In this tutorial J. Anthony Allen walks viewers through creating a minimal drum loop using only three fundamental percussion elements: a kick, a snare, and a hi‑hat. He demonstrates how to clear existing clips, search for suitable samples (using keywords like “kick,” “snare,” and “hat”) and recommends the free sound library freesound.org for royalty‑free one‑shots. Allen explains the difference between loops and one‑shot samples, selects a snappy snare with a clap character and a thin hi‑hat hit, and then renames and organizes the clips on dedicated tracks. He shows how to trim the samples to roughly a quarter‑note length, delete excess tail, and apply fade‑outs to prevent lingering resonance. Throughout, he offers casual commentary (e.g., a Deadmau5 anecdote) while focusing on practical DAW workflow steps that set up a clean, basic drum pattern ready for further layering.
Chapters
Okay, what sounds go into a beat? Now, we're gonna start by making what we call the world's most simple drumbeat. Okay. This is gonna be no thrills. So there can be anything in a drum beat. You know, you can use spoons clanking together. You can use hitting on your desk. Any percussive sound like that. One of the most famous producers right now, Deadmau5, talks about using farts to take the place of snares. You can do that if you want to. We're not going to do that here, though. We're going to use the three most basic things to build our first beat. And the three most basic things that any beat needs is a kick, a snare, and a hi hat. Okay, Those three things. So I basically have kick, snares, and hi hats here. But I'm going to erase them because all three of these things I pulled from this loop. So let's get rid of those. I'm going to unsolo this loop and then I'm going to mute it because I don't want to hear that. So I'm going to search through my library of stuff and find some sounds. So I'm just going to search for kick. That one's cool. I'm going to go with that one. So I'm going to put a kick on my timeline. I'm going to put that on my kick track. Now, you probably don't have a big library of sounds like this. This is a great opportunity to head over to a website like freesound.org I've mentioned this before. I love this website. You can find millions of things for totally free royalty. Free download all day long. Let's look for a snare. As what typically happens if I'm searching through like hundreds of snares? Like, one of the first ones I just heard was the one I'm that I want that one. I want something that's got a little bit of a clap to it. Only because that's kind of what I'm feeling like right now. Okay, so. So here's our snare. Now let's find a hi hat. I'm going to search for hat. Now, one thing you'll notice here is that a lot of these hats are little loops. And I don't want a loop right now. I just want a single hit. We sometimes call these one shots, like just a one shot of a hi hat hit. Like that. That's a one shot. That's what I'm looking for. Although I don't like that one. Make your way back up here. That one's nice. Nice and thin. We'll go with that. Okay, so here are my three sounds. Kick. Snare. Snare. That's not a snare. Let's rename that to hi hat. Okay, now the next thing I'm gonna do is shorten the sound. You see how there's a lot of empty snare sound at the end of these? I want to shorten these to be roughly a quarter note long, so I can grab the ends of the clip and push it in. Or I can just highlight here, delete, and then delete all this extra stuff. If that's still ringing, I can draw a little fade out on it just to make sure it's not still making sound. Okay. The hi hat I might want even shorter, but we'll see once we start building our beat. Okay, so those are the three most basic sounds that we need for a beat. We can add in all kinds of stuff later, but this will get us off the ground. Okay, so let's go in and start talking about the elements.
