2. Create Your First Beats!

The Drums

Before creating a beat, we need to choose our instrument. For beats, the ideal instrument is the drums.

We will use sound to play 3 drum sounds.

These two-letter abbreviations represent different parts of the drum kit.

bd = bass drum
sd = snare drum
hh = hi-hat

With sound("bd sd hh") we play three drum hits: first the bass drum bd, then the snare sd, and finally the hi-hat hh.

Bass Drum, Snare, and Hi-Hat

Now that we know the three basic instruments, let's see why they are so important. These 3 instruments form the foundation of almost all modern music. You will find them in pop, hip-hop, rock, and many other genres. That’s why, with these 3 sounds, you can create most of the beats you hear in your favorite songs.

And why these 3?

To understand their importance, let's see what each one brings us:

The Bass Drum (bd): It's the giant of the drum kit. It sets the pulse with a deep, resonant sound. Think of it as the heartbeat of your song.

The Snare (sd): It produces a sharp and cracking hit. It's that sound that makes you want to nod your head to the beat.

Hi-hat (hh): Adds brightness and speed to the beat. Its sharp, metallic sound fills the gaps and keeps the rhythm constantly moving.

The Bass Drum and "Four on the Floor"

Let's start practicing. We will begin with the bass drum bd, which is the most fundamental element.

Write the following in the Strudel editor.

Congratulations, we just created the most fundamental beat in dance music! This pattern is known as 'Four on the Floor'.

To understand how this works, let's see how Strudel structures rhythms. In Strudel, we build rhythms by writing "words" (bd) in a sequence ("bd bd bd bd").

Cycle: Everything you write between quotes "" forms a complete cycle.
Beat: Each word within the cycle occupies a beat. It's like the heartbeat or the tick of a clock.

For example, if you write 4 sounds ("bd bd bd bd"), Strudel divides the cycle into 4 equal parts. It's like cutting a cake (cycle) into 4 pieces (beats) of the same size.

Imagine a cycle lasts 4 seconds. Then each sound plays for 1 second. Since we have written 4 bass drum sounds, you would hear a bass drum hit every second.

By default in Strudel, the cycle lasts 2 seconds, so everything we put between "" will take 2 seconds to play. Since we have added 4 sounds, each will sound every half second.

How does this division in 4 sound?

Now let's see how this is applied in practice. You can "feel" these 4 beats in many songs. The first beat is called strong beat, and the other 3 are weak beats.

To verify this, listen to the song "What do you mean" by Justin Bieber. At the beginning, a clock sounds that perfectly marks each beat of the rhythm.

Do this exercise: At each tick of that clock, count 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4... Notice what happens when you say 1.

When doing this, you will notice three things:

The tick of the clock sounds a little louder on beat 1
The piano enters right on beat 1
The bass drum hits also start on beat 1

Do you feel how the rhythm divides into those 4 beats?
1⏱️🎹, 2⏱️, 3⏱️, 4⏱️
1⏱️🎹, 2⏱️, 3⏱️, 4⏱️
...
1⏱️🎹, 2⏱️, 3⏱️, 4⏱️
1⏱️🥁, 2⏱️🥁, 3⏱️🥁, 4⏱️🥁

This is a good example to distinguish between beat (each tick of the clock) and cycle (each group of 4 beats). Hence the word cycle as something cyclical that keeps repeating.

The division into 4 parts is the most common in music. Pop, rock, hip-hop... almost all of these genres use 4 beats. That's why we'll start with this division.

By the way! Does the bass drum rhythm sound familiar? Listen closely to the song! It's the 'four on the floor' that we just created!

Visualizing the Rhythm

Hit play and observe the 2 ways we are going to visually represent our rhythm.

These are two ways to represent your beat:

Grid: The 4 bass drum hits are represented as rectangles
Staff: The standard musical notation. With 4 notes representing the 4 bass drum hits.

Staff

We will look at the staff in more detail later, but to get you familiarized, let's go over a few things.

The 2 black vertical bars that appear at the beginning of the staff indicate that this score should be played by percussion (drums).

Since the bass drum cannot play a melody, all its notes will be on the same line, the first one of the staff as it is the lowest, and the other drum instruments will also have their own line higher up.

The top 4 indicates that the cycle/bar is divided into 4 beats, as we just saw. The bottom 4 is not important at this moment, you can ignore it.

With cat() (from concatenate) we can add more cycles/measures separated by ",".

In the image, you can see 2 cycles/measures, with the division into 4 beats of bass drum in each one. In this example where all the beats sound exactly the same, we wouldn't perceive the division into 4 audibly, but when we add more elements, it will start to be noticeable.

Tip

To write faster, you can use s() instead of sound().

The bass drum in a real example

Listen now to another example with the same beat: "Satisfaction" by Benny Benassi. When the beat starts, you will hear the bass drum hits on each of the pulses. Shortly after, the snare will come in, which we will see next.

In the next section, we will look at the snare and the hi-hat 👉>>