4. Rhythm & the grid — beats, bars, and steps

← Learning path

Music has a heartbeat. Tap your foot to a song — each tap is a beat.

• bpm = beats per minute = how fast the heartbeat is. 120 bpm = two taps a second. Higher = faster song.
• Beats are grouped into bars (usually 4 beats per bar — that’s the beats setting).
• We slice each bar into little equal boxes called steps. With steps 16, a bar has 16 boxes, so you can place sounds on a fine grid.

In a drum row, each character is one step: x = play, . = stay silent.

bpm 120
steps 16
kick  x...x...x...x...     # a hit on every 4th box = a steady "four-on-the-floor"
hat   x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.     # a tick every other box

• swing slides the in-between steps a little late, giving that lazy, bouncy “shuffle” feel instead of a stiff robot beat.
• humanize adds tiny random variations to each hit’s loudness and timing (every hit lays back a few milliseconds, like a real player behind the beat) so it feels like a human played it, not a machine.

Real names: tempo (BPM), beat, bar/measure, step/grid resolution, swing/shuffle, humanization.

✅ Live now: the beats header (beats 3 = waltz feel), swing (swing 0.1 nudges the off-beat steps a touch late), and humanize (humanize 0.4 gently varies each hit’s loudness and lays its timing back a few milliseconds — plus per-note pitch and brightness drift — so it sounds less machine-perfect).

← Index · Next → 5. Loud & soft