Hands on sound: Rhythm and Reason

No matter whether your taste falls on the side of rock, jazz, indie, hip hop, electronica or grime, the beat is what drives the music along.

After all, you can’t dance or thrash about to a track unless there’s a groove being laid down by the drum track – well, perhaps not unless you’re an ageing hippy who’s into 1970s ambient music.

But if you’re not accustomed to the art of playing drums, you may struggle to come up with interesting-sounding rhythms. Lots of the latest dance tunes use quite complicated layers of beats to keep the music driving forward.

We’re going to look at some of the tricks and techniques dance music producers use to build up and break down these rhythms. But don’t worry if you’re not into dance tracks, as many of the techniques we’ll cover can be used in other forms of music.

We’ll be using Reason V3 from Propellerhead Software to create the beats, because it contains everything you need to get going, including modules for drum machines, samplers and effects units.

If you don’t have Reason you’ll still be able to follow most of the steps we take using the software synthesisers built into sequencers such as Cubase, Live and Sonar.

We’re going to start with quite a simple beat that we’ll program into the drum machine in Reason and use as the foundation for our rhythm. We’ll then take this stripped-down beat and gradually add extra elements to it to give it the type of break-beat feel you hear on many dance tracks today.

We’ll do this by layering drum patterns with sampled breaks. Once we have our break-beat, we’ll start processing some of the drums with filter effects and distortion to give the beat a more electro feel.

You should be able to take the techniques we show you and adapt them to suit whatever style of music you make.

To get started, load up Reason V3. We want to begin with an empty rack so click on the File menu and select Open.

In Locations select the Reason folder and then choose Template documents. Now select the Empty rack template and click on Open to load it in. Because of the way audio routing works in Reason, first we need to add in a mixer module.

By starting with a mixer module, any extra modules we add later will automatically be wired up to the mixer. Right-click on the rack and from the menu that appears select Mixer 14:2.

Once you have the mixer in your rack you can start adding extra modules. Right-click on a blank area in the rack and select Redrum Drum Computer from the menu.

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