After creating beats for a lot of years, I often ask myself if it's really beneficial to have complex software to distract me from what I really want to be doing. Are you into making beats for rapping or instrumental music? If so, you may feel the same way, and might be looking for much more accessible beat making software.

I have discovered that simplicity usually assists me to come up with much more interesting beats. I'm not talking about super-simplicity, such as only having the option to put the drum hits on only four slots of a four note pattern. That is too simple, and is approaching old-school 808 drum machine programming territory. However, even the 808 is more complex than the situation I described. In fact, many of the originally notorious drum machines that helped birth the slamming hip hop beats of the late 80's and early 90's really weren't much more complex, even those that added samplers and more advanced sequencers.

It is better to try and locate something within the middle ground, software that has just enough features to make some solid sounding beats, but not so complex that you're overwhelmed with options.

I like to think of simple as software that helps you easily put together a few drum loops, selecting samples from your very own collection or from a sample set, and then maybe adjusting a few other parameters such as hit velocity or attack on some of the different notes to make the beat more dynamic. And then, to take it one step further, be able to export those loops effortlessly to utilize in your samples or whatever you like to utilize for looping the beats. Or probably just play them straight from the software you sequenced with?

When something is this simple, it's hard to get distracted and spend hours and hours tweaking a beat. This kind of situation makes the feeling like you can make a great beat on the spot and make great use of it, and probably even like most of them.