Pro Tip #1 Strengthening Your Beats

So you've been making some beats, but they are sounding a bit weak.  What to do?  Strengthen those beats!

First off, we need to look at successful beats that just seem to work. You know the one's I'm talking about, the ones where they come on and you just start moving, nodding your head. In these beats you'll find that there is a constant pulse in the music. But pay closer attention and you will discover that it is not necessarily the drums that are producing the pulse.


Drums may comprise a few of beats, but more often than not, other instruments or sounds will come in and hit on the beat to keep that pulse alive.  The beat is not just your drums. The beat is all sounds together pulsing to a tempo.

Knowing that, how can you change the way you create your beats to make them stronger?  Visit Electronic Music Production to find out, or hit the read moar button bellow!
Write your beginning drum lines first, then try turning your drum sounds down as you are write the rest of the elements of the song.  Note the level of each major drum element, usually kick, snare and hats, and then turn them down, not so that they're totally gone, but so that they are not driving the pulse of the music. This will force you to emphasize other sounds on the beat and will ultimately strengthen the voicing of your other sounds.

Now turn your drums back up to the range they were before you pulled them down. Now, not only is your beat going to be pulsing very hard, your phrasing of other lines is going to be emphasizing your pulse.

You may also note that the peaks of your sounds are all adding up in the mix to create potentially unmanageable peaks on the beat, maybe even some peaks exceeding 0db. First off, this shouldn't be the case.  You should be writing and mixing with enough headroom so that your signal isn't exceeding 0db. To do this, when you start your beat making session, turn your monitors up, and as you start to bring sounds into your beat, turn them each down. As you do this, you'll be able to add more sounds, without constantly worrying about clipping your output. A good rule of thumb is to set your kick drum anywhere from -18db to -12db. This may be a hard habit to start, but if you take anything away from this blog, please take this idea.

Assuming we have enough headroom to work with, lets reduce the dynamic range of the mix by knocking those peaks down a bit. A great way to deal with this, is by playing your parts in by hand. Unless you are Rain Man, your hits are going to be slightly out of time. This likely will mean that the peaks don't add up into super peaks.  If you did write in your beat with a pencil tool, or over quantize hand played parts, you can manually nudge sounds back off the beat a bit.

Another way to manage super peaks is by the use of dynamics tools like compressors, transient shapers and limiters.  For this purpose I love to use transient shapers.   This is my favorite:

http://www.schaack-audio.com/transientshaper.html

Just whack a transient shaper like Schaak Audio's (good sound / low price = good deal) onto  your individual channels that are hitting on the pule of the beat.  For drums sounds, turn the release down a smidge (sorry for the technical term), for your other sounds, turn down the attack until the sound gets too soft.  There are three little humps under each knob in Shaack's shaper, they represent the time scale to be effected by the knob, little hump for short time, big hump for long time.

Watch your mixer's stereo two buss, as you drop the attack of the other elements, that super peak will be tamed.  To complete the process consider some very slight limiting from a quality limiter like:

http://www.fabfilter.com/products/pro-l.php

FabFilter's Pro L (quick one here - turn down the out, found on bottom right quite low, and turn up the gain until you see about 1 or 2 db reduction in the meter in the upper right, the red line shooting down, to get a more accurate view, click that little -32db button on the bottom right, and switch it to -16db), sum your various components into a buss and apply a little light compression and maybe a touch of limiting again.

Your drums will have that hard punch, your phrases will be strongly augmenting the beat, and your dynamics will be in control.  A job well done, but don't forget, it helps to have a good musical idea first!

If your beats are too strong, check out Softening Your Beats to tame the beast!