Instrumental Beats Hip Hop

Essentially, you do not have to spend so much if you are going to buy software to make beats. There are a few things that you need to remember, though, to ensure that the basic things you need are there. First off, you need to make sure you have the complete buttons in the control dashboard. Some programs or machines do not include fast forward and rewind buttons. It is best that you check that you have the record, play, fast forward, rewind, and the pause buttons.

Next, you need to check if the program has a sound bank. This means that there should be a wide collection of sounds that you can choose from. These sounds should include sounds and beats from guitars, bass drums, percussion instruments, and what have you. If the sound bank does not contain a lot of files, forget it. It is very important that you have access to hundreds or probably thousands of beats and music selection because this is the very reason you are buying the software to make beats.

The last thing you need to check for when buying software to make beats is the effects section. You should have the ability to automatically put effects such as the fade out and all that instead of having to manually do it by cutting and recording. One the program has all of these, then the machine is said to be worth your money.

As far as I can look back, music has always been full part of my life. Growing up with classical music with some openings towards jazz and pop music, I have extended my interest to black music including gospel, soul, blues, and of course, hip hop. I am usually open minded about music, as long as it pleases my ear. However, I am very picky when it comes to define somebody as a real artist. Only the Great who influenced music history deserve to be classified as real artists.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of those real musicians. His music is an example of hard work. His incessant quest for perfection and harmony characterizes his music. Among the Great, you can count people like John Lennon, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington , James Brown, Eazy E, Nas-and yes- Eminem, whatever his haters might have to object. (This list of artists I mentioned here, is of course, non exhaustive)

Despite the fact RIP Proof was less known from the public than other famous artists, he had all the qualities that make a real artist.

So what is the definition of a real artist?

A real artist, a plain artist is a person who makes music for the love of it, not for the money only, even if he is perfectly conscious that he has a family to feed. A true artist must be inspirational to the listeners. Whatever his message is, people must be able to feel the music and to acknowledge the feelings expressed through the voice, lyrics and instrumentals.

A true artist usually has high requirements regarding the quality of his beats, instrumentals and recorded voice. Never satisfied with himself, he keeps working hard over the years in order to satisfy his public.

A true artist will always put his passion for the music, the will of sharing it and to satisfy his audience before the material aspect of the show biz.

A true artist definitely manages to generate a genuine enthusiasm among his audience.

While being on stage, he becomes the music. He and the audience are one and that's the full beauty of the musical fusion created by dedicated artists and a very receptive audience.

When you hear the song, you must be able to feel the artists' feelings and to forget about yourself, because during such moments, there is only place left for the music. Yes, this can happen if the artist is a real, dedicated person towards his art.

When you heard a person like James Brown tell their audience: « I feel so good I want to screeeeaaam », you perfectly know that his words weren't made up. There is a wonderful chemistry between such artists and the public. Good vibes are in the air and they penetrate into the mesmerized audiences.

Real artists usually stay humble in front of other great artists. Not only do they possess a good musical culture, but they will never mind quoting other legends. I heard James Brown paying homage to Ray Charles, for instance. So did Nas.

I do consider Eminem as a plain artist, because he changed the face of the rap game. He dared to use different themes than the usual themes used in hip hop and proved to be an astute word acrobat, playing with syllables and foolishly putting words together that you would never see side by side in real life. Moreover, his music touched a lot of people from different backgrounds all over the world.

RIP Proof never failed in naming big influences of his like Kurt Cobain, Jerry Garcia and John Lennon numerous times. One can consider D12 's Proof as a rhyming genius too. He had an amazing sense of realness and more importantly, a great passion for hip hop that won't die away since his
murder on April the 11th, 2006.

The Great in the music have the power to influence generations and usually make history. Even their deaths will never erase their contribution to the music history.

Entire artists are the ones who deserve your respect, because you know, deep inside of you, that they are the ones who live and breathe the music for your ears greatest pleasure. Only those guys will live on through their music over the centuries.

Copyright ©2007 by Isabelle Esling
All Rights Reserved

Stage 1: Right choice of the software or the hardware to use

Whether you are making beats for hip-hop, R&B or even pop music, you need to understand the software or the hardware you are using in order to translate your ideas to sound. Things to consider include user friendly interface, all the necessary functions that you need (VST, Sound Editor etc). You also make sure you have all the necessary hardware (including your computer!) to be able to run the software properly.

Stage 2: Drum Pattern

Especially for hip hop and r&b the drum pattern is an extremely important part of the beat. Typically you will find a kick, a snare or clap, high hat in these songs. What is important is that you get creative and create your own patterns BUT you still need to ensure that the sounds compliment each other instead of clashing. It is also important to change up the patterns throughout different parts of the song. Why you may ask? Because like any human being we tend to get bored of the same thing, so by switching the patterns up at different parts of the song it would highly benefit the song

Stage 3: Bassline & Melody

The bassline adds depth to your song and the melody of course is a large factor in the overall beat. In this section you have a lot of room for creativity. You can use electronica sounds and compliment it with strings, the combinations are endless. Having said that, sometimes keeping it simple goes a lot further than just overwhelming the song with all sorts of instruments. This comes with practise and the more you do, the better you will get out of it.

Stage 4: Effects

Depending on the type of genre you are working, sometimes less is more when it comes to effects. For many of today's top audio production softwares you have highly flexible functions such as re-verb, echo, delay that can drastically alter the song. Of course like I mentioned throughout the article, sometimes too much is bad thing so it is important to judge through your own ear and your peers.

I hope these things will help, happy beat making!

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!

1. Work on assignment. I call this technique going to the well instead of waiting for rain. Sometimes I work free form, just letting the music happen. Other times I work on assignment. A client will ask for a specific style, genre, or sound. In those cases I have a destination in mind and a basic framework for what the end product should be. For me that's much easier. I find that once I get going on this type of assignment, my creative forces take over and I eventually end up with a hot track.

The trick you can use is to create the assignment for yourself. Who says you have to have an outside client to challenge yourself. You can give yourself an assignment within a genre, style, and sound and get to work. The key is to get the assignment mapped out before you step into the studio to work on it.

Get the idea as fleshed out as much possible in your mind. Detail what the end work will sound like and the feeling it will bring when you hear it. If you go that far with it, you push your mind to call up those creative juices to create that feeling. Now when you hit the studio, you have the energy and path to run down.

2. Don't start from scratch. Another trick I've used is almost like remixing my own work or creating variations of a previous work. Start by calling up an old project in the studio, giving yourself access to a ready made pallet of sounds, tempo, song structure, etc, then scrap everything you recorded except for a few elements. If you work using a midi sequencer, this is as simple as creating a copy of the project under a new name and deleting everything except for a simple element like the snare pattern.

At this point, you're already a third of the way down the road to creating something new. You've got a pallet and a tempo and a snare pattern to build from. By the time your done, you might have ditched the original snare and found the session has pulled you in a new direction. And that's what you wanted in the first place. Something new.

3. Call on The Masters. Some days, for me at least, the above two methods don't get me going the way I want and the energy level still needs a boost. This is when I like call on The Masters. Depending on the genre I'm working in, I'll play a few of the masterworks that convey the type of emotion or energy I'm after and also some tracks that are completely different.

For example, if I'm working on an R&B balled and nothing hits the mark, I might throw on some of the classic Janet Jackson joints produced Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and something instrumental like a passionate cello piece by Yo Yo Ma where the emotion is there without lyrics at all. Or some Billy Joel or Debussy, or Missy Elliot, or The Roots, or... you get the idea. Whatever you play, make sure it's material you consider to be excellent, that sets the bar in your mind for what you want in the end from yourself. Throwing in some varied styles points your brain in new directions away from the roadblock you'd been facing and gets you shooting for the stars.

So there you go! 3 ways to get your creative juices flowing toward your next musical masterpiece. Have fun with it see what your get.

To get clear vocal effects, it is better to manage the beat and the vocals separately. If you create separate groups and provide a separate group bus in the sequencer for the beats and vocals, you could connect all the instruments into the beat group and make a separately recording for the instrumental tracks.

A fine-tune setting for the perfect balance between the beat and vocals is possible, if during the recording of the vocal tracks you connect the microphone to the vocal group separately. A wider range of sound effects for your Hip-Hop style is also possible, if you isolate every element separately.The result is clear sound effects for the listeners. You could not get a sound balance, when for example you record all the drums in one track.

For adding interesting sound effects such as a slap back echo, you could record all snares in one track. Good snare sounds are important for a good beat, soul of the music. The snare beat is the main beat that you clap intuitively in the pattern. To program your patterns and make them interesting and danceable, you need to learn the sound of the different drum parts. The hi hats usually keep the timing and add syncopation. For a very unsteady, syncopated style, hi hats could completely change what the beat sounds like.

To create the correct sound effect, it is very important that the bass drum keep the rhythm of the melody and bass line. A tempo of 80-90 bpm is an ideal tempo. You can adjust the tempo until the vocals are added using MIDI samplers and create the drum patterns at a very slow speed. Later you could increase the speed to match the ideal tempo. To learn more about Hip-Hop sound effects, recording, tracking vocals or music mixing always listen carefully to the applied effects of the recording tracks.

A rap song can be pretty boring without the right beat. The beat is in my opinion the element of the song that takes the rap to the next level and makes it stand out in the crowd. Even 2pac and Biggie would have a hard time if their beats were not up to par.

The two most important elements of a rap beat are its depth and its originality. By depth I mean how it makes you feel when you hear it. Every rap song has a message, and the beat needs to bring that message home.

It is also important that the beat stand out in the crowd. This is where originality comes in. In the first seconds of your beat you have to make it unique so the person who listens to it recognizes the song and are ready to join in on it.

A rap beat typically consists of a loop. A loop is a set of bars repeating over and over. So how to you make a great loop?

Begin with your hi hats. The hi hats sets the basics for your rap beat and let you decide the speed of your beat. There is nothing complex with you hi hats so make it simple. You can add more hi hats later if needed.

Second step is to add the kicks and the snares. The kicks are what most people will consider the baseline. These are the deep elements of the base. The snares are the mid and high tones and are usually lighter than the kicks.

After you have configured the speed and your base line you have your skeleton ready. Next thing is to add your instrumentals and vocals.

It is the combinations all these elements that build the feeling and originality in your rap beat.

There is no need to overdo your rap beats

Many newbies does the mistake of working too much on their rap beats. They add layer upon layer of instrumentals and work the beat line to much.

Keep the beat as simple as possible. It is not how many sounds you have that counts. It is how much the rap beats can bring emotions upon the listener. Spend some time listening to the beats of your favorite producer and you will probably notice that their beats are not very complex. They are simply unique.

Also keep in mind that you are not the Star of your rap beat. This is the rappers job. Your job is to make the rapper have an easy day at work and help him or her bring out the creativity inside.