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 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.

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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!

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

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