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How to Make Your Own R&B Music Beats

R & B beats support a genre of music with slow tempo but fast and off-beat rhythms with heavy bass drum and some echo effects. Making your own R&B music beats requires the use of either an acoustic or electronic drum set to produce the beats. Using a computer and drum machine will give you a quick method of providing an R&B beat and will allow you to record your composition in your final R&B song or play along with an acoustic drum set.

Things You'll Need

  • Computer
  • Internet
  • Compatible sound card
  • Drum set (optional)
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Instructions

    • 1
      Installing Hydrogen Drum Machine is free.

      Download and install the Hydrogen drum machine, a freeware program that can produce all the sounds of an acoustic drum set. Hydrogen drum machine freeware is available for both Linux and Windows users. These instructions also work for Cubase.

    • 2

      Open a new project in Hydrogen. Select the GM Kit from the lower right corner by clicking load. Click on Pattern 1. In the middle section place a beat at the numbers 1 and 4 using the Kick beat. Select Pattern 1 to play for 16 bars by clicking on 16 of the squares next to Pattern 1. This means your song will be 16 sections. Press the play button to test that you can hear the beat before continuing.

    • 3

      Set resolution to 16 to take advantage of off beats. Do this by looking two-thirds of the way down the screen for the drop-down menu that says Resolution 8. Click on the arrow and click on 16. You will now see that the grid pattern below has been subdivided.

    • 4

      Set Beat Pattern 2. To do this click on Pattern 2 and select Hand Clap. Place a beat marker at the first two subdivided beats after beat 2. Place another hand clap beat at the first subdivided beat after beat 3. Still in Pattern 2, place a Jazz Crash on beat 4. Next to Pattern 2, skip over the first four beats and place markers for the next eight.

    • 5

      Set Pattern 3. Place a marker next to Tom Low between beats 1 and 2 and between beats 2 and 3. Place another marker next to Tom Mid on beat 3. Next to Pattern 3, miss out the first eight sections and click on the next four. You should now see a pattern of blue markers on Pattern 1, 2 and 3 that together look like an inverted pyramid.

Digital Music

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