It’s been a few days, yeah I know. Been busy with alot of ish. Here’s when I tell you I’ve been working on some music. I’VE BEEN WORKING ON SOME MUSIC. I don’t bang out tracks everyday. I have to be in the right mood. If not, I don’t believe in it or feel it. I’ve been listening to alot of new artists that I never thought I’d like that much considering the commercialism of hip hop. One artist I have’nt been able to stop listening to is Papoose. I have a feeling this dude is gonna break into the mainstream in a firery storm. He credits his influences as Big Daddy Kane and Rakim. You know he’s the real ish if he’s giving those cats as his influences. Stylin on Ya is such a hard track. I listen to it daily now. Even though he’s representing the new school of hip hop, you can tell his roots are in the classics.

So with that being said, I have some new inspiration in my heart. I will finish two tracks this weekend and post them.

Later,

Every video Boon Doc has on YouTube is golden. I can’t believe he’s not fully blown up yet. The most minimal setup produces some of the best sample based hip hop beats. He’s really inspired me when I’ve had creative blocks. I suggest you watch the whole thing.

Oh remember to stop the track in the right nav bar or the sound will clash with the video.

I can’t stress how important layering your drum samples when building your tracks. Some tracks I produce have three kicks, three snares and maybe two hats going on. The reason for this? Some drums lack certain frequencies and can be filled out with other samples that support those lacking freqeuncies. Beat making starts with your drums, so you have to make sure they’re tight before building on top of them.

First make sure not to have all your samples at full volume. There’s a fine balance to mixing them. A good blend of kicks that works well for me is to have an 808 kick on one pad with a low pass filter on it. This gives you a really smooth bottom. Then on another pad I’ll have two kicks, one that has good bottom/midrange balance, and one that has a snappy top end and some air in it. Tweak the volume and eq’s to your taste. Now you might think, why does my kick need high end? This helps it become more pronounced and cut through the mix. You’d be suprised how much this helps your kick sit in the mix.

For snares I’ll do the same thing. I’ll find a few that compliment each other and them mix until they sound right to me. This is a very common technique, but I think few producers fully utilize this. I love breaks to death, but I always have to layer some drums on top to get the track pounding.

Now don’t get crazy with EQ, remember, always look to cut freqeuncies than boost them. You should have a full sounding drum track with each drum being clear and defined, not muddy or muffled.

I know many of you only chop your samples inside your MPC. I’ve done this for a while and I’ve never been completely happy with the results. The samples never seem as clean on the tail end as they do when chopping in Recycle. I’ve started using Recycle more and transferring back and fourth the MPC via the usb connection.

For those of you that have never used Recycle, it’s a stand alone program from Propellerheads (makers of Reason and other great software) that allows you to chop or slice your samples in a way that retains the original pitch while being able to change tempo. This takes some processing power to stretch the sample out while maintaining the quality of the sound. This is where I think the MPC falls short. I’ve taken up tempo drum breaks and slowed them down almost to a half time tempo while retaining a clean sounding loop. Recycle does this by adding a slight amount of reversed delay on the very end of each slice which fills in the gaps that normally would be present when chopping on the MPC. To get the same result in the  MPC, you’d have to chop and then time stretch which takes several times to get it right.

From a workflow point of view, I like getting things done quick to keep the creative process flowing. I don’t like to be hung up on tweaking. There are a lot of other features in Recycle I haven’t even begun to use yet, but for beat making and chopping, this had made my life a lot easier.

Producers are always on the look out to add some new sounds to their drum libraries. Here’s a little project that is pretty easy to do and you can get new and original samples from. This works best if you have a buddy who plays the drums, but even doing this solo with no drumming experience can give decent results.

Find an affordable studio or rehearsal space with a decent sound room and drum kit (in nyc where I live they’re a dime a dozen).  Book a few hours. Bring your laptop if you have one, or have the studio set you up to record on their gear. Experiment with tuning and placement, have your mics on the kick snare and hi hat. Start recording and play each drum one by one at different velocities. Play until you think you have what you need.

There you go. If you have some experience under your belt, you can try different mic’ing techniques, turning some gain up on the mic pre’s and compressing a little to get a grittier sound.

Layer the sound under some of your favorite drum kits to add some flavor, or… let them sit on their own for your own personalized kit.