Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Creating Good Hip Hop Beats

By Mary Anderson

If you wish to create beats that people will remember, you are going to have to up your game a little. Everyone and their little brother's little brother wants to make beats these days. It's the cool thing to do - but for some reason these same people don't want to take piano lessons.

If you walked into a recording studio you would probably locate a few keyboards and synthesizers. Unless we're talking about The Roots here, almost everything used to make hip hop is digital. The drum machines will be inside the synthesizer. The violin and organ sounds will be inside that synthesizer too. What won't be inside that synthesizer is piano lessons.

You could definitely have plenty of fun playing around on those fancy, costly studio keyboards. But unless you understand how to put songs together, sequence the parts of your tracks, and how to even play a chord you're always going to run in to the same brick wall that limits your creativity.

I know you want to be the next Pharrell, and that's cool. But he studied music and learned how to play different instruments and write songs to get where he is today. All of the well known music has built upon itself which is the main reason why hip hop began sampling old jazz and soul records to begin with. Go back and listen to the old school. Listen to the dudes who probably started playing in church because their whole family played in church. Those same people grew up to write and recorded amazing soul and funk music. That's how you will become the next great producer. Begin from the start and learn your way from the floor up.

Dust off your parents' (and even your grandparents') old records and listen to - better yet STUDY - some James Brown, Little Richard, Al Green, Sly Stone, Blue Note and Verve Jazz records, Herbie Hancock, and a million others that have experience and skill to pass on to you. If you desire to grow into a true hip hop producer you must stop limiting yourself to just hip hop and really listen to where it came from so you could see where it is going.

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