Hip Hop Rap

Hip Hop Rap, Make better hip hop beats and rap beats with these tips

Hip Hop Rap app will help you make better hip hop beats and rap beats with these tips

On a casual listen, tracks by Jay-Z, Tupac, or KRS-One might seem simple in construction – charismatic rhymes riding a driving, repeating drum groove. But if you’ve ever tried building hip hop beats on your own from the ground up, you probably already know that producing something propulsive, gutsy, fresh, and original is not such a simple science – so where do you begin?

Hip-hop tracks are extremely diverse, but they're generally characterised by repetitive beats with plenty of bottom-end and rapping. Their extreme levels of sub bass provided the blueprint for the mixdown style of rave music and, more recently, drum 'n' bass and dubstep.

We've got tips that will help you to improve both the instrumental and vocal elements of your hip-hop productions (including advice on finding an MC), whether you're just starting out or a seasoned beat maker.

I’ve had mildly-spirited conversations with snooty audio engineers who believe that rap is beneath them, as they claim “Pfft, it’s just a two-track and a vocal. Anyone could do that.” What they ignore are the realities presented by the genre.

Although there are scenarios in which the music is just a two-track stereo mix, the music is often set up as separate multitrack files to include tons of tracks. Plus, “a vocal”? No, no, no. A cornucopia of vocals is more like it.

Aside from the truth about track count, there’s a certain creative freedom that comes with mixing rap and hip-hop; it’s both liberating and challenging. What’s liberating is the opportunity to do creative things that would be laughably inappropriate for many other genres. For example, pitch-dropped vocals can work great in rap, but if you did that in folk rock, the artist would rightly question your sanity.

What’s especially challenging is successfully tapping into your creativity to make a mix that isn’t just balanced, but also interesting. To help with your pursuit of both, I’d like to share eight tips that you can toss in your grab bag of sonic treats for mixing rap and hip-hop.

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.

Mixing Hip-Hop is something I write about/teach/do pretty often.

This article is going to be a centerpiece for everything else. It’s intended for folks who have engineered other styles of music but are new to Hip-Hop, as well as producers who are new to mixing.

One of the greatest challenges in mixing is simply knowing where to start. The process would be much easier having a blueprint of goals for the mix. So, here’s a blueprint of some goals.

Now, disclaimer: music is subjective, living, breathing, birthed from nothing short of pure creativity. In other words, these aren’t hard and fast rules. Rather, generalities I’ve gathered over the years of mixing a lot of Hip-Hop records.

There are plenty of tutorials about music production that are very good, but sometimes it's best to read about something aimed more at Hip Hop. In this article, I offer 5 tips that you can start using in your own productions, from sampling, to using filters, and more. Whether you're making beats or working on a full fledged production, these tips are sure to help you out. Here we go...