The backbeat is the pulse under most pop, rock, hip-hop and soul. It takes four hits in one bar, and it is the first lesson of a path that ends with a finished song you made yourself.
Click the cells to try it here. The line under the grid runs the same check, with the same words, as the studio.
In the studio each step is one sentence in a strip over the real controls. Its check lights when your song does what the step says; Show me opens the tool and points at the control.
Count a bar of four: one, two, three, four. The kick is the weight, so it lands where you would stamp your foot, on one and three. The snare is the answer, so it lands where you would clap, on two and four. Most listeners feel that clap before they can name it, which is why this is called the backbeat.
In the studio the grid shows sixteen cells per bar, four for each beat. Beat 1 is the first column after the bar line, beat 2 the fifth, beat 3 the ninth and beat 4 the thirteenth.
The lesson reads the notes in bar 1 of your drum track, nothing else. A kick (General MIDI note 35 or 36) must start on beats 1 and 3, and a snare or clap (38, 39 or 40) on beats 2 and 4, each within a small fraction of a beat of the line. Extra hits are fine: a kick on the "and" of 3 is a style, not a mistake. Nothing is scored; the check lights when the pattern is there.
When something is close it says what is there and what the pattern wants, in words like these:
The kick is on beats 2 and 4 so far. This pattern puts it on beats 1 and 3: count the columns from the bar line.
The clip starts on beat 2 of bar 1, not on the bar line, so its first column is not beat 1. Drag it left until it snaps to bar 1.
Because the two drums take turns. The kick marks the strong beats and the snare answers on the weak ones; put the snare on the kick and the bar loses its push and pull. The studio says so if you try: "The snare lands on the same beat as a kick."
The path starts a new song called First song at 90 beats per minute in A minor. You can change both at any time; the lessons read whatever the song says.
No. Every lesson is done by hand, with a check that reads your song. Gusta, the studio's AI, can make an example you can study, keep or undo, but that is optional and it uses tokens; the lessons themselves are free.
Eight lessons of about ten minutes, each building part of the same song, ending with a finished file.
Next lesson: Hats and groove.
Gusta Music is a free browser studio: a timeline, a note editor, a mixer and an AI copilot that edits your song with you instead of generating one for you. The lessons run on top of it, and the song you make is yours.
Start lesson 1