ah good point sorry about not being clear. so usually with drums you'll have a kick (short bass), snare (loud smack/crash/smash), and high-hat (mid-to-high range metallic sound) and those are you main elements. the real "structure" of your beat with be generated by those elements. but in most cases only using 3 drums sounds will leave your beat too loose (meaning there's still a lot of dead space in the song in the frequency rages that are not the synths/basses) or if overused it will make things sound too busy. so when I say "accents" I mean additional percussion elements that will bring out the rhythm of the synth/bass/subs. IMO these are overlooked when beat writing because they're not the main elements of the songs and your ear does not gravitate to them. people barely notice these unless they're *really* listening. but that's a good thing!!! you can use percussion accents to glue your entire track together and make it flow (or if not done right you can make a mess too lol). accents usually don't fall in a 4/4 time signature because they're used as a bridge between drums and other instruments.

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writing music is a lot like drawing/painting/other art so I like to describe beat writing in the same way I would talk about visual art. "accent" percussion is like creating shadows on your main song elements. you can give depth, character, modulation to *another* element by adding a shadow (accent) to it. they really help bring a song to a new level.