To make an afrobeats beat, set your tempo between 100 and 115 BPM, loop two to four warm chords, then build the groove from layers of percussion rather than one big drum pattern: a syncopated kick, a soft rim or clap backbeat, swung 16th-note shakers, and congas or talking drum answering each other across the bar. Add a round bass (or a log drum if you lean amapiano), a simple melodic hook, and leave space for the vocal. The percussion is the beat here, not decoration, so that is where most of your time goes.
This guide walks through the full process in FL Studio terms, with real numbers from mix engineers and catalog data. If you mostly cook trap or drill, the biggest shift is mental: afrobeats is about bounce and pocket, not hard hits.
What’s in this guide
- Afrobeats vs Afrobeat: what are you actually making?
- Step 1: Set the tempo and key
- Step 2: Start with the chords
- Step 3: Program the core drums
- Step 4: Stack the percussion
- Step 5: Add the bass or log drum
- Step 6: Melody, arrangement and a quick mix
- Sounds and tools that help
- FAQ
- Verdict
Afrobeats vs Afrobeat: what are you actually making?
Afrobeats (with an “s”) is the modern West African pop sound of artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido and Tems. Afrobeat (no “s”) is the older, live-band style tied to Fela Kuti. Most producers searching “afrobeat beat” today want the first one, and that is what this guide covers.
Splice’s walkthrough with producer Iss 814 makes the same distinction, describing Afrobeat as a blend of West African styles such as highlife and Yoruba music with American funk, jazz and soul (Splice). Modern afrobeats keeps that DNA in its percussion and guitar lines, but it is programmed in a DAW and built around a vocal.
Amapiano is a third, separate thing: a South African genre that overlaps with afrobeats on playlists and borrows from it in production, mostly through the log drum. You will see it come up in Step 5.
Step 1: Set the tempo and key
Start at 105 to 110 BPM. That sits right in the middle of where released afrobeats actually lands.
Mixgraph’s afrobeats catalog analysis puts the median at 110 BPM across 242 tracks, with the middle half of songs between 99 and 116 BPM and nine in ten between 93 and 123 BPM (Mixgraph). Their listing shows Burna Boy’s “Laho II” at 110 BPM and Wizkid’s “Essence” at 104 BPM. If you want an amapiano feel, push a little higher: Splice notes most amapiano falls in the 110 to 115 BPM range (Splice).
On key: there is no rule, but afrobeats leans warmer and brighter than trap. Major keys and minor keys with major-seventh color both work. If you are coming from dark trap, resist the urge to go straight to a harmonic minor scale. The vibe is usually sunny, even when the lyrics are sad.
Step 2: Start with the chords
Loop two to four chords with seventh or ninth extensions on a soft keys, guitar or pad sound. The chords set the mood, and everything rhythmic gets built around them.
Good starting sounds:
- Electric piano or Rhodes with a little tremolo or chorus.
- Clean electric guitar playing short, muted chord stabs (a nod to highlife).
- A warm pad underneath for width, kept quiet.
A simple progression to try in C major: Cmaj7, Am7, Dm7, G7 (I, vi, ii, V), one bar each. Play the chords with a rhythm instead of holding whole notes: push some hits slightly ahead of the beat so the harmony already bounces before any drums come in.
Step 3: Program the core drums
The core kit is light: a syncopated kick, a soft backbeat, and a constant swung shaker. If it sounds like a trap kit at a slower tempo, it is too heavy.
Kick
Avoid four-on-the-floor and avoid trap-style rolls. A classic starting point is a 3+3+2 pattern across 16 steps: kicks on steps 1, 4 and 7, then again on 9, 12 and 15, which gives that rolling, off-balance pulse. Pick a round kick with a short tail. Pounding 808 kicks fight the bass.
Snare, rim and clap
Put the backbeat on beats 2 and 4 (steps 5 and 13), but use a rimshot, a soft clap, or a clap layered with a light snare instead of a cracking trap snare. Drop the velocity to around 70 to 80% so it sits behind the percussion, not on top of it.
Shakers and swing
Program a shaker on every 16th step, then shape it: accent the off-beats with higher velocity, lower the rest. Then add swing. In FL Studio, the Channel Rack Swing knob “affects the length of odd vs even steps (every second step),” and a channel needs both Global Swing and its own Channel Swing above 0% for it to apply (FL Studio manual). Start around 20 to 30% and listen. Too much and it turns into a shuffle.
For finer control, the same manual describes the Graph Editor’s Shift target as a “note start time offset,” so you can nudge single steps late without swinging the whole pattern.
Step 4: Stack the percussion
This is the step that makes it afrobeats. Add three to five short percussion parts, each with its own pattern, so they interlock instead of doubling each other.
Typical layers:
- Congas or bongos: a two-bar call-and-response figure, open and muted hits.
- Talking drum: a few pitched hits or slides at the end of a phrase.
- Woodblock, cowbell or clave: one high, dry element playing off-beats.
- A second shaker or tambourine panned opposite the first.
Keep each pattern short. In a KVR Audio forum thread breaking down afro-house rhythms, one producer noted that “percussion is mostly one-bar and two-bar patterns, nothing super-long,” and that “a lot of the short notes and percussion are on off beats” (KVR Audio). Their final groove used “a whole lot of percussion layers with separate patterns for each element” and “no sidechains.”
Do not bury these parts. Jesse Ray Ernster, who mixed Burna Boy’s Twice As Tall, told Sound on Sound that afrobeats has “a lot of percussion that occupies the upper midrange and top end with really fast transient responses,” and that artists “really want that stuff upfront, sometimes way above the vocal” (Sound on Sound). He also points out that afrobeats productions “often program fills on separate tracks,” which is a good habit: put your end-of-phrase drum fills on their own mixer channel so you can process them separately.
Step 5: Add the bass or log drum
Use a round, melodic bass that plays in the gaps the kick leaves. For a more amapiano-influenced beat, swap or layer it with a log drum.
Classic afrobeats bass: a bass guitar or a soft sine-plus-harmonics synth bass following the chord roots, with short notes and a few passing notes. Write it against the kick: when the kick hits, the bass often rests, and vice versa. Ernster’s tip for a “lean and tight low-end” was a high-pass filter on the bass with a slow roll-off at 60 Hz, then light saturation for presence on small speakers (Sound on Sound).
Log drum: a pitched, punchy percussive bass with a quick decay, the signature sound of amapiano. Producer Kooldrink, who has remixed Ed Sheeran and Tyla, told Splice: “Without the log drum, it’s not amapiano.” He also says the “OG amapiano ‘Log Drum’ preset” lives in FL Studio’s stock Fruity DX10, and suggests running it through Fruity WaveShaper or a plugin like KNOCK “to give it a little more oomph” (Splice). That means every FL Studio user already owns the starting sound.
If you come from trap, note the difference: a long gliding 808 fills all the space, while afrobeats bass and log drums are short and leave air. If your low end still gets muddy, the same fixes from our guide on how to mix 808s without mud apply here.
Step 6: Melody, arrangement and a quick mix
Add one simple melodic hook, arrange in 8-bar blocks, and mix with the percussion and vocal space as priorities.
For the hook, short is better: a plucked guitar riff, a flute or sax line, a marimba, or a bell. Iss 814’s Splice walkthrough builds its lead from a saxophone melody over the chords and percussion (Splice). Leave the 1 to 4 kHz range open where the vocal will sit, and keep the melody in call-and-response with where a singer would breathe.
A starting arrangement for a type beat:
| Section | Bars | What plays |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 8 | Chords, shaker, one percussion layer |
| Hook | 8 | Full drums, all percussion, bass, melody |
| Verse 1 | 16 | Drums, two or three percussion layers, bass, chords (melody out) |
| Hook | 8 | Everything back in, plus a fill on the last bar |
| Verse 2 | 16 | Swap one percussion layer for a new one to keep it moving |
| Hook and outro | 8 + 8 | Full hook, then strip back to chords and shaker |
Quick mix checklist before you export:
- Start the mix with kick and bass, as Ernster does, and get those two feeling good together first.
- High-pass everything that is not kick or bass, including percussion.
- Pan percussion layers out (shakers, congas, woodblock) so the center stays clear for the vocal.
- Use a short room reverb on the percussion bus, not a long hall.
- Take a break before final tweaks. Ernster says that after “more than two hours on a mix, it’s very difficult for me to get my perspective back.”
Sounds and tools that help
The most important sounds in afrobeats are percussion one-shots and loops: congas, shakers, talking drum, rims and log drums. Get those right before buying any synth.
FL Studio stock covers more than people think: Fruity DX10 for log drums, FPC for percussion one-shots, and the Channel Rack swing for groove. For budget options built around the genre, we covered what is worth grabbing in our roundup of afrobeats VST plugins.
Being honest about our own product: Pendora is not an afrobeats bank. Its 275+ presets were designed for trap, drill, dark trap, phonk, boom bap and pluggnb, so you will not find congas or log drums in it. Where it can help is the melodic side: its pads, bells and plucks work as chord beds or hook sounds if you like blending afro bounce with darker, R&B or pluggnb-style melodies. Choose a dedicated afro percussion kit if you want the authentic sound. Choose Pendora if you already make trap or pluggnb and want melodic sounds that also cross over into afro-fusion beats.
If you want to test that crossover cheaply, Pendora Lite has 30 presets for 29 €. And if you also make drill, our step-by-step on how to make a drill beat follows the same structure as this guide.
FAQ
What BPM is afrobeats?
Most afrobeats sits between about 100 and 115 BPM. Mixgraph’s catalog of 242 tracks has a median of 110 BPM, with the middle half between 99 and 116 BPM. Start at 105 to 110 and adjust to the vocal.
What is the difference between Afrobeat and Afrobeats?
Afrobeat is the older live-band genre associated with Fela Kuti, mixing West African music with funk and jazz. Afrobeats is the modern, DAW-produced pop sound of artists like Burna Boy and Wizkid. They share percussion roots, but production-wise they are different targets.
Can you make afrobeats in FL Studio with stock plugins?
Yes. FPC handles percussion one-shots, the Channel Rack swing knob handles groove, and Kooldrink told Splice that the original amapiano log drum preset is in Fruity DX10, which ships with FL Studio. You will still want good percussion samples, since stock drums lean electronic.
How is amapiano different from afrobeats?
Amapiano is a South African genre built around the log drum bass and piano or keys, usually at 110 to 115 BPM per Splice. Afrobeats comes from West Africa, is more song-and-vocal driven, and relies more on layered hand percussion. Many current afrobeats songs borrow log drums, which is why the two often get mixed up.
Why does my afrobeats beat sound stiff?
Usually because the shakers and percussion are dead on the grid with flat velocities. Add 20 to 30% swing on the shaker channels, vary velocities on every 16th, and make sure each percussion layer has its own short pattern instead of copying the kick.
Verdict
A good afrobeats beat is 105 to 110 BPM, warm extended chords, a light syncopated kit, and three to five interlocking percussion layers mixed loud. Spend your time on the percussion and the bounce between kick and bass. The melody and sounds matter less than the pocket.
If you want melodic sounds that carry over from trap and pluggnb into afro-fusion beats, check out Pendora or browse the full Tiger-Sounds shop for drum kits.
