Beats: tempo, bars and steps

Play the kick from the last page and tap along with it. Each tap is a beat: the steady pulse you would nod your head to. Everything in this page is about where sounds fall in relation to that pulse.

Tempo

How fast the beats come is the tempo, counted in beats per minute (BPM). Set it at the top of the script:

blank("house");
tempo(120);
track("kick", s("bd*4"));

At 120 BPM there are two beats every second. House music lives around 120 to 126 BPM, hip-hop around 85 to 95, drum and bass around 174. Try tempo(90) and tempo(160) and hear how much the same kick changes character.

Bars

Now count along with the kick: one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Each group of four beats is a bar. Musicians count in bars because almost everything in a song repeats in groups of four beats, and bigger ideas come in groups of 4, 8 or 16 bars.

In claudius, one pattern string is one bar. s("bd*4") means “fit four kicks into the bar”, one on each beat. s("bd bd bd bd") is the same thing written out: the words share the bar equally. A kick on every beat is called four on the floor, and it is the heartbeat of house and techno.

The backbeat

Add a clap. Listen for where it lands before reading the explanation:

blank("house");
tempo(120);
track("kick", s("bd*4"));
track("clap", s("~ cp ~ cp"));

The clap falls on beats two and four. ~ is a rest, a beat of silence, so "~ cp ~ cp" reads as rest, clap, rest, clap. Hits on two and four are called the backbeat, and you have heard it in nearly every pop, rock and dance song.

Between the beats

Each beat can be divided into smaller steps. Square brackets squeeze several sounds into one step:

blank("house");
tempo(120);
track("kick", s("bd*4"));
track("clap", s("~ cp ~ cp"));
track("hats", s("[~ hh]*4"));

[~ hh] is a rest and a hi-hat sharing one beat, so the hat lands exactly halfway between two kicks; *4 repeats that in all four beats. Count one AND two AND three AND four AND: the hats are on every AND, the offbeats. This “tss” between the thumps is what makes house sound like house.

The usual ways of dividing a beat:

Sixteen steps per bar are a common grid. Producers call each one a step, and talk about “a hit on step 5” (the second beat) or “a ghost note on step 8”.

A fuller groove

Add a shaker playing sixteen soft steps, so you can hear the grid filled in:

blank("house");
tempo(120);
track("kick",   s("bd*4"));
track("clap",   s("~ cp ~ cp"));
track("hats",   s("[~ hh]*4"));
track("shaker", s("sh*16").gain(0.4));

.gain(0.4) plays the shaker softly: gain is how hard each sound is hit, from 0 to 1. Soft, busy parts like this make a groove feel alive without getting in the way.

Swing

Straight sixteenth steps sound mechanical. Swing delays every second sixteenth a little, so the steps go long-short, long-short, the way a drummer’s hands do:

blank("house");
tempo(120);
swing(0.58);
track("kick",   s("bd*4"));
track("clap",   s("~ cp ~ cp"));
track("hats",   s("[~ hh]*4"));
track("shaker", s("sh*16").gain(0.4));

0.5 is straight; 0.66 is a full triplet swing. Listen to the shaker: at 0.58 it bounces. House usually swings a little (0.52 to 0.56), lofi hip-hop a lot (0.58 to 0.62).

Try this

• Make the kick play only on beats one and three: s("bd ~ bd ~"). The groove relaxes into half the energy.
• Add a kick on the very last sixteenth of the bar, a little push into the next bar: s("bd bd bd [bd ~ ~ bd]"). The last beat is split into four sixteenths, and the extra kick sits on the fourth.
• Replace the hats with eight-per-bar hats, s("hh*8"), and hear how the feel gets busier.
• Play the drums on a real drum machine, the Roland TR-909 used on countless house records (this needs the sample packs, which claudius setup installs):

blank("house");
tempo(120);
track("kick", s("bd*4").bank("tr909"));
track("clap", s("~ cp ~ cp").bank("tr909"));
track("hats", s("[~ hh]*4").bank("tr909"));

The song so far

Keep this in your song.rhai; the next pages add to it.

blank("house");
title("First Light");
tempo(120);
track("kick",   s("bd*4"));
track("clap",   s("~ cp ~ cp"));
track("hats",   s("[~ hh]*4"));
track("shaker", s("sh*16").gain(0.4));

Mini-notation has every symbol you can use in a pattern string.