Create Your Own Music Beats
With so many different options to Create Your Own Music Beats available, knowing which one is worth your hard-earned money can be difficult. Two leading, affordable beat making programs on the market today are Sonic Producer and Dr. Drum, and choosing between them isn’t easy.
Both offer a multitude of features, a 16 track sequencer and a plethora of instruments to play around with. For a newcomer to the world of beat making, choosing one of these two programs is virtually impossible, but there are some key differences that can help you make your choice.
First off, the format in which the songs are exported has an effect on the audio quality. If you want to be taken seriously by industry professionals, your work has to be presented in the industry standard quality.
Sonic Producer exports your work as MP3s, which are great for everyday use, but are actually a compressed format. This means that all of the data from your original recording is squashed down so it can fit in a smaller space, and this causes some degradation of quality. Dr. Drum exports your masterpieces as 44.1 .WAV files, which is professional quality.
There are differences even if you’re not interested in pitching to producers straight away. Both programs come with a wide range of drum sounds, but the level of freedom you have in putting them together differs. In Sonic Producer, you can make your own drum beats using eight pads.
That means you can have eight different sounds, such as snare, open and closed hi hat, kick, tom, ride, crash and floor tom. This is great for basic beats, but if you really want to get creative you’ll need some extra options.
Dr. Drum has a 12 pad drum machine, which gives you the option of making more complex, cool beats, and adds new options such as clap and variations on standard drums like the snare. You can also upload your own sounds to make even more unique beats with Dr. Drum.
For melodies, both programs have keyboards loaded with different instrument sounds. Again, both programs have a great selection of sounds, with guitars, synths, pianos and everything you could want.
The key difference comes in the size of the keyboard. In Sonic Producer, you have a one octave (which includes all 12 notes) keyboard to play with.
Dr. Drum raises the bar by including a four octave keyboard. This wildly increases your freedom, allowing you to create awesome melodies which span multiple octaves. Real pianos usually have seven octaves, so being stuck with just one isn’t enough.
Whilst both programs have a lot to offer the beat-maker, Dr. Drum stands head and shoulders above Sonic Producer. Whether it’s the audio quality, range of drums, or the size of the in-built keyboard that sways it for you, the conclusion is inevitable.
To Create Your Own Music Beats, you need Dr. Drum on your side. Other programs just won’t cut it.
Hip Hop Beats
Whether you want to make Hip Hop Beats, R&B Beats or Rap Beats etc… these days they seem to demand extensive study before you can get to grips with the really cool features.
You can’t just go through a few simple tutorials and start making beats; you have to wade through PDF documents and find instructional videos on YouTube before you can make anything that sounds vaguely musical. Dr. Drum is a new, beginner-friendly program that aims to address these issues and open beat making up to a wider audience.
Audio quality is often an issue with more affordable, beginner-friendly beat makers. Most export your lovingly crafted creations as MP3s, which although are common for consumers, can get you laughed out of an industry professional’s office. MP3s are compressed, and the process chips away at the quality of the audio.
Dr. Drum exports all of your beats as .WAV files in 44.1 stereo quality – or in other words – the industry standard quality. As well as this, the samples you use to create your songs are professionally mastered, so every element of your beat is pristine and perfect.
To us beginners, professional mixing desks are an incomprehensible mess of dials, sliders and buttons that require technical wizardry to operate.
Dr. Drum takes all of this functionality and repackages it, so beginners can use all of the features without an internet-based crash course in music production.
The functionality is simple; the pencil tool is used to add elements, and the eraser is used to get rid of them. There are also instructional videos to help you out if do you get stuck.
Dr. Drum is made up of three distinct elements. The 16 track sequencer is the main screen, and it’s used to arrange the elements of your song and build up your beats.
You pull in different samples from the program’s extensive collection, place them in your desired position and then press play to see what it sounds like. If the pre-recorded melodies and beats aren’t good enough for you, you can use the 12-pad drum machine and the four-octave keyboard to make your own.
Both of these have vast collections of sounds for you to play with, so you aren’t confined to a few basic drum kits or keyboard tones.
In my experience, more affordable beat makers are low on options for tweaking your sound. Dr. Drum has managed to break the mold by providing options for adjusting the volume of each track, emphasizing different frequencies and panning different elements of your beats into designated speakers.
The program gives you a feeling of ultimate control, manipulating elements of your mixes like a pro in a high-end studio.
Overall, the value for money, audio quality and creative freedom provided by Dr. Drum isn’t matched by any other program on the market. Somehow, it’s managed to cram the features and quality associated with top-quality, expensive beat makers into an affordable and user-friendly package.
Whether you’re looking to make some Hip Hop Beats, R&B Beats or Rap Beats for fun or trying to make it to the big time, Dr. Drum is the only program you’ll need.