The boom bap pattern, explained

Say it out loud: boom, bap. Boom boom, bap. You have just performed the most influential drum pattern in hip-hop. The name is the sound.

The snare is the law

Count the grid in fours. Sixteen pads make one bar, and beats fall on pads 1, 5, 9 and 13.

The snare lands on beats two and four, pads 5 and 13. It does that in every bar and it never moves. This is called the backbeat, and it is the thing your head nods to. If the snare wandered, there would be nothing to lean on.

The kick is the personality

Now the kick, with the snare left in so you can hear where it falls around it:

Beat one, as expected. Then pad 7, which is not a beat. It sits in the gap just before beat three, where you were not expecting anything. Then pad 11, another off spot.

That is the trick. The snare tells you exactly where the beat is, which frees the kick to land around it. Kicks that fall between the beats are called syncopation, and a little of it is the difference between a drum machine demo and a groove.

Move either of those kicks one pad left or right and listen. The pattern still works, and it has a different personality. Producers spend hours on exactly this.

The hats hold it together

Hats tick on every other pad, alternating strong and soft:

The dimmer pads are the soft ones, and they matter. If every hat were the same volume the pattern would sound like a machine. Alternating them gives it a pulse, like breathing. In the playground, hold shift and click a pad to make it soft.

Why it swings

Boom bap is almost never played straight. Every second sixteenth note arrives a little late, which turns the even tick of the hats into a lope. Read more about swing, or just drag the Swing slider up to around 15 and listen to the beat relax.

Make your own

Open the drum pattern generator, pick boom bap, and start moving kicks. Keep the snare where it is. When you find a kick pattern you like, open it in the studio and put a bassline under it that plays where the kicks are.