Basic Production Tips

1. Use mixer groups.
If your sequencer allows, create a separate group bus for both the Beat and the Vocals. All the instrumental tracks should feed into the Beat Group. All the Vocal tracks should feed into the Vocal Group. Doing this allows for a more accurate setting of the important balance between the vocal and the beat. In HH, the vocal must always stay clearly on top of the beat, unlike rock, where it often blends into the mix.

2. Track Isolation
If you isolate elements on their own track, things will sound better and allow you a more creative range of effects, For example, if all the drums are on one track, if you add an effect, all the drums will sound out the effect, often leaving you with junk. But if you put all the snares on one track you can apply a more lavish effect, tailored just to the snare. A slap back echo might sound good on a snare track but on the whole kit, its going to be too busy.

3. Tempo Considerations
Hip Hop music is typically done at slow tempos. Of course there is often variation, but a good tempo as one begins to build tracks is around 80-90. Set the tempo according to your mood. One advantage to using MIDI samplers is that tempo is infinitely adjustable until you add the vocals. You could write the drum patterns at 50 BPM which is slow enough that anyone's hands can make beats of great intricacy. Once done, speed it up to the project tempo.

4. Groove considerations
Unless the elements of your song fit into a sonically pleasing groove, your stuff is not going to "hit" properly. Masters of hip hop beats are masters of groove, and can lay down a drum pattern with no correction. Most of us have not perfected this skill, so we use quantize templates to achieve the right amount of groove and apply it to our tracks. You might note that your sequencer already has built in grooves that can be applied to any midi track. Grooves that work well with hip hop are based on 16th notes with a swing value in the range of 57-83%. 50% is straight 16th notes. 100% pushes the 16th note to the next 8th note. 0% pushes the 16th note the the previous 8th note. As you pass 57% you will hear the groove start to relax and as you reach around 70% you are in classic hip hop/rap territory.

Another method of getting a hip hop groove: Quantize the kick drums on a 24th note quantize divisor and the rest on 4th, 8th and 16th notes. Why 24ths? There are 6 values between quarter notes on a 24th note grid. They all groove in a nice way when offset against claps on 2 and 4. Try to avoid putting a kick on 2 or 4.

Try this groovy tip.
Start a drum pattern with claps on 2 and 4 and a kick at 1 and 3. That is standard 4/4.
Now, set the grid to 24 and add 1 more kick on the grid, anywhere!
Press play and listen. Move it till you like what you hear.
Then add a 4th kick and move that around. In the process you will hear many different hip hop groove possibilities.

5. Microscopic editing.
a. MIDI. Your sequencer has an offset parameter. This moves all the notes you highlight by midi ticks, the smallest possible note division the sequencer is capable of. If you tried the above tip, now grab all the kick drums except the ones on 1 and 3 and offset them by a few ticks in either direction. Listen carefully for a head nodding groove. Copy the drum sequencer to a groove template (read the manual). Apply it to the bass. Mind over groove. You are there.
b. Audio If you put a common audio loop on an audio track in the sequencer and slice it into parts, you can apply destructive editing to each part in an audio editor. You can move these "regions" around, delete some, stutter others, and if the sequencer allows, re-groove the hits and save to a new audio file. For those who are into making esoteric beats, you can borrow elements from one audio loop and precisely place it in another with simple copy and paste commands.


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