Trap Music Production Techniques: How to Make a Trap Beat

“I also remember a hip-hop producer—perhaps Rick Rubin—extending the decay of the 808 Bass Drum.”

You know the sound before you can name it: hi-hats rattling like a sprinkler, a snare that lands late, and a bass you feel in your chest more than you hear. Then you open FL Studio, drop in a few drums, and it sounds nothing like the songs you love.

The difference isn’t a secret plugin or an expensive sample pack. It’s a handful of choices about where each sound goes and when it comes in. Below is the order Max, the founder of Mix Elite, uses to build a trap beat in Mix Elite’s free 4.5-hour FL Studio course, with a screenshot for every step, plus the 808 and arrangement tricks that turn a loop into a song.

What makes a trap beat?

A trap beat is a hip-hop beat built from a few parts you can spot in seconds. Trap grew out of Southern hip-hop, with Atlanta at its center, and today you hear its drums in rap, pop, R&B and even EDM. Strip any trap song down and you’ll find the same six ingredients:

• A tempo around 140 BPM with a half-time feel, so the beat moves fast and slow at the same time.
• Rolling hi-hats: a steady pulse with quick rolls and stutters on top.
• A snare or clap on beat 3 of every bar. That’s what makes 140 BPM feel like 70.
• An 808: a long, deep bass note that started life as the kick of Roland’s TR-808 drum machine, tuned to the song.
• Dark melodies in a minor scale, often on piano, bells, plucks, flutes or choir sounds.
• Space. A few loud, clear parts instead of a wall of sound.

What is hip-hop production, and how is trap different?

Hip-hop production is making the beat a rapper or singer performs over: drums, bass and a melody or sample, arranged into a song. Trap is one style of it. It runs near 140 BPM with a snare on beat 3, rolling hi-hats and long 808s, while classic boom bap sits around 85 to 95 BPM with swung, sampled drums.

Think of hip-hop as the big family and trap as one branch of it. In boom bap the snare hits on beats 2 and 4. In trap it hits on beat 3, which makes 140 BPM feel half as fast while the hi-hats keep moving at full speed.

The gear is simpler than it looks. A computer and a good pair of headphones are the only hardware you truly need. An audio interface, studio monitors and a MIDI keyboard are optional, because your typing keyboard can tap in drums and simple melodies. The software is a DAW, the program you build the beat in. FL Studio is popular with beginners and pros making hip-hop and trap, and its free trial has no time limit. The one catch is that you can’t reopen saved projects.

Drill is trap’s close cousin. It uses a similar tempo, but the hats skip around more, the snare lands a little later, and the 808s slide between notes more often. You’ll see how to turn a trap pattern into drill in Step 3.

What tempo is trap? Start at 140 BPM

Most trap sits around 140 BPM. The snare or clap lands on beat 3 of each bar, which gives trap its half-time feel: the drums feel like 70 BPM while the hi-hats move at full speed. Some songs run a little slower or faster, but 140 is the safe place to start.

Set it before you write a single note, not later. Trap is usually around 140, not 130, and a beat written at the wrong tempo is hard to fix once the drums and the 808 are in.

In FL Studio, the tempo is the number box at the top of the screen (1). Click it and drag up or down until it reads 140.

Trap music production techniques, step by step

Trap music production comes down to six techniques, done in this order: a dark chord loop, a simple melody, drums with rolling hi-hats and a snare on beat 3, an 808 that follows the chords and the kick, an arrangement that adds parts every 8 to 16 bars, and a mix where the kick and the 808 take turns.

The steps follow the order of Mix Elite’s free FL Studio course. Each one comes with a screenshot from the video, so you can copy the exact clicks.

Step 1: Write a dark chord loop in a minor scale

A trap beat starts with chords, and trap chords almost always come from a minor scale. A scale is just a set of notes that sound good together. Major ones sound happy. Minor ones sound serious, dark or sad, and minor is the more popular choice in today’s pop, hip-hop, R&B and electronic music.

Write your chords on a plain piano first and change the sound later. The course uses the Soft Piano from LABS, a plain piano sound, because a simple piano lets you hear the chords clearly. That’s also the classic trap piano sound: a dark piano loop with plenty of space around it.

How to pick a scale in the Piano Roll

Open the Piano Roll, right-click the note icon in its toolbar, and choose a scale such as Minor Harmonic (1). The rows of that scale light up behind your notes (2), so you always know which keys are safe. Left-click the same icon to turn on snap to scale, which won’t let you place a note outside the scale.

Then build the loop. Place four root notes, one per bar. On each root, stack two more notes from the scale, skipping one note each time. For a fuller sound, copy each root note one octave lower. Most songs loop just four chords like this, so don’t overthink it.

Which scale is best for trap?

Natural minor and harmonic minor cover most trap. Harmonic minor is Max’s personal favorite, and the course loop uses C# harmonic minor. It changes one note of the natural minor scale, which gives the last chord a tense pull back to the first one. For an even darker, eastern sound, try Japanese Insen or Hirajoshi from the same menu. In one of Mix Elite’s shorts, Max calls Insen his secret sauce for dark trap melodies.

Step 2: Write a melody on top

Your melody has one job: it’s the part people hum. The easiest method to get right: build the melody mostly from notes that are already in your chords, and give every bar a slightly different rhythm. Hum it back. If you can’t, simplify it.

Turn on ghost notes first with View > Ghost channels, or press Alt + V. Then place your melody notes (1) on or near the grey shadows of your chords (2). With snap to scale on, a small step away from a chord note still sounds right.

Trap melodies usually live on bells, plucks, piano, flutes or dark synth leads. The course writes its melody on a pluck sound in Vital, a free synth, with the piano kept a little louder than the pluck. For more free instruments that suit trap, see our list of free trap VST plugins.

If the loop still feels empty, add a soft pad or a chopped vocal underneath, kept quiet. Pads fill the space between the drums, the 808 and the melody without fighting them.

For more ideas, Mix Elite’s video below shows five melody tricks for trap and hip-hop, such as a detuned lo-fi piano made only with FL Studio’s stock plugins, reversing a melody, and chopping a loop into a new melody with Fruity Slicer.

Step 3: Program the trap drums

Make a new pattern for your drums and give it at least two bars, especially for the kick. One bar repeats so fast that it starts to sound like a ringtone. Two bars give you room for a small change at the end.

Then keep it simple. “Don’t go over the top,” Max says. “Drums, especially in trap music, are only to keep the rhythm going and not necessarily be in the highlight.”

Put a hi-hat on every second step

Right-click the hi-hat channel (1) and choose Fill each 2 steps (2). That puts a hat on every eighth note, the steady pulse of the beat. Don’t add rolls yet. Start with FL Studio’s stock 808 kit so you hear the pattern first, then swap in better samples later.

Snare or clap on beat 3, kick on beat 1

Every group of four steps in the Channel Rack is one beat, and the button colors change with each beat, so counting is easy. Put the snare or clap on beat 3 of each bar. In a two-bar pattern, that’s beat 3 and beat 7.

Now add the kick. Always put one on beat 1, so the listener knows where the bar starts. Add a few more wherever they feel good, on the start of a beat or halfway through one. Claps sound brighter and snares punchier, and stacking a clap on a snare is fine. There’s one hard rule for layers: never layer kicks.

How do you make trap hi-hat rolls and pitch slides?

In FL Studio, right-click the hi-hat channel, open the graph editor, click the Repeat tab and raise the bar under one hat: that single hit becomes a fast roll. The Note pitch tab raises or lowers a roll’s pitch. Rolls on two or three steps in a row, each pitched a little higher, make a rising roll.

Rolls are the fast stutters that make trap hats feel alive. The graph editor shows a small bar under every step: click the Repeat tab (1) and raise the bar under a hat (2). If the same hats play in another pattern, copy the changes over. Select the hat channel, press Ctrl + C, open the other pattern and paste with Ctrl + V.

How do you keep hi-hat rolls from sounding chaotic?

Use fewer rolls than you think. Keep the hats steady for two or three beats and change something on the fourth, so each roll lands as a surprise instead of noise. When two rolls crowd each other, delete one, and vary the rolls a little from pattern to pattern so they don’t repeat.

“There are no rules for where to make rolls,” Max says. “You should make it where you think it sounds good, so play around. But one framework that I like to use is change something every four [beats].” It works because of contrast. Three steady beats teach the ear the pattern, and the change on the fourth tickles it.

Make the hats sound human with velocity

Velocity is how hard each note is hit. When every hat plays at the same velocity, the beat sounds like a machine. In the graph editor, switch to Velocity (1) and pull every other hat down a little (2). “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Max says. “Even if it’s not perfect, it’s better because it’s more human.”

Add percs, then try a drill version

Once the main pattern works, add one or two extras, like a rim, a perc or a second clap, near beat 4 so they lead into the next bar. Two is plenty.

For a drill feel, change three things: a hat pattern that skips two steps and repeats, the snare moved from beat 7 to beat 8, and an extra kick near the end of the pattern. If drill is your thing, here’s how to make drill melodies to go with it.

Step 4: Make the 808 follow the chords and the kick

An 808 is a bass played from a sample. Drag an 808 sample into the Channel Rack and open its Piano Roll. The rule for writing it: follow the root notes of your chords, but also follow the rhythm of your kick. In the screenshot, the 808 notes (2) start right where the kick hits (1). If the kick lands on beat 6, an 808 note lands on beat 6 too. Simple as that.

Keep the 808 pattern two to four bars long so it loops with your chords, and make sure every note is in the key of your song. An 808 that plays the wrong note makes the whole low end sound off, even if you can’t say why.

An 808 already behaves a lot like a kick, so some trap beats drop the kick for a while and let the 808 do both jobs.

Why does my 808 sound muddy and clash with the kick?

Because the kick and the 808 both put most of their energy in the sub, the deep low end under about 100 Hz. When they hit at the same moment, they mask each other and the low end turns to mud. Keep every 808 note in key, set the 808 about 3 dB under the kick, and let them take turns.

Only one sound should own the sub at any moment. The cleanest fix ducks just the 808’s low end for a split second every time the kick hits, so the 808 keeps its full sound between kicks. Our guide on how to mix a kick and 808 shows it step by step with FL Studio’s stock Fruity Peak Controller.

How do you make an 808 hit harder?

Balance it first, then add grit. Phone and laptop speakers can’t play the deepest part of an 808, so a clean one can vanish on them. Blend in a distorted copy that small speakers can hear, then glue the kick and the 808 together with light saturation so they hit as one.

Here’s how. Duplicate the 808 channel and put a saturation or distortion plugin on the copy. Cut everything below about 200 Hz on that copy with an EQ, and blend it in quietly under the clean 808. Small speakers now hear the grit and fill in the bass for you.

Then send the kick and the 808 to one group track in the mixer and add a little saturation there. It evens out their levels and gives both the same color, like one photo filter on two pictures.

Step 5: Arrange the loop into a full trap beat

A loop isn’t a beat yet. The way out is additive arrangement. Put every instrument and drum in its own pattern with Split by channel in the pattern menu, and give drums and instruments their own colors. Select everything and press Ctrl + B until the song runs about 2 minutes. Then mute it all and unmute parts as the song needs them.

What is the standard trap song structure?

A simple layout that works is intro, hook (the chorus), verse, hook, outro: 16 bars each for the first four, then a short outro. At 140 BPM that runs about two minutes. For a longer song, add a second verse before the outro, and inside each section bring a part in or take one out every 4 to 8 bars.

Then fill each section in. In the course arrangement, the intro (1) starts with only the piano. The pluck joins at bar 8 and the bass at bar 13, and one drum sound, a rim, sneaks in just before the hook (2) to tease the listener. At the hook (3), every drum comes in at once. The verse takes some parts away again, and the outro eases out with just the pluck and the bass.

If the beat is for a rapper or singer, this rough version is enough, because the artist decides the final length. For more ways to lay out a beat, see our 7 tips to structure a beat.

Add transitions between sections

Transitions tell the listener that something is about to change. Drag a sweep, riser or downlifter from your FX samples onto an empty Playlist track where a new section starts (1), then drag the clip’s corner handle to fade it in (2). FX samples often come in too loud, so turn them down before you judge them.

Two more classic trap moves: cut all the drums for one beat right before the hook, or let only the hats and the 808 play for a bar. A moment of space makes the next hit land harder.

Step 6: Mix it so the drums and the 808 hit hard

Mixing is its own skill, but three habits from Mix Elite’s free FL Studio course get a trap beat most of the way there:

• Keep the master empty while you mix. FL Studio’s default template puts a limiter there, and it squashes the kick and hides your mistakes.
• Turn things down before you turn anything up. Start every mix by pulling down whatever feels way too loud.
• Compare with a reference track, a finished trap song you love, played at the same volume as your beat.

For the full process, from drum buses to checking the mix loud, follow our guide to hip-hop mixing.

Common trap production mistakes

• A roll in every bar. It stops being a surprise. Change something every four beats, not every beat.
• An 808 in the wrong key. If the bass fights the chords, check the 808’s notes against your scale.
• Kick and 808 at full blast on the same hit. Let them take turns, or let the 808 replace the kick.
• Weak samples. Gold in, gold out: a simple pattern with great sounds beats a busy one with dull sounds.
• Too many parts. Mute them one at a time. If the beat sounds better without one, delete it.
• Every drum in the intro. If it all plays from bar 1, the hook has nowhere to go.
• A limiter on the master while you mix. It makes the beat louder and hides the real problems.

Tonight, make one trap loop with just these steps: chords, a melody, hats, snare, kick and an 808. Don’t polish it. Stretch it to two minutes and finish it, and the next one will come faster. When you’re ready for the bigger picture, see our guide to making your first beat from scratch.

Frequently asked questions