A beatmaker creates the instrumental foundation of a track: drum patterns, bass lines, chords and samples, arranged in a hardware sampler such as an MPC or SP-404 or in a digital audio workstation. In hip hop the word is often used alongside producer. The line between them is loose, but beatmaker stresses the hands-on craft of building the beat, while producer can also mean guiding a whole recording, vocals and mix included.
The ethnomusicologist Joseph Schloss, in Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), studied how these musicians work and what they value, from digging through crates of records to chopping, flipping and looping samples. Lo-fi is largely a beatmakers’ genre: most tracks are made by one person at home, released as singles or beat tapes, and shared through live streams, playlists and Bandcamp.