Bars, Beats and Steps

In the previous lesson, you felt the pulse and learned to measure its speed. But a pulse on its own is like a clock: it moves forward and never comes back to the start. Music, on the other hand, is organized in cycles. That's what lets you know, without looking at the screen, that a loop has just started over or that the drop, the moment the track comes back in at full power, is about to hit.

Four beats, then start again

Listen to this figure, which plays twice. The kick hits every beat, but a cymbal marks only the first beat of each group of four, and the kick on that first beat is louder than the others. Count out loud, “one, two, three, four”, going back to “one” on each cymbal hit.

This group of four beats is called a bar, or a measure in American music books. Almost all electronic music, pop, hip-hop and R&B use this four-beat bar, which is written 4/4 and said “four-four”. The top number tells you how many beats are in each bar. The bottom number tells you which note value is the counting unit, here the quarter note, which is one beat in 4/4 and which we'll introduce in the lesson on note lengths. In your software, the numbers 1, 2, 3 written on the ruler at the top of the window are bar numbers.

Within a bar, not all beats are equal. The first beat, which producers often call “the one”, is the anchor for everything else. That's where changes happen: a new chord, a bass coming in, the drop that brings the track back. When something important lands next to the one, the listener feels it immediately, even without knowing why.

Each beat splits into smaller pieces

A beat is often too wide to hold an interesting rhythm. So we cut it into equal parts: in two, then in four. This cutting is called subdivision. Cutting each beat into four gives sixteen small cells per bar, and that's exactly the grid you know if you've ever programmed drums one cell at a time.

To count these sixteen cells without getting lost, musicians use a simple formula: on each beat, you say the beat number, then “e”, “and”, “a”. That gives “one e and a, two e and a, three e and a, four e and a”. The number falls on the beat itself, the “and” falls exactly in the middle of the beat, and the “e” and the “a” fall on the remaining quarters.

Now listen to a hi-hat that plays all sixteen cells. It hits hard on the beats, medium on the “ands”, and soft on the “e”s and “a”s. Count along with it, slowly: your voice should land right with each hit.

With a little practice, you'll be able to point to any cell by its name. “The clap is on the and of four” means it's on step 15. “The kick comes on the a of two” means it's on step 8. That's the vocabulary musicians use to talk to each other about rhythm, and it's much faster than counting cells on the screen.

The step, the smallest cell of the grid

In your software, each of these sixteen cells is called a step. FL Studio's step sequencer shows sixteen steps by default, one full bar, grouped in fours with alternating colors so you can see the beats at a glance. In the piano roll, you'll find the same hierarchy as vertical lines: thick lines for bars, medium lines for beats, thin lines for steps.

The most common step is a sixteenth of a bar, written 1/16. But you can set the grid wider, to 1/8, with eight cells per bar, or finer, to 1/32. Look at this bass line: it's drawn on a 1/16 grid, and each note starts on a specific step.

Count it with the formula: it hits on the one, on the a of one, on the and of two, on three, on the and of three and on the and of four. If you can say that in rhythm while it plays, you've understood the heart of this lesson.

Loops of one, two, four or eight bars

When you make a loop, you choose its length in bars. A one-bar loop goes around quickly and becomes hypnotic, which works well for a drum part or a techno motif. A two-bar loop already lets you vary the end of the second bar. Four and eight bars are the most common lengths for a chord progression or a complete melody.

It's no accident that these numbers double each time. Your ear naturally groups bars in twos, then fours, then eights, and it expects a change at the end of each group. Listen to this two-bar loop: the second bar repeats the first, but its ending changes, and that's what makes you want to hear it again.

Here's the practical advice that follows from this: start your loops on the one, and make them one, two, four or eight bars long. A three-bar loop isn't forbidden, but it surprises the listener every time it comes around. Save that kind of surprise for the moments when you really want it.

Snap and quantize

When you draw a note with the mouse, your software automatically sticks it to the nearest grid line. That's called snap. The snap value decides the size of the cells: at 1/16, your notes land on the sixteen steps; at 1/4, they can only fall on the beats.

When you play a part on the keyboard, on the other hand, your notes land wherever your fingers put them, a little early or a little late. Quantize moves the start of each note to the nearest grid line. In the next figure, a melody that should put one note on each beat was played by hand, and we've exaggerated the mistakes so you can clearly hear them: two notes come in one step too late.

You heard the two notes stumbling against the kick. Here's the result after quantizing to the beats: each note has been pulled back to the nearest line, and the melody lands squarely again.

Watch out for two settings. The first is the quantize value: it has to match the rhythm you meant to play. If you quantize to the beats a part that had notes between the beats, your software will squash them onto the beats and wreck the rhythm. The second is the quantize strength, often set as a percentage: at 100%, the notes are glued to the grid; at 50%, they only go halfway, which fixes the big mistakes while keeping some life. We'll come back to that life in the lesson on groove.

In the next lesson, we'll give a name to each note length, from the whole note to the thirty-second note, and see how many steps each one takes up.