Writing a Beat
43 drum styles in six families, the controls that build the prompt, live controls that reshape a beat without regenerating, batch variations, and Pro Mode.
DocumentationWriting a Beat
Drums
Writing a Beat
Two kinds of control sit on the Drums tab and it is worth knowing which is which. Some compose the prompt and only take effect on the next generation. Others reshape the beat already in front of you, with no model call and no tokens. Everything below is one or the other, and the difference is why they live in different places on screen.
Styles
Forty-three styles in six families, picked from the Groove dropdown or just described in the prompt. Describing one in your own words is often enough; Aether routes "dusty sample flip" to Boom Bap and "sliding 808" to Drill.
| Family | Styles |
|---|---|
| Hip Hop | Boom Bap, Trap, Drill, Lo-fi, West Coast, Phonk |
| Four On The Floor | House, Deep House, Tech House, Techno, Trance, Big Room, Hardstyle, Disco |
| Breaks | Drum & Bass, Jungle, UK Garage, Dubstep, Footwork, Breakbeat, Jersey Club |
| Live Kit | Rock, Funk, Motown, Jazz Swing, Blues Shuffle, Punk, Metal, R&B / Neo-Soul, Reggae, Country |
| Latin / Afro | Afrobeat, Afrobeats, Amapiano, Reggaeton, Samba, Bossa Nova, Afro-Cuban |
| Pop / Electronic | Pop, Alt-Pop, Synthwave, Downtempo, Gospel |
Prompt controls and live controls
The Drum Controls panel composes the prompt, and everything in it takes effect on the next generation. It is in the same order as the Melodic tab's Quick Params.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| BPM | Generation tempo, 20 to 999. Leave it empty and the AI chooses. |
| Bars | Clip length, 1 to 64. Leave it empty and the AI chooses. Sections takes this field over while it is on. |
| Time Sig | Meter for the generated beat. Auto leaves it untouched. |
| Groove | The style family. Auto lets the words in your prompt choose it. |
| Feel | A word for the intended pocket, such as Laid back or On top. Auto leaves it to the model. |
| Density | How many hits fill the grid, from Sparse to Busy. |
| Fills | How often a fill breaks the pattern. |
| Pieces | Restrict the beat to the pieces you tick. Selecting none means no restriction, which is the default. |
| Note naming | Which octave convention the map legend and the lane tooltips use. It changes labels only, never a note number. |
Pieces is the one worth knowing about: tick only kick, snare and closed hat and the beat comes back on those three alone, which is how you get a skeleton to build on rather than a finished pattern to strip back.
The live controls are elsewhere on purpose. Quantize, Swing, Humanize and Ghost depth sit behind Live on the transport bar, next to Raw / Processed, because they reshape the beat you already have rather than the next one, with no generation and no tokens. Move one while the loop plays and you hear the change against the beat without it restarting, so you can judge it in place. Raw / Processed compares the two, and whatever you are hearing is what gets dragged out.
Moving a slider switches its stage on and flips the beat to Processed, so one gesture is enough. Swing follows the beat's own subdivision: it shifts the off-eighths of a straight pattern and the off-sixteenths of a busier one, rather than assuming a grid.
Swing is a control, not a prompt
Ask for "swung hats" and Aether moves the Swing slider rather than passing the words to the model. That keeps one authority for how much swing there is, and leaves it visible and adjustable instead of baked into the notes. Styles that are swung by nature, such as Jazz Swing, Blues Shuffle and Footwork, are written on a triplet grid by the model and disable the slider, because it would have nothing to do.Sections
Turn on Sections to lay the beat out as named parts with bar counts, such as Intro 8, Build 8, Drop 8. Bars then shows the running total rather than taking your entry, and the request carries the structure with each section's start and end worked out for you.
The suggested names follow the style you picked, because the vocabulary is not shared: Four On The Floor offers Build, Drop and Breakdown, while Live Kit offers Verse, Chorus and Bridge. You can type your own instead.
Batch
Turn on Batch and pick 2 to 5, and one prompt comes back as that many beats. Each one is told what the ones before it did, described in drum terms, subdivision, density, kit and dynamics, so they diverge rather than repeat. Numbered buttons switch between them and the Drum map follows whichever one you are on.
The first variation loads as soon as it arrives, so you are not waiting on the whole run to see anything. Click a different one while the rest are still generating and it stays where you put it. A batch is one undo step, and one card in the Library with a row per variation. Batch always starts off when Aether loads.
Pro Mode on drums
Pro Mode works on the Drums tab as well as the Melodic tab. One call plans the beat, naming the subdivision it sits on, which pieces carry the pulse and which answer it, where the fills land, how the sections differ and how the dynamics move. A second call writes the beat to that plan. The plan appears in the Thought panel the way it does on Melodic.
One toggle serves both tabs, so turning it on in either turns it on in both. It works with Batch, and each variation is planned on its own, which means five variations is ten calls. Budget for it.