Programming a beat
You have a kit loaded. Now what? Do you need to play it in time on a keyboard?
No. You can place every hit with the mouse, check it by eye, and fix it later. That's programming a beat. By the end of this lesson you'll have a four-bar beat with a fill, built from one bar you drew yourself.
The idea: a grid of hits
A MIDI clip on a Drum Rack track opens in the MIDI Note Editor. Time runs left to right. Each row is one pad of the kit, named after it, so a note on the Bass Drum row is a kick.
The vertical lines are the grid. When you draw, a note lands on the nearest line, so the grid decides where a click ends up.
Draw your first bar
- On your drum track, double-click an empty clip slot. Live makes an empty one-bar MIDI clip and opens it below.
- Right-click in the editor and set the grid to 1/8, so the lines fall on eighth notes.
- Press B to switch on Draw Mode. The pointer turns into a pencil.
- Click kicks on beats 1, 1.2.3 (halfway through beat 2) and 3, snares on 2 and 4, and a closed hi-hat on every line.
- Press B again to go back to the normal pointer.
Positions read bar.beat.sixteenth: 1.2.3 is bar 1, beat 2, third sixteenth, the "and" of 2. Live shows them along the top of the editor.
Fold the kit
A full kit has more rows than your beat uses. Click Fold at the top left of the editor (or press F with the editor in focus) to hide every row that has no notes.
Turn Fold off whenever you want to add a sound the beat doesn't use yet.
Split, chop and join
Long notes can be cut up. That's often quicker than drawing many short ones.
- Split: hold E and draw a line across a note. It becomes two notes at that point.
- Chop: select a note, right-click it and choose Chop Note(s) on Grid, or press CmdE (CtrlE on Windows). It's cut into pieces one grid line long.
- Join: select notes on the same row and press CmdJ (CtrlJ on Windows). They merge into one.
Chop is a fast way to turn eighth-note hats into sixteenths: select the hats, set the grid to 1/16 and chop. Listen to what it does to the groove:
Same kicks and snares at 96 BPM. Only the hi-hats change.
Loop it, then grow it
One good bar is the hard part. Copying it is easy.
The loop brace (the bar above the editor's ruler) sets which part of the clip repeats. Click the Duplicate button in the clip's settings, or press CmdD (CtrlD on Windows) with the loop brace selected. The loop doubles in length and its notes are copied into the new half.
Now you have four identical bars, and room to change the last one.
Finer grids and triplets
A fill at the end of bar 4 tells the listener the loop is about to start again. Fills often need notes the 1/16 grid can't reach.
- Cmd1 (Ctrl1 on Windows) narrows the grid (1/16 → 1/32).
- Cmd2 (Ctrl2 on Windows) widens it again.
- Cmd3 (Ctrl3 on Windows) switches triplets on or off. A triplet grid fits three notes where two would normally go, so 1/16T puts six lines in each beat.
The current grid is shown at the top right of the editor.
Off the grid, and switched off
Not every note has to sit on a line. Hold Cmd (Alt on Windows) while you drag a note to move it freely, or press Cmd4 (Ctrl4 on Windows) to turn snapping off altogether. A quiet snare placed a little late, called a ghost note, adds movement between the main hits. Make it quiet by dragging its bar down in the velocity lane below the notes.
To hear the beat without a note, select it and press 0. The note is deactivated: it turns grey and stays in the clip, but doesn't play. Press 0 again to bring it back.
Here are all four bars, the fill included:
Summary
- In a drum clip every row is a pad; Fold hides the pads you don't use.
- Draw Mode (B) adds and deletes notes with single clicks.
- Split (hold E), Chop (Cmd/Ctrl+E) and Join (Cmd/Ctrl+J) reshape notes you've already drawn.
- Write one bar, then Duplicate the loop to grow it.
- The grid decides where notes land: Cmd/Ctrl+1 and 2 change its size, Cmd/Ctrl+3 switches triplets.
- Hold Cmd (Mac) or Alt (Windows) to place notes off the grid; press 0 to deactivate a note.
Practice
Program the core bar
importance5 of 5Load any kit, make an empty one-bar clip and draw a beat with Draw Mode: kicks on 1, 1.2.3 and 3, snares on 2 and 4, closed hats on every eighth. Then loop it and duplicate it to four bars.
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With Fold on you should see three rows: Bass Drum, Snare Drum and Closed Hi Hat, with eight hats per bar. After two Duplicates the clip's length reads four bars.
The most common slip is drawing with the grid at 1/16, which makes it easy to land a hit one sixteenth late. Check the grid value at the top right before you draw.
Add a triplet fill
importance3 of 5Take your four-bar beat and write a fill in the last beat of bar 4 on a triplet grid. Try it on the hi-hats first, then on the snare.
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Switch to 1/16T with Cmd/Ctrl+3 (narrow or widen until the label reads 1/16T), clear the hats from the last beat, and draw six notes across it. If the fill sounds rushed, widen to 1/8T and use three notes instead.
Ghost notes off the grid
importance2 of 5Add two quiet snares between the main hits of bar 2, dragged slightly late with snapping bypassed. Deactivate them, listen, and switch them back on.
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Hold Cmd (Mac) or Alt (Windows) while dragging so the notes don't jump to a line, and pull their velocity well below the main snares. If they sound like flams, they're too close to a main hit; move them further away.
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