To start making beats you only need a basic laptop, music production software and a few pieces of hardware.

Luckily, music production software and hardware companies have great options for building a low-cost home studio setup that’ll easily get you started and sounding professional on a budget.

Assuming you already have a laptop, here’s exactly what you need to start making beats.

Modern DAWs are a marvel in today’s music production world. Their streamlined workflows have made it relatively easy for anyone to start making music on pretty much any computer right now.

If you’re a macOS user, you already have a great DAW installed on your computer called Garageband.

In Garageband, you’ll find a great starting point for beat making and music production, and you can upgrade to Logic Pro easily once you’re ready to learn more advanced aspects of beat making like recording, mixing and mastering.

But if you don’t want to work in Garageband, Ableton Live is another excellent option that features a streamlined workflow well suited for beat-making’s creative needs.

Ableton Live Lite is an affordable starting point that comes bundled with LANDR Studio subscriptions if you want to try Ableton out.

Plugins and a good DAW give everything you need to create sounds and make a beat, but adding a MIDI Controller to your beat-making setup gives you the ability to control and play instruments in your DAW.

MIDI controllers come in various shapes and sizes, but if you’re just getting started, any MIDI controller with finger drum pads and a piano keyboard will set you up for success.

MIDI controllers from Arturia, AKAI and Native Instruments offer a small footprint on a budget that’ll get you ready to write beats and play instruments directly in your DAW.

If you’re shopping around, we’re fans of the Novation Launch series.

If you want to listen back to audio at the highest possible quality and at a low latency you’ll need an audio interface and a decent pair of music production headphones.

Audio production headphones are designed to give you the clearest sound possible with a flat response that won’t boost lower-end frequencies like many consumer headphones tend to do.

Audio interfaces use an external sound card to process audio. They route audio to your headphones or a pair of monitors in your home studio.

On top of that, audio interfaces make it possible to record live audio like vocals, drums, guitar or any other physical instrument.

But the most important reason to get an audio interface is to reduce the latency of audio traveling from your DAW to your headphones.

Reducing latency is needed to make any instrument you play in your DAW respond instantly to your playing like a real instrument would.

Not ready to program your own drum beat? It might be easier to use the oldest beat-making trick in the book, sampling.

On LANDR Samples, you’ll find tons of great drum loops matched to a wide variety of genres.

Grab a loop and use it as a starting point for your drum beat. To make it your own, you can easily chop it up, re-arrange it and put effects on it too.

Aside from drums, there are many inspiring melodic samples to check out on LANDR Samples.

Whether you’re looking for a brooding synth to set under a trap track, or if you’re looking for a bright melody to create a hook for your dance beat, you’ll definitely find lots of inspiration.

If you’re not sure where to start with layering samples and building a track with them, give LANDR Creator a try.

With Creator, you can easily build a stack of loops and hear how they sound together directly inside the LANDR Samples library.

Creator will even adjust the tempo and key of each sample to make it easy to hear how they sound together and export straight into your DAW for further editing and arrangement.

It’s free to try right now if you head over to LANDR Samples.

Once you have a drum beat ready, it’s time to give your song its melodic backbone, otherwise known as a chord progression.

Starting with the chords is a good idea because they define the important melodic structures in your beat like its key, chord type and chord changes.

You need this melodic structure to write your bass and melody later on.

If writing a chord progression sounds like a challenge, check out LANDR Composer.

Composer can generate chord progressions over a 4 to 32 bar loop and gives a ton of options for easily creating interesting, jazzy extended or inverted chords.

It’s a very beginner-friendly way to dip your toes into the inspiring world of chord theory. Even if you’re a professional producer, Composer can be a quick source of inspiration!

Now that we’ve got drums and chords, the last thing missing from the “rhythm section” of your beat is a bassline.

Basslines can be tricky, but they’re simple in that their primary goal is to play the root of each and support the chord progression.

You can make them funky by adding interesting notes around the root note in a rhythmic way that complements the drums, and this can require a bit more effort.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, LANDR Composer can generate a bassline for you to edit into something of your own.

But you can’t go wrong by downloading a cool bass synth plugin like MiniRaze or Synth X and playing your bass ideas over your drum and chord loop.

Synth X and MiniRaze are just a few of the great bass-friendly synths that come bundled with LANDR Studio subscriptions.

Melodies in beat-making are difficult to define. In many cases, the bassline itself or even the drums can supply the melody.

In beat making, it's safe to say that any part of your track that stands out as a hook for a listener is the melody. So think of the melody as the part that makes your beat stand out.

Remember that if you’re writing beats for a rapper or singer, their vocals will often fill out the track’s melody. If you’re producing in a context like this, consider making space for the vocals and focus on making a complementary hook.

Browsing through samples of arpeggios, synth sequences, vocal chops and guitar parts is a great idea if you’re looking to inspire a melody or find a feeling that matches your track.

Now you have a drum beat, some chords, a bassline and a melody looping and sounding good in your DAW — cool!

It’s time to enter the arrangement phase of making a beat.

One loop isn’t exactly a full-fledged beat. You need to create tension, release and a sense of movement by adding and subtracting elements from your loop.

Arrangement is the process of editing your loops into a full-fledged beat that goes from one place to another. It’s where you’ll create drops and where you’ll cut the kicks or put the hi-hat in.

You’ll have to learn a few audio editing techniques in your DAW, but once you get a handle on that, it’s all about learning how to build a loop into a beat with various sections, switch-ups and drops.

When you have an arrangement you're happy with and you feel like your beat is done, there’s two important steps left before your beat is ready for the world.

You’ll need to mix your beat to make it sound the best it can. Of course, mixing can be a complicated process that takes time to learn.

But one-knob mixing plugins like the LANDR FX suite (which comes with all LANDR Studio subscriptions) can make mixing tasks like EQ, compression and effects much easier.

Once you have a mix you’re happy with, you need to master it to polish your beat and get it to commercial loudness levels.

Mastering was once a complex and expensive task that required the help of a professional mastering engineer, but today AI mastering tools produce high-quality masters that are competitive with the output of human mastering engineers.

LANDR’s industry-leading AI mastering plugin is easily the best option on the market, so if you need a quick and cost-friendly master of your beat, give it a try.

LANDR Mastering Plugin comes bundled with LANDR Studio, so if you’ve already gotten a subscription to write your beat, you’re ready to master your track and release it.