A kick and a snare are the skeleton. Hi-hats keep time between them, and swing is what turns a straight grid into a groove you can nod to.
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.
Eighth notes split each beat in two: "one and two and three and four and", eight hats in a bar. Straight, they tick like a clock. Swing delays every second one, the "and", so the pair becomes long-short, the lilt of hip-hop, shuffle and jazz.
In the studio the Groove knob on a track is its swing. At 100% the "and" moves a sixth of a beat late, onto the triplet position; the lesson asks for at least 10%, where the lean starts to be heard. The notes themselves stay on the grid, so you can change the feel later without redrawing anything. The grid on this page uses the same swing.
Bar 1 needs a hi-hat (General MIDI 42, 44 or 46) on all eight eighth-note positions; sixteenths count too, because they include the eighths. The drum track needs a swing of at least 10%. Then every one of bars 1 to 4 needs a kick and a snare, however you got them there: three duplicates, or one clip looped out to four bars.
Each duplicate is selected as it lands, so pressing Cmd+D (or Ctrl+D) again carries on down the timeline.
That is a hat on every beat. Add one halfway between each, for 8 in the bar.
The beat plays in 2 of the 4 bars. Bars 3 and 4 are still empty.
Start around 25 to 35% and listen. Past about 50% the offbeats sit near the triplet and the beat starts to shuffle; for boom-bap and lo-fi that is often the point.
The next lessons put four chords over the beat, one per bar, so the beat has to be under all four.
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: Chords from the key.
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 2