Beats and rhythm

Feel the beat

Every song you’ve ever bopped your head to has a beat: the steady pulse you tap your foot or nod along to. It’s the heartbeat of the track, and everything else lines up with it.

How fast the beat goes is called the tempo, measured in BPM (beats per minute). A chill lo-fi track might sit around 75 BPM, a lot of hip hop around 90, house music around 124, and drum & bass races along at about 174.

Bars and steps

Beats come in groups called bars. Nearly every pop, hip hop and dance song has 4 beats in a bar, so you count “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4…” over and over.

A drum machine chops each beat into 4 smaller steps, so one bar is a row of 16 steps. In the grid below, the numbers 1–4 along the top mark the beats, and “&” is halfway between two beats.

Build a beat

Time to make your first beat! Tap the squares to turn drums on and off, and press Play to hear it loop. The kick is the deep “boom”, the snare is the sharp “crack” and the hi-hat is the tight “tss”.

This one is the classic rock and pop beat: kick on beats 1 and 3, snare on beats 2 and 4, and the hi-hat on every “&” and every beat.

The backbeat

That snare on 2 and 4 has a name: the backbeat. Clap along to almost any song on your playlist and you’ll find yourself clapping on 2 and 4.

Try the Tempo slider while it plays. The pattern stays the same, but slow it down and it feels laid-back; speed it up and it gets hyped.

Four on the floor

Dance music (house, disco, a lot of EDM) puts the kick on every single beat. DJs call this “four on the floor”. Put the hi-hat on the “&”s in between and you get that “boom-tss, boom-tss” sound that makes people move.

Quick quiz