Beats and Beets and Beats and Beets and

       Beats/beets are pretty cool because they can come from the ground or they can come from a drum, either way, they rock. Just kidding, I think beets are disgusting. But, I do enjoy the musical sort.

       Recently, I've made an effort to learn a bit more about the inter workings of music, so I've been studying audio production. Part of this, is making beats on a digital audio workstation, or DAW. Since I'm not a drummer myself, I thought it would be really difficult to make a good beat, but it has come a lot easier than I expected. Making beats has also proved to be a beautiful means of what I like to call: productive procrastination. You see, I'm learning something new, which is valuable, but I'm also having fun and avoiding doing my homework. I made Sunday afternoon, “appropriately” titled, “Cats Eating Lasagna".

       This is a picture of what “Cats Eating Lasagna” looks like on my computer. The different drum options are listed on the left, and the dots mean that that drum sound is being played on that particular beat. Each number along the top is a beat in a 4/4 measure, and each tick mark between the numbers is a sixteen of a beat. You can slow it down or speed it up, too. I have mine set at 94 beats per minute.

       What's really cool about making beats, is that you don't have to know how. “Cats Eating Lasagna” started out totally random. After I had something to work with, I just built on that. Originally, I had cowbells and hand claps woven in, but I found them too over powering, so I kept their rhythms but put them on a different instrument. I realigned some rhythms, so that certain drum sounds would all line up on a particular beat. I isolated certain lines to see how they sounded on their own as opposed to the beat as a whole. The whole time, I was just dabbling, but in the end, I was pretty satisfied with what I put together.

       “Cats Eating Lasagna” surely isn't going to top the charts anytime soon, but it was fun to create something of my own. When you play music, you get the rush of performing, but when you write your own music, it's a whole different kind of rush. My beats may not be actual songs, but they're a start. Eventually my beats will become actual songs, just like beets become baby food or canned preserves or some god awful casserole.