Creating and customising drum grooves
To start creating drum grooves, tap on GROOVE in the Home Screen. This opens up the GROOVE page, where you’ll be presented with a handy Beat designing screen. At the top part, there’s a Notation editor showing you the notes that make up your drum pattern and, at the bottom, you’ll see three circular areas with control dots corresponding to the Kick, Snare and Hi-Hat sounds. Tapping in the Notation screen adds or removes drum notes, and dragging the control dots creates viable variations for each drum sound pattern (busier when you drag upwards and toward the right!)
You can tap on tempo (at the top-right of the Notation screen) to open the BPM slider, which you can drag left or right to make your selection (the + and – buttons let you tap to refine your selection). [You’ll also see a time signature indication at the top-left of the Notation screen – this is set to 4/4 in the free version of Songzap, but you can upgrade to Songzap Premium within the app, to unlock more time signatures.]
You’re now ready to start customising your Basic Groove. Press Play (at the bottom-right of the GROOVE page) to listen to your Basic Groove and tap on the Loop button (at the top-right of the GROOVE page) to keep the beat playing as you’re making changes. Let the fun begin!
First, let’s review some drum kits from Songzap’s sample library. Tap on the ‘Rock Kit’ tag (positioned on the left between the Notation screen and the control dots interface) to open the Select Drum Kit menu and try out different kits as your groove plays [you can unlock the full sample library in Songzap Premium]. Choose your preferred Drum Kit and close the Select Drum Kit menu.
Now, let’s experiment with some popular Preset Beats (drum patterns). Tap on the Preset Beats menu (positioned on the right between the Notation screen and the control dots interface) and preview a number of classic drum patterns (A-Q). When you find one that is close to what you imagine, select it and close the Preset Beats menu. Next, we’ll customise the groove to your liking.
Tap in the Notation Editor to add or remove drum notes, and listen to the changes. (Not only is this an intuitive way to modify your drum patterns, you’ll also be learning a lot about drum notation!) If you want to go wild and experiment further, just drag the Kick, Snare and Hi-Hat control dots to generate a plethora of viable patters (remember: busier patterns up and right – more minimal patterns to the left and bottom).
Finally, you can change the Hi-Hat sound to a Ride Cymbal or Tom drum and add a Crash (super handy for adding impact, and changing the feel and sound of different song sections). Tap on the Cymbal Settings menu (at the bottom left of the GROOVE page), choose Hi-Hat, Ride or Tom from the Cymbal/Tom Sample selector, and select a Crash Cymbal Cycle to make a Crash play every 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 bars (or not at all)!
Well done! You’ve created and customised your first drum groove. You can now copy your Basic Groove pattern and create more beat variations (for different song sections).
If you want to learn more about how to copy, variate and arrange your grooves, click on the Arranging a Song tutorial!
