J. Anthony Allen shows where to place a kick drum on beat one of a measure, using a one-bar loop and metronome to lock in the timing. He mentions adding kicks on beat three for variation, but recommends mastering the downbeat first.
Okay, so remember, the formula kick goes on downbeats. So our kick is on a downbeat. It's right there. Let's solo our kick. So we're only going to hear our kick, and we're going to turn this loop on. Okay, so we're going to loop one bar over and over. My loop is turned on. This is the area that's going to be looped. And here we go. Three, four. One, two, three, four. Okay, if I want to double check that I'm right, I can always turn on my metronome and hear 1, 2, 3, and 4. Cool. So kick is on beat one. That's our downbeat. That's where we want it. We could jazz it up a little bit by putting our kick also on the upbeat on beat three. But hold on to that for now.
