Establish the tempo of your beat first and foremost by setting the beats per minute on your track file. The number range of your beats per minute for slow, mid- and up-tempo beats can vary depending on the rhythms and bars of your arrangement and whether your melodies and drum patterns start on an up or down beat.
Record the drum track, the foundation of your beat, first. Start with the kick drum, then add snare and cymbals and other lighter percussion elements. You can also record a combination of drum elements at the same time on one track with the use of an MPC drum pad or MIDI controller. Before recording your drum track, play around with the different drum sounds until you have found the pattern that will inspire melodies for the rest of your beat.
Add the bass line of your beat. You can also record the bass line first, with the drum track following, as it is also considered a foundation for your beat that will inspire the melodies for the high-toned instruments upon layering. Typically, bass lines of a beat are created with techno, bass or electric guitar sounds. Filter through the string instruments in your sound bank to locate the right bass sound for your style of beat.
Loop the foundation of your beat to play continuously as you filter through different sounds and instruments on your sound bank that will fulfill the layering of your track. Play different notes of the instruments until you find a melodic loop pattern that will go well with your drum track and bass line. Humming and movement such as head-nodding and/or pacing along to the foundation of your beat will help get your creative juices flowing for finding melodies. Record as many layers of melodies and instruments as necessary to make your beat sound full and complete.
Fine tune your finished product with the help of your music production software mixing features. It is best to use studio-quality headphones when mixing your beat. This ensures that you are hearing the correct volume of each track and also whether the beat is evenly panned to the right and left sides. Any flat or hollow sounds on your beat can be magnified with the use of the overdrive and reverb processing features that are available on most if not all beat-making software. When mixing, deal with each track of sounds separately rather than all at once. Some of the sounds of your beat may be fine as they are and would explode too much with the use of overdrive. Mix down your beat until the overall sound quality of the music is as high as it can be.