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Hip Hop Beat Construction Made Easy
give feedback here --page 1 Hip hop has been with us for over 20 years. It has diversified greatly during this course of time as artists have explored, inventively, with sounds and rhythm. This article will keep it simple. My goal is to give you what you need to know to make beats that are immediately identifiable as hip hop and show you how to start your own process of sound and beat creation in your own studio. I will walk you through standard hip hop beat construction and give you some sound development and production tips. Once you have the basics down you should take the format into your own hands and make beats conforming to your own artistic vision. At least one of the reasons for hip hop's popularity is that the rules are flexible, open ended, and allow for great expression.
Breakdown of a Hip Hop SongThere are two basic parts to a typical hip hop song: The Beat and the Vocals. Each consists of several tracks. While this article focuses on the construction of beats, lets lead off with a description of all the elements of a hip hop song so you can see how the beat fits in. What are Beats?This is the most important term to understand in Hip Hop construction, cause if you don't know it, you'll never understand what people are talking about. The Beat is basically, the whole song minus the vocals. It usually includes the following:
The Beat can be long or short. In its shortest form it is 8 bars. If short, it is usually looped over and over again, for as long as the vocalist wants. If long, it may be comprised of different parts for the verse and chorus and may add an introduction, a break, and an ending. Often, the HH song follows classic pop form of Intro (8 bars). Verse (8-16 bars) Chorus (8 bars) Verse (8-16 bars) Chorus (8 bars) Break (2-8 bars) Verse or Chorus (8-16 bars) then ends in a fade out. This structure, called the arrangement, of course, is not written in stone. It can be modified to suit the piece at hand. What do the vocal tracks consist of in a Hip Hop song?
We'll get to vocals in a later article.
Elements of a Hip Hop BeatLets dissect a basic hip hop beat and talk about the 4 basic elements I described above. 1. MIDI Drum patterns or audio drum loopsThis is the "core" of the song so you should take great care with what you are laying down here. There are two basic methods here and you may use either or both in the same song. a) Audio Loops This is the simplest way to proceed. Most sequencers come with a selection of drum loops and these can be used, edited, re-grooved and effected. Audio can be tweaked to give you the sound you want. Loops can be time stretched and compressed. You can add effects with plugins. Perhaps the more creative tweaks one can do is in an audio editor like Recycle or Sound Forge. Here you can destructively (meaning you are actually altering the sound file) modify parts, even single hits, within the audio loop. b) MIDI drum patterns While this method is slightly more complicated, if usually gives more exacting and easy-to alter results. Here the keyboard, control pad surface or electronic drum kit triggers samples for each drum. The samples may reside in a software sampler, synth, hardware MPC type sampler or even as an instrument in some applications. In all cases the drums are a pattern of MIDI notes that correspond to sampled hits. In your sequencer this may be on a grid, dedicated drum pattern editor or piano roll editor. You can use loops or MIDI or both. It's common in Hip Hop, as well as other forms of electronica, to have more than one drum loop playing at once. As long as they work together and enhance the groove, its fine. Hip Hop artists have been very creative with drum tracks and our ears are accustomed to great variance with unusual timing offsets. Drums in hip hop are allowed to go places sonically that other genres will not.
2. A BasslineYou can find basslines in audio form already made out for you, but it is often better to use MIDI, given you have some decent bass samples, a good soft synth for bass or a hardware synth with decent analog emulations. Why use MIDI? Bass audio loops do not transpose easily and may leave warbly audio artifacts when you do. An analog or digital synthesizer, however, can create a fresh low waveform in real time. Good bass sounds for hip hop come from a variety of synthesizers. Old analog Mono synths and their software and hardware emulations are the first place to go. Basslines are rarely complex in typical hip hop, but are thick and low and usually have a sub-bass element, brought out by filtering and overcompression. Many, though not all, classic HH basses rely on a low pass filter with resonance, which is the most standard filter found in analog synthesis. This kind of filter removes the high frequencies and fattens the low end. That gives you a muffy, puffed up bottom yet allows the vocals to pass right over in the mix, keeping them clear and distinct. Some HH basses emphasize the high frequencies rather than the low, leaving the kick drum to carry the low end entirely. And of course a real bass can be used as well. Keep it simple, repeatable.
3. Supporting OrchestrationWhile the term "orchestration" may sound complex, it is really a simple concept. To orchestrate is to select instruments that "go together". Hip Hop and rap began with orchestration that was sparse and often minimalist. Instruments are chosen often more for their impact on the groove than for their melodic capabilities. How do you know what instruments to select? You do it by trial and error basically. But I find it helpful to use a "metaphor" of other ensembles when coming up with my own orchestrations. For instance, using an RnB metaphor, you might add a smooth electric piano, funked up jazz guitar strums, some nasty horn hits, congas, maybe a vibraphone. You visualize the old RnB band in your mind and use that vision as the metaphor for deciding your orchestration. A "symphonic" metaphor may have you bring in heavy string sections, gongs, timpani, orchestral percussion, glockenspiels. A "downtown session" metaphor might include studio brass, clean guitars, standup bass. A "club" metaphor might have a drunken crowd and musicians that play sloppily. Ask yourself: Who is in this band? What are they thinking? Where are they playing? In a club, on the street, India, or in your homies basement? 4. Dubs and snipsHip hop and rap arose when sampling took off around 1986. With sampling, there was finally an easy way rip audio material off of vinyl (and CDs), which is exactly what the early artists did. Drum beats, record scratches and surface noise, string, brass and full orchestra hits, sax riffs, guitar chords, electric piano chords were sampled as "one shots", a term popularized by Akai, were laid out on the keyboard and put right in the midi pattern with the kick, snare, hats and other drum hits. Today you can buy royalty free sample sets that give you all the dubs and snips you want, though people are still going to capture snips from the records of the past to get that subliminal recognition. Today's audio editing and multi channel samplers allow separate channels and separate effects for dubs and snips. Since audio was added to our sequencers we can now drag samples straight to an audio track and give each its own custom treatment with plugins. This has made the often hard work of editing samples to a rather easy process. Dubs and snips of audio dramatically add character, time and space to the composition, just like flipping through a collection of old photographs. Its a quick abstract reference to another time and place, that ideally fits with your metaphor.
Tools of the Trade: Samplers, Synths and Software instrumentsHardware samplers have been making Hip Hop beats since the beginning. Those outfitted with "pads", like the MPC and MV8000, are convenient to use. However, software samplers, like Kontakt 2, Battery, Halion, Gigastudio are just as good and can offer more flexibility if your computer is strong enough to run one inside a sequencer. You can use a control pad surface like the Akai MPD16 to give you some hardware control over your software. Hardware or software synthesizers can be used for constructing basslines and other elements of orchestration. Having a variety of sound sources is ideal. Vintage synths, in real or emulated form, are great resources. In addition to the obviously needed analog synths, old FM synths like the DX7 and its offspring, cheap Casios, and other digital synths can work well for hip hop elements. Some artists like to use dinky sounding cheap synths for short little blippy sounds. However, not everything can be lo-fi. It pays to have a modern beautiful sounding sample library for strings, brass and other instruments that you want to put out there front and center. A workstation quality synth like a Fantom or Motif can do many of these quality sampled sounds. Perhaps an underestimated synth for hip hop is the Alesis Fusion.
Assembling and Arranging the BeatAssembling the beat refers to the process creating tracks and filling in the orchestration, while Arranging the beat refers to how these tracks change over time from verse to chorus from the start to the end of the song. Assembling the Basic Beat, step by step
At this point you have the basic beat. It should look something like the pic at the top of the page.
Arranging the BeatThe "arrangement" of a song is the fitting together of verses, choruses, breaks, intros and endings. The HH beat is no different. While it can be as simple as a single 4 bar drum pattern repeated forever, we are going to assume, for this article, that you want to go all the way. Take a look at the picture below. You can see where I copied and pasted sequences, and at which point of the beat I added and subtracted parts. Again, this is just a guide, not all songs work this way. You make these decisions based on what you feel the song needs as it plays. As you refine the beat in subsequent passes, you ask yourself: Is that part too long? to short? does it need something else? what would make it really cool?
The full beat is arranged into form, with a 4 bar intro and fade at the end. All I have to do is mix and add vocals for a full hip hop production.
There is some freedom when arranging hip hop, but its not a wide open universe. You can shrink parts to 4, even 2 bars for effect, but the main body of the vocal should be in an 8-16 bar verse, otherwise the listener can get lost. You can also make the first verse 8 bars and the second 16. Sometimes a shorter 8 bar verse can keep things moving where 16 would make eyes roll with ensuing boredom. Heh, if you are bored listening to it you can bet your last dollar your audience will not be listening at all. As in rock, pop, jazz and other forms, as you transition from verse to chorus there should be some fill action on the drums, perhaps a dub or snip added, as the listener needs these signposts to follow the song.
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