sure how applicable this is to midi...

To get the start of each loop, I magnify the track to get fine adjustment. I click on the spike of the 1st beat, say it's a kick, in the 1st measure I want to loop, then I back off say 5 milliseconds and split the audio at that point. At the end of the section to be looped I split the audio right on the kick to be excluded. I then copy the split section into a seperate track, and paste it twice. I line up the second clip and just drag it back & forth until it sounds about right. The extra 5 ms gives me a bit of leeway and helps make up for my crappy timekeeping. Once the 2 clips are in time, I can copy and paste them again, going thru the same exercise.

Not very scientific but I'm getting better at disguising the joins
 
You might want to take a look at ...

Acid 4.0

OR

Fruity Loops Pro 4

One of those two programs should make your beat creation much, much simplier.

spin
 
Have tried laying the beat down in midi, then converting it to audio? Doing it that way gives you the option of quantizing it and making fine-tune corrections. It has the added advantage of allowing you to create the entire track to the song before converting it, giving you the opportunity to change the beat at appropriate points. You can also use whatever drum sounds from whatever sound modules or sound fonts you have.
 
It is actually quite easy to make loops in Sonar...using the groove clip looping functions. I tried to reply to this once, but couldn't do it from home. I wrote a lot, too. Private message me if you really want to know and haven't done some other method. If it's a go, we can try to post some of it here later.

As for the first beat, you'll have to just slide it to snap to the beginning of the first beat. I'm guessing if you quantize all of it, it will start to sound too mechanical, unless you want it to do that. I don't know squat about proper quantizing techniques, but I did play around with groove clip looping, which basically "acidizes" your loops so that you can start to edit what parts of it you will be using.

Let me know if you still need help! I'll do my best.
Kirstin
 
djbleach......................

We have proffered three to four different ways to make beats with your comp.

Which way worked best for you?????

spin
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top