subject: Tips For New Beat Creators [print this page] There are plenty of various things an individual can do once they begin creating their own beats. But the following tip is a surefire way to make your songs flow and feel much more professional. Please note that this is a tip that works very well with just about any type of software and hardware and so it ought to be simple to achieve no matter what you are utilizing.
Here it is: Use an odd BPM.
It is a very easy solution to a usual issue. You make your own beat and you're happy with the way it sounds, but it doesn't feel... Natural. Chances are your beat is in a boring tempo - most likely 120 BPM. For those that are not familiar, BPM means Beats Per Minute, and tempo is basically the speed at which your song is playing. Fast songs = higher tempo, slows songs = lower tempo.
If you listen to hip hop songs it's very difficult to just figure out the tempo/BPM. Following along with a metronome is one solution, but that can get frustrating. Definitely the simplest thing you can do is import a song within a software that can easily analyze the tempo for you. If it's accurate, down to the tenths or hundredths of the beat, you'll see that songs don't really come in 120 BPM or 110 BPM - they're a lot more likely to be 118.34 or 123.12, etc. Using even, "clean" numbers will make your beat feel cold and mechanical.
Take a beat or instrumental that you made and look at the tempo. See if you can enter in a different BPM for it, with 1-2 numbers to the right of the decimal point. Not all beat making hardware and software will let you do this, and it can be tough to find out after you've already bought it. Test it out for yourself and try to see if this makes your beats sound any more natural.
