Tweaking Hip Hop
Drum Sounds

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Hip Hop series page 1   2   3

The Basics of the Hip Hop Drum Kit 

Drum sounds used in hip hop cover a huge spectrum.  Hip Hop has a wider universe of drum sounds than any other genre of music, from squeaky clean studio quality kits to total train wrecks of effects.  Drum sounds may be lifted from records, may be from your sample collection or may be synthesized.  You can even record a real drum kit!  Or any combination.

Waveform of a typical HH kik

• Kick drum sounds.  Probably most characteristic of Hip hop is a kick drum with strong sub bass qualities.  There are many ways to create these, but perhaps the best way is through synthesis.  Many classic hip hop "kits" are derived from the Roland 808 sand 909 drum machines, which used analog waveforms coupled with lo bit samples through filters to make most of the sounds. 
  
  The typical sub kick is constructed from scratch as follows:  A low, short sine wave is put through a fast pitch envelope that rapidly drops the note of the sine wave by an octave or two.  This happens so fast you don't really hear the pitch dropping, but an attack followed by a thud.  Processing that helps get more lowness is to put a high pass filter (the opposite of what you might think) and set it to around 50-100 HZ and turn the resonance up high.  This gives a massive boost right at the cutoff, but leaves enough definition in the upper frequencies to give a sense of a clean attack.  It also helps remove some of the sub bass that is not musically useful under 50 Hz, but keeps the sub bass you feel and hear.  If its too peaky, cut the resonance, but if it get wimpy when you do that, consider adding compression or limiting. 
  
  To get the kind of low sustained kicks that sound like a musical bass note you can put a long release time on the compressor or limiter and push the threshold way down, to the point of abuse. The Waves L1 is perfect for this task.  This essentially squashes the volume against the ceiling.  The release on the compressor or limiter can make the kick tight or flabby.  Your artistic vision decides.
   
• Snare sounds.  Choosing the snare is typically based on the metaphor of orchestration.  Clean, distorted, full, or heavily filtered and compressed, all are fair game.  Often enough, mid range frequencies are enhanced though and the "bright" frequencies around 4kHz are left alone.  The high frequencies may be boosted to make the snare "fizzy".  Electronic 808/909 snares are often modified with eq, or real snare drum hits are compressed to bring out more grit and nastiness then downsampled, eq'd and recompressed for a classic low-fi snare. The snare is often understated, though there are no real rules here, other than staying out of the way of the vocals.  Unlike in pop music, the snare does not have to be centered.  Nor does it have to be dominant. 
   
• Hats.  Again the metaphor may determine the hats.  From full bodied heavy sticked hits, to tinny electronic noise bursts with the high frequencies boosted and the lower frequencies rolled off.  Hats are usually grooved on 16th notes, but not every 16th note, which would give it an electronica flavor
   
• Claps.  The original 808/909 handclaps never sounded like real handclaps and in most hip hop productions the handclaps are deliberately artificial.  Samplists who make kits for electronica and club music have long been tweaking the claps and the Hip Hop artists were quick to steal their methods. You will often hear 3 or 4 handclap samples together.  These make be compressed, equalized, reversed, use time stretching, raised or lowered in pitch and often have reverb and delay added in generous amounts.   In Hip Hop the claps are staged much like a snare is in rock and pop music.  It usually comes down on a quarter note and may flam up at the end of a 16 or 8 bar pattern.

Tweaking Tools of the Trade: audio editors

Slicers: Intakt by Native Instruments also can do wild things with audio loops.  It will quickly slice and map a loop and allows you to edit each slice.   Recycle is also for dissecting audio loops into slices which can be mapped to a soft sampler's keyboard and effected as an individual sample.  However, unless you have a specific reason for using Recycle, like importing samples into Logic's EXS sampler, or into Stylus RMX, etc., Intakt will give you more power.  Editors: Sony's Sound Forge and Steinberg's Wavelab works well with editing audio on PCs.  On the Mac there is Bias Peak and Apple's Soundtrack pro.  Battery II allows for some basic editing to individual drums without opening an editor. 

Concluding for now

I hope I have given you some worthwhile information and insight into creating hip hop beats.  I wish you the best in your artistic endeavors.

I am, Tweaked

Feb 2008 Revised

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