Instrumental Beats Hip Hop

When it comes to hip hop music, all we have is a singer and some beats playing in the background. The vocalist has to spit words and try to rhyme them together so that the vocals fit with the music or the beats. This genre is a difficult one for the vocalist as he has to work out a lot on the sounds and how he sings the lyrics. Rap beats are equally important for the singer as they are the ones that set the musical background for the vocalist to perform on. These beats can either be created or you can also find them online.

If you are thinking of buying a hip hop beat online then there are a lot of web music stores that can help you with the requirement. All you need to do is search the right type and you will have hundreds of rap beats listed on the screen. Then you can pick the one that suits your lyrics the best and pay the site for the service. Most of the beats available online are jazzy and created by music professionals. You can also be sure of the beat that you are going to buy as you can hear the demo of all the beats that are available for you.

Unlike the music stores wherein you get beats at super expensive prices, the beats available on certain hip hop sites are extremely affordable. You can get a superb hip hop beat for just five dollars as well. Once you have bought the beat you can use it in any way you like, you can use it for one of your songs or you can share it with your friends. So if you are thinking of becoming a big rapper someday, better start with beats of your choice and fill the lyrics accordingly.

This is probably the most important piece of equipment to make beats. Your choice of software could have implications in the style you develop as a music producer. But for somebody starting from zero I would recommend to not pay too much for this yet.

Most of the peripherals needed to make beats come with light versions of popular music software. Even though the purpose is to temp you to upgrade to the more expensive versions, these light editions have more than enough sounds to keep anyone going for a long time.

If you have absolutely no experience you could check something like Sonic Pro, a very popular online program that for only .00 USD offers a sequencer, sounds, instruments and more important, video tutorials on how to make your own beats.

An Audio Interface

One of the most important reasons why to get a decent audio interface is their handling of a common problem with computers and music, latency. This is the amount of time that it takes the computer to process an incoming signal.

Latency can create very annoying issues when making beats, like playing a midi note and hearing the sound a second later. It would be extremely difficult to record live that way. Also if you want to connect instruments, external synths and drum machines, audio interfaces feature the proper inputs.

A Midi Controller

Most of today midi controllers plug to the computer via USB and are recognized automatically by most music software, requiring almost no technical knowledge to get them going.

The most popular midi controllers come in 2 flavors, keyboard or pads. The keyboard is the most popular and the most practical, but rubber pads can yield more rhythmically interesting beats. Even better is the new breed of controllers that blend both together.

Monitors

It might seem like the least important feature for someone getting started, but this depends on how much you enjoy making music. The issue lies in the reproduction of the entire frequency spectrum. Small computer speakers by default mess with the audio content, hyping up frequencies because of their inability to fully reproduce them.

Even though the monitors at beginner prices are not the full solution, as you go up in price you start to get a more realistic image of the sound you're working on. At lower prices most monitors still hype up the sound a little, but in a way that compliments music making and not video game playing.

Panning: What is panning exactly? You may have heard this as well from people who tell you that you need to pan your sounds in the mix. In layman's terms, panning is the shifting of an audio channel either more to the left, or more to the right. So now that we know the simple explanation of it, when you're told that you should pan the sounds in your mix, you'll want to make some of the audio channels balance more to the left side and others to the right. My tip for panning is to keep your kick drum dead center, and usually your bass instrument as well. You can pan your hats more to one side, and the snare more to the opposite side, but don't overdo it. Try to visualize a drummer playing a drum set. Usually, the kick drum is the drum dead center, while other hats and snares and other percussion instruments are usually set up around the drummer, some more to the left side, and others to the right. However, they are still close to the drummer, so panning a snare all the way to the left for example, wouldn't sound too realistic. Panning helps to eliminate clutter directly in the center of your mix.

Compression: This is another term that you may have heard of also. Compression acts as a tightening up of audio on an audio channel to amplify it more. Compression is an effect that can be used sparingly in your hip hop beats on certain channels. Some people use way too much compression and cause their instrumentals to sound distorted. My tip for compression is that you use it on your kick drums, your bass instrument, although this can vary with the type of bass used, and lightly on your final mix. Using compression on these channels will bring out the thump of your kicks further, and on the master channel, when used lightly and correctly, will bring out the overall mix as well without overkill.

Equalizing: Another quality effect that can bring great results (or horrible results when overly used) is the EQ, or equalizer. Equalizing is simply the elevating or decreasing of certain parts, of an audio channel so that you bring out more of the desired area in that channel. On an equalizer, regardless of the type you use, the parts, or bands as they're referred to, on the left side are your deeper bassy bands, and more so to the right are your treble bands. So if you had a bass instrument, but had slight hiss, you could use EQ to decrease the higher bands of your audio to eliminate the hissing some. In comparison, you could use EQ to decrease the lower bands of an audio channel so as not to hear slight bassy sounds that may be present. This can be effective for string instruments, or especially brass ensembles if you are wanting to create a nice, crisp sound for them. My tip when using EQ is to use them to decrease undesired areas of your audio more so than to use them to elevate desired areas. By this I mean, if you're using an EQ on bass for example, decrease the higher bands further, rather than to elevate the lower bands, as this can sometimes cause problems on a mix also.

In short, these three effect plugins are always of great use in creating hip hop beats, and can bring your hip hop beats from sounding weak and lacking, to sounding more powerful and impacting! The tips I provided above should get your beats sounding hotter in no time. Of course, another tip I advise is always to experiment to see what sounds best to you. Happy beat making!