Trap Drum Patterns

Welcome to my guide to trap drum patterns. I cover a few important techniques and include drum patterns to copy. Here’s a preview of one of the beats…

See also: Hip Hop Drum Patterns, How To Make An IDM Beat, How To Make Dubstep ,UK Garage Drum Pattern, Electro Drum Patterns, Drum And Bass Drum Patterns, House Drum Patterns, Studio Brootle 808 Sample Pack.

Trap Drum Patterns

Here are the trap drum patterns, they use my own free 808 kit and free Ableton sub bass rack too. The BPM is set at 145. You can use your own samples too and change the patterns, these are starting points, free free to edit them and change them as you see fit, whatever sounds good to be honest.

What BPM Is Trap?

Trap’s tempo is anywhere between 135 and 150bpm, 145 is really common. But it’s important to remember that the kicks are really sparse and at half time, so they give the impression they are at 75 bpm or so, which give the hats and snare fills a double-time urgency.

So what is trap music?

It evolved out of hiphop, and mainly from Atlanta, artists like Young Thug, Gucci Mane, Migos, Young Jeezy, T.I. etc.

Characterized by 808 drum samples and heavy on the bass. It is made at fast BPMs, but with half-speed kicks and rushing fills and triplet rhythms in between, especially at the end of the bar for rolling broken rhythms where the kicks are slow for hip-hop speed but the hats are skipping and rushing.

For an example of trap music listen to Migos – Bad and Boujee ft Lil Uzi Vert.

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Trap Drum Pattern 1

This is a basic trap pattern with just kick, snare open and closed hat. Plus a sub bass. You can use my sub bass Ableton rack, or another longer 808 kick sample or sub bass sample. The sub bass hits at the same time as some of the kicks. There’s a quick snare/hat rush at the end of the bar to turn the bar around and keep the feeling of pushing the rhythm on into the next bar. I’ve added a bit of overdrive to each of these beats to gel them together.

I added delay and reverb to the snare. I automated the delay so it’s not on all the time. You can see the automation in the image below, the top line is delay feedback and the bottom is wet dry. It’s set to add fx to the snares, more so at the end of the bar.

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Trap Drum Pattern 2

This one is very simple but effective, with just 4 elements, and reverb on the snare. It has double time hats at the end of the first bar for that rushing feel. I just switched the grid to 1/32 and filled out 4 hats at the end of the bar. It helps that the rest of the hats are really constant too, so you really notice it when they double up. The double kicks at the end of the bar are a common feature in trap too.

You want really sparse kicks and other beats then doubling them up has more effect.

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Trap Drum Pattern 3 – Triplets

This beat shows a common technique – triplet hats. I put them towards the end of the bar here. Just switch the grid to ‘triplet’ and add the fills. You want to make sure they are not playing at the same time as other percussion on the normal grid. You can try this with other hits too, use it sparingly!

If you’re not sure of what triplets are, you can just change the grid of your DAW to them, but they are basically a skipping feeling a drummer uses by putting in 3 notes where there should be 2 normal notes. A good idea is to make a basic beat with a normal 1/16 grid, then change it to triples afterwards and add some fills.

There’s a lot of reverb on the cymbal and snare too.

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