Essential Drum Patterns by Genre
This lesson gives you the drum skeletons of the major genres: house and techno, the backbeat, boom bap, trap, drum and bass, 2-step, dembow and Afro grooves. For each one, you'll know where the kick, the snare and the hi-hats land, and what lets you recognize it in two seconds.
Even before the first bass note, a listener often recognizes a genre by its drums. That's no accident: each genre was built around a few placements of kick, snare and hi-hat, tied to a way of dancing and to a tempo. These placements are called patterns. Knowing them doesn't mean you have to copy them: they're a starting point, which you'll then bend your own way.
Every example in this lesson is an original skeleton, deliberately simple. Read each grid while counting “one e and a”, as in the lesson on bars and steps, and listen to each one several times. The tempos given are habits, not rules.
Four-on-the-floor: house and techno
Four-on-the-floor is the simplest of all: a kick on each of the four beats, without exception. In house, you usually add a clap or a snare on two and four, and an open hi-hat on the “ands”, on the offbeat. The tempo is often around 120 to 128 BPM.
Techno starts from the same kick, usually a little faster, often between 125 and 140 BPM. It puts less weight on the clap and more on repetition: hi-hats that loop around, a percussion hit that lands in unexpected places, and a kick that carries everything. The goal is less to make things sing than to hypnotize.
The backbeat: snare on 2 and 4
The backbeat is the foundation of pop, rock, R&B and much of hip-hop: the snare hits on the second and fourth beats, and the kick sits around one and three, with a few variations. The hi-hats often mark the eighth notes. This is the rhythm your body instinctively recognizes as “a beat”.
Boom bap
Boom bap is the classic sound of 1990s hip-hop: a “boom” from the kick, a “bap” from the snare. It's a backbeat, with the snare on two and four, but the kick is more syncopated, the sounds are often sampled from records, and the whole thing is played with swing. The tempo is often around 85 to 95 BPM.
Listen to how the second kick, on the and of two, and the third, just after three, push toward the snare on four. With swing, the sixteenth-note hi-hats drag slightly, and that little delay is what gives boom bap its walk.
Trap in half-time
Trap is usually programmed at around 130 to 150 BPM, but it feels twice as slow, because the snare or clap hits only once per bar, on the third beat. That's the half-time from the lesson on tempo. The kick is often doubled by an 808, a deep, long bass that plays notes, and the hi-hats make the most of the fast tempo to string together eighth notes, sixteenth notes and triplet rolls.
Drill often starts from the same half-time base, around 140 BPM, with snares and kicks that are more offset and an 808 that slides from one note to the next. In both cases, the key is contrast: heavy, spaced-out drums at the bottom, nervous hi-hats on top. For the triplet rolls, go back to what we saw in the lesson on dotted notes and triplets.
Breakbeat and drum and bass
The word breakbeat first refers to the drums-only passages, the “breaks”, that DJs and producers sampled from funk and soul records to loop them. By extension, a breakbeat is any rhythm that keeps the snare on two and four but breaks up the regularity of the kick, with syncopated hits and ghost notes all over the place. It's the heart of jungle and drum and bass, which play these rhythms very fast, often around 170 BPM.
The simplest drum and bass skeleton has only two kicks per bar, one on the one and another on the and of three, with the snare on two and four. In this genre, it's often called “two-step”, not to be confused with UK garage 2-step, which we'll see right after. At this tempo, a few snare ghost notes are enough to get the whole thing rolling.
In many drum and bass tracks, the bass and the pads seem to follow a pulse half as fast as the drums. So within the same track, you have drums racing at around 172 and harmony breathing at around 86: once again, the play between the tempo shown and the tempo you feel.
UK garage 2-step
2-step comes from UK garage, a British style from the late 1990s, often played at around 130 to 135 BPM. Its principle is to take kicks away from four-on-the-floor: instead of four regular kicks, you keep only two per bar, placed irregularly and not always in the same spots from one bar to the next. The clap stays on two and four, and the sixteenth-note hi-hats are heavily swung, which gives 2-step its skipping feel.
The reggaeton dembow
Reggaeton is built on a pattern called the dembow, usually between 90 and 100 BPM. The kick hits every beat, as in house, but the snare draws a very recognizable figure: on the a of one, on the and of two, then the same thing on the a of three and the and of four. Count the distances from the kick on one to those two snares: three steps, three steps, then two steps to three. You'll recognize the three, three, two split from the lesson on dotted notes and triplets, repeated twice per bar.
Afro grooves
The word Afro now covers very different styles: Afrobeats from Nigeria and Ghana, often around 100 to 115 BPM, South African amapiano, Afro house. It would be wrong to boil them down to a single pattern. Still, they often share a few traits: many layered percussion parts, patterns built on groups of three and two steps, a shaker or hi-hats in sixteenth notes, and a kick that doesn't necessarily hit every beat.
In this pattern, the rim plays a figure inspired by the clave, a rhythm struck on two wooden sticks that comes from Afro-Cuban music, and that you'll find in one form or another in a lot of Afro and Latin music. The kick and the clap stay simple; it's the layering of percussion that creates the sway. For Afro house, keep a kick on every beat instead and lay this kind of percussion on top.
Program them yourself
The best way to remember these patterns is to program them with your own hands. The next drum machine has presets for several genres. Load one, listen to it, then change one thing at a time: move a kick, remove a snare, add swing. You'll quickly see which elements make the genre, and which ones you can change freely.
In house, the kick hits every beat (that is the “four-on-the-floor”), the clap marks beats 2 and 4, and the open hat answers between the beats: that back-and-forth is what makes the groove bounce.
Choose what a click adds: a normal hit, an accent (louder), a ghost note (very soft) or a roll (two hits in the same step, for hi-hat bursts). Clicking the same cell again clears it. On a computer, Shift + click adds an accent right away, and Alt + click a ghost note. Click a sound name to hear it on its own.
Swing delays the second sixteenth note of each eighth note. At 0%, the rhythm is straight. At 55%, it lands two thirds of the way through the eighth note, as in a triplet: that is the “shuffle”. Around 30%, you get a slight sway that feels more human.
One last word, for anyone who's afraid of copying. A skeleton like four-on-the-floor or the backbeat is shared by countless tracks: it's a common language, like a set of everyday words. What makes your drums personal is your sounds, your variations, your accents and the small details that change from one bar to the next.
Here's a four-on-the-floor kick at 96 BPM, with a bass in three, three, two. Turn this bar into a dembow: add the snare in the right places, then an eighth-note hi-hat. Before placing each snare, say the name of its cell out loud.
All of these patterns live in a four-beat bar. In the last lesson of this part, we'll step outside that frame with odd time signatures and polyrhythms.