Hats and the in-between
The kick and snare tell you where the beat is. The hats tell you how fast it’s moving.
You now have: a kick and a snare — a beat, but a stiff one.
Hear it
The hat plays every other step — steps 1, 3, 5, 7 and so on. Eight hits in a bar, so: eighth notes. This is the single most common hi-hat pattern there is.
Understand it
Kick and snare mark out the four beats. The hat fills in what happens between them, and by doing so it sets the speed you perceive — even though the tempo hasn’t changed at all.
Switch between these two at the same BPM — and compare both against the eighth notes above:
Quarters feel slow and heavy. Sixteenths feel urgent and busy — sixteenths on a closed hat is a big part of why trap and drill sound the way they do. Neither changed the tempo by a single BPM.
The offbeat: where house comes from
There’s a second hi-hat sound: the open hat, which rings on instead of stopping short. Put it on the offbeats — steps 3, 7, 11, 15, the “and” between each beat — and something specific happens:
Switch between the two while it’s looping. The second one is house — that “tss” landing exactly between the kicks is the genre’s signature, and it works because the open hat is still ringing when the next kick arrives.
Once you’ve heard it you can build the same idea into anything. Same trick, faster and harder, and you’re in techno.
Practice on your virtual tbd 16
The Kick and Snare are already in place. Add an eighth-note closed hat on Track 4. The grid and physical device edit the same runtime state, and Reset pattern restores the starting Kick and Snare.
- Press → three times to select Track 4. The OLED shows the Hi-Hat track.
- Switch on steps 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15.
- Press PLAY. Watch the OLED and LEDs while Kick, Snare and Hat play together.
- Remove a few hats and listen to the space they leave. Use Reset pattern to return to the lesson’s starting state.
Made a mess? While the sequencer is playing, hold FUNC5. Steps on the selected track are erased as the playhead passes over them; release FUNC5 when you want to stop erasing. This is the same live-clear gesture as on the hardware, and Reset pattern still brings back this lesson’s starting beat.
Try this
- Take the hats off the beats entirely — only steps 3, 7, 11, 15. Sparse and springy.
- Put a hat on every step except 1. The hole at the start pulls your ear to the downbeat.
- Add a hat on step 16, right before the loop restarts. It pushes you into the next bar.
You now have
A groove: kick, snare, hats, and control over how fast it feels. What it doesn’t have yet is a sound — right now every drum is sitting at whatever the factory left it at. Fixing that is the most valuable thing in Stage A.
Next: 4 · Make it sound great · Previous: 2 · The backbeat