Ever since I first touched a piece of studio equipment in the 90's, I was fascinated with the process of making music. I read everything I could about studio recording in magazines and books, where all the techniques were laid out right there in black and white on paper. I read about how to overdub,...
There's been an explosion of enormous proportions in the last few years, and it all has to do with Hip Hop beats. It used to always be about the rappers and deejays, but now it's the producer that is at the forefront and taking center stage. The problem is that a lot of the beats being pumped out re...
I'm assuming you dig for your samples. Scratch that - I'm assuming you sample. Well if you do, then that means you spend lots of time looking for the perfect drum break for your next beat. There are tons of breaks out there, and many of them have been snatched up over the years either by famous Hip ...
Success comes in all shapes and forms. Most people tend to associate money with success, and while that may very well be a good fit, it's not the only type of success there is. If you're hitting the studio on a regular basis and you're working really hard on your beats, hoping to blow up and get som...
I have a challenge for you: organize your samples. I know it's a tedious task because no one wants to have to sort anything, but by organizing your files, guess what will happen? You'll work better! Too often we're used to taking a sample from whichever source, such as a vinyl record, or just an MP3...
When producing music, it can become quite repetitive given that we're mostly working with loops. Maybe by working this way, we've grown accustomed to doing things over and over and not realizing that it could be hurting our productions. There are many different ways that you can change things up ...
Within Rap music, drums have always been at the forefront for both producers and fans of the genre. Everyone knows that without a solid drum track, a Rap song will not hold as much weight or it might just be terrible altogether. What a lot of people fail to realize is that the bassline is just as im...
The goal here is to show you the fundamentals of what each knob on a standard compressor does and how it relates to applying it to your music. Compression is mainly for controlling uncompressed recordings. Most of the music that we use in our genre requires little to no compression at all. In hip ho...
In the past we've seen a lot of different articles and videos explaining what compression is and how it works. This will be different. My goal is to show you how to understand what basic compression does. The basic principles of compression is not that complicated and it's one of the single most imp...
The main difference between "Speakers" and "Monitors" is that one tries to provide you with the best possible sound and the other tries to provide the most accurate sound. At a glance, you would think that the best way to find the difference would be in their frequency responses. This is so far from...
The construction of drums could either be a simple or complex process. You obviously have your own way of doing things, but with the tips provided in this article, you may walk away with learning a few new tricks. The first thing that should be done is to come up with an idea for your drums.
