Metro Boomin Type Beat

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Over the past months I got asked a lot about how to do type beats. While I’m no master at this, I’ve sold my fair share of type beats and can hopefully show you a trick or two. The Metro Boomin Type Beat obviously also works for beats in the style of Future and Southside too! Start off by setting your BPM anywhere in the range of 130 to 180 beats per minute. If you are not into halftime beats, then 65 to 90 beats per minute is the way to go.

Instrumentation for a Metro Boomin Type Beat

Let’s start putting down the bells & pianos. Metro Boomin usually has a an eerie, creepy vibe to his instrumentation. Sound choices are part of it but also playing in scales like Phrygian gives the track the right vibe! For the main melody I usually duplicate the audio and have one channel run through the Halftime plugin which adds depth to the sound.

The complementary melody is actually more pad like in his tracks. I used a piano and added lots of of reverb to it. Any reverb will do, but one of my go-to reverbs in this case is Diffuse from the Dub Machines plugins.

Last but not least, I added a choir to play along with melody and accent the chorus or bridge. It’s also drenched in reverb and is really just for the background to give some depth to the composition. the melody is the center of the track, this one just filles things up.

In the end I group and ran a the RC20 plugin with a vinyl preset over it to give it a vintage grit / lo-fi touch with a touch of little warp and crackle. You can also use the free Izotope Vinyl plugin for this.

You can do more detailing on each of these parts, but at the core we have a pretty solid sounding composition, so let’s move along.

Metro Boomin Drums

Nothing complicated going on here, I took sounds from our Metro Boomin Drum Kit (Just grab it and EQ to taste) and programmed pretty sparse rhythms for kicks, hats and snares. I layered a clap with the snare to make it snappier and used a different snare sample in a slightly off beat pattern, to add some variation.

To round things off, I used a clean 808 from the Drum Kit mentioned above, added some saturation for some extra flavour and sidechained the bass to the kick, so they both have room to breath.