Why it's good to make lots of beats

How many beats should you be making each week?

What’s up guys, it’s Benji. 

I’ve been talking to people about different ways to get better at producing and one thing people mention is “How many beats should I make?”. Obviously the answer is “How long is a piece of string?”. But, I see people talking about how you “shouldn’t make more than 1 beat a day” or you can “only make X amount of good beats a month”.

Honestly - I think making a lot of beats in one intense sitting is good to do at times. It helps get out a lot of unfiltered ideas and allows you to experiment freely. Also, working at speed can help you get past second guessing yourself. I’m not saying that it’s good to make loads and loads of beats everyday, day in day out, but scheduling an intense patch of beat-making with high output can be really helpful.

I’ve found that it enables me to get to the ideas I really believe in much faster. It also encourages me to try again at a failed idea or something that I didn’t feel I got quite right. Is every beat going to be fire? Probably not. But will you learn something? Absolutely.

One way to implement this idea in your production is just to pull in samples and loops and ideas from different places - maybe 10 different loops. And then try and quickly produce a rough drum beat, bass line and an outline of a simple structure on them in a day. You don’t need to put pressure on what any of them need to be - just start throwing sounds in and see how far you can get.

Even if it’s just for practice (you don’t have to release those beats) but adding drums or other things to loops and trying out ideas quickly is a great way to hone your skill and develop quickly. Kanye famously said “lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers” and this mantra definitely holds true today. The bonus is these days it’s even easier to collaborate with other musicians, producers and sample-makers online or even just sending recordings via text. This in turn can make it easier to try out and pull together crazy or ambitious ideas and increase output through collaboration. 

Try it out - go out and find some new inspiring sounds and pull together and collaborate to make X amount of beats in a day. See it as an experiment and try it every so often. See how far you get! Check out the video below of me making a beat in 60 seconds with a loop, drums and bass. Tell us what you think and what you guys end up making!

Peace!