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Hollywood Cliches: How to Write Comedic Music

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Learn how to create hard-hitting trap bangers in 6 steps. We discuss musical composition, sample selection, 808 and percussion processing and the different FX you can use.
By Charles Hoffman
Genres are defined by a shared set of conventions, which most people can identify, but aren't necessarily capable of articulating. What makes hip-hop music hip-hop? What about country music? This guide chisels away at a variety of trap songs to provide a 6-step trap beat formula that you can use to write trap beats at lightning speed.

1. Use a Repetitive Melody Loop

Step one to becoming the Mozart of trap is to find a 2 to 4 bar melody loop and repeat it throughout your song. When choosing a loop, avoid picking a melody that's hard to follow along with; simplicity is king.

In "Keanu Reeves" by Logic, the same melody repeats itself multiple times throughout the song, but it's transposed up/down at various points in time to avoid sounding "stale."

Keep in mind that you'll be adding other elements to your beat, so the melody should be catchy, but it doesn't need to carry the entire weight of the song. It's easy to over-produce a beat when you don't have vocals filling space in your mix, so anticipate the addition of vocals and arrange your song accordingly.

When it comes to the sound design of the melody you select, choose a sound that won't conflict with vocals in the 1-5 kHz range; this is where the intelligibility of vocals comes from, so it's best to avoid frequency masking if possible.

If there is some unwanted frequency overlap, use an EQ like the F6 Floating-Band Dynamic EQ to carve out space in the melody for your vocals. To do this, place the F6 on your melody track, and route the vocal to the F6 as an external sidechain.

The great thing about the F6 is that you can toggle the SC Source of bands individually to EXT. This means that if you only want the vocals to affect a band centered between 1-5 kHz, then you can do so.

2. Choose the Right Kick and Snare

Trap beats usually make use of punchy kicks and dry, heavily compressed snares. You can hear both of these characteristic sounds in the track "Death By Dishonor (w/ Ghostemane x Shakewell x Erick The Architect)" by Pouya.

The reason that trap kicks are often short and punchy, as opposed to long and dense, is that they're regularly layered with 808s; the kick is used for its attack, and the 808 is used for its decay. Apply a fade to the beginning of your 808s to allow your kick to come through, or use a sidechain compressor like the C6 Multiband Compressor only to attenuate conflicting low-end frequencies.

Check the phase correlation of your kick and 808 when you layer them together using InPhase. When the two samples are in-phase with one another, they will sound more powerful and impactful when they playback through your speakers than if they are out of phase with one another.

You may have noticed that the snare in Pouya's song sounds like a "splat" that spans the entire width of the song's stereo image; this takes a bit of a detour from the common punchy, center-panned snare that you hear in most other genres.

The unique widespread snare effect can be achieved with the use of a delay like Doubler and a limiter like the L2 Ultramaximizer. Enable voice 1 and 2 in Doubler, pan them hard left and right, and then delay voice 1 by around 20 ms and voice 2 by around 40 ms.

Balance the level of the Direct signal with the level of voice 1 and 2 so that they sound evenly distributed across the width of the track's stereo field. To finish this effect off, run the widespread snare through the L2 to glue the three snare signals together.

3. Distort Your 808s With Saturation

Nothing screams "trap" like an 808 that makes you grit your teeth. "Sumo" by Denzel Curry contains a mean 808 that acts as the main driving force behind the entire track. Seriously, listen to how raw this thing is:

There's a fine line between "dirty" and "muddy" when it comes to processing 808s. Typically, you want the extreme low-end of your 808 to remain pure and non-distorted, and the mid to top-end of your 808 obliterated.

You can process the low-end and top-end of your 808 independent of one another using multiband saturation. It's easy to apply custom multiband processing using a multiband audio effect like the C4 Multiband Compressor.

Duplicate the track you plan to apply processing to; label one of these tracks "Top-End" and the other "Low-End." Place the C4 Multiband Compressor onto the "Low-End" track, set the low-frequency crossover to 100 Hz, and solo the Low band; make sure the Range value for this band is set to zero so that no gain reduction is applied.

Place a different C4 Multiband Compressor on the "Top-End" track, set the low-frequency crossover to 100 Hz, and then solo the low-mid, mid, and high bands; ensure that the Range value for all of these bands is set to zero as well.

What you've done is split the frequency range of your 808 in half at 100 Hz. You can now apply saturation to the top-end of your 808 without affecting frequency content below 100 Hz.

Apply a saturator like J37 Tape after the C4 Multiband Compressor on the "Top-End" track for a mild distortion effect, or go all out and run the top-end of your 808 through Berzerk or MDMX Overdrive. Another option is to insert MultiMod Rack on the original 808 track and simply distort the mid and top-end bands.

4. Use Hi-Hat Rolls to Progress Your Beat

Hi-hats rolls are another defining characteristic of trap beats; they help carry the rhythm of your beat and can deliver the "head bob" that every beatmaker is after. Listen to the song "Stir Fry" by Migos and pay attention to how the hi-hats are arranged in a way that grabs your attention on the "and" of beat two and holds onto it until you almost face-plant into beat three.

Another fun and creative arrangement technique you can use is called a polyrhythm; this is where you mix together two rhythms from different time signatures. For example, it's possible to write a song in 4/4 time, but add elements to it that play in 3/4 time. Hi-hats tend to overlay with 4/4 beats in 3/4 time exceptionally well. You don't need to put all of your hi-hats in 3/4 time, but changing their time signature here or there can create an exciting switch up and draw attention to them.

If your hi-hat patterns feel stale, consider using a plugin like MetaFilter or Brauer Motion to pump some movement and life into them. The LFO found in MetaFilter can apply sinusoidal filter effects to your hi-hats that evolve over time, perfect for ethereal tracks.

Alternatively, you can use the step sequencer MetaFilter provides to affect every other hi-hat sample and create the illusion that multiple different hi-hat samples are being played back.

Static hi-hats can become boring, which is where Brauer Motion steps in. Brauer Motion lets you modulate the position of your hi-hats along different stereo field paths using four different LFO shapes. If you want to create hi-hats that rhythmically sweep through your mix, Brauer Motion is the tool to use.

5. Use Background Pads to Set the Vibe

Sometimes you might be feeling a little wild and decide that your trap beat should have more than just a melody and some drums. In that case, you can use background pads to fill in space and interact musically with your main melody loop. Background pads can completely change the vibe of a beat, and since they act as harmony elements, they can infuse your beat with various types of emotion.

In the following beat that I made called "7 Sins," listen to how the swelling background pads create an eerie feeling that permeates throughout the track. They lay the groundwork for the rest of the beat, which is actually quite simple, but effective nonetheless.

The Flow Motion FM Synth uses FM and subtractive synthesis to generate sounds and works exceptionally well for creating pads. This synth comes with 1,000+ built-in presets that you can take modify and make your own.

One of my favorite pad processing techniques involves drowning a sustained sound in reverb with Abbey Road Chambers, and then heavily compressing it, using around a 4:1 ratio on the CLA-76. A moderate attack and release time of four on the CLA-76 should work for this purpose. Print the pad to audio and then apply fades where necessary to control the monstrously thick sound.

I once received a great tip regarding setting the levels of pads: you want to feel pads, but not hear them. Obviously, you can set the level of your pads however you want, but if you've only added them to your beat for the vibe they bring to the table, then you can actually get away with setting their level quite low; this will provide more space for the main elements in your beat, like the melody loop and vocals.

6. Use Chants and Ad-Libs to Fill Space

Chants and ad-libs can help fill space in your tracks, pump them up, and create variation. Lil Pump is an artist that uses tons of ad-libs in his tracks, and whether you love him or hate him, his songwriting formula works. The following track by Smokepurpp that Lil Pump is featured on has been viewed millions of times, so he must be doing something right.

If you aren't familiar with what ad-libs are, they're the weird vocal one-shots that make absolutely no sense in the background of Smokepurpp's track. The next time you record a rapper, make sure to record a handful of ad-lib-only takes during your recording session so that you have the option to add them to your beat later on. Consider requesting additional ad libs that you can use in other projects as well.

It's possible to repurpose vocal chants and ad-libs that you already have in your sample library by applying creative processing to them. " 10 Creative FX Tips You Can Use Right Now " covers vocal effects like flanging, phasing, chorusing, tremolo, vibrato, vocoding, and more. Read the full article for an in-depth look at how you can make the most of your fledgling chant and ad-lib libraries.

Conclusion

Trap beats aren't necessarily the most musically complex, but they're accessible and fun to create. By making use of melody loops, appropriate sample selection, 808 saturation, hi-hat rolls, background pads, and chants/ad-libs, you're well on your way to producing hard-hitting trap bangers.

Want more on hip-hop production? Learn how to master hip-hop tracks with one plugin.

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How to Make Trap Beats: The 6-Step Formula | Waves

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Learn how to create hard-hitting trap bangers in 6 steps. We discuss musical composition, sample selection, 808 and percussion processing and the different FX you can use. By Charles Hoffman Genres are defined by a shared set of conventions, which most people can identify, but aren't necessarily capable of articulating.

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808 Bass Tips For Perfect Low End [Free Preset]

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808 Beat Production: Trap 808 Bass Lines - Part 1

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We may be in the anyone can make a hip hop beat on GarageBand age, but if you want to earn a spot in the hip hop hall of fame, there are a few things to consider to up your game and get attention for the right reasons.

Whether you're making your first beat or looking to stylise your sonic signature, this curation of the 5 top tips when producing hip hop music will help you make those aural epiphanies a reality.

1. Time for a Reality Check

Before we get into how to arrange and produce hip hop, we will go into the number one issue we see in the 2022 hip hop industry; new hip hop artists and producers trying to run before they can walk. There is no quick fix to becoming a producer pro overnight; no tweaks that can turn you into Dr Dre in a beat; no hack that can take you up the billboard charts.

All hip hop producers new to the art will need an unrelenting will to learn and the time to home in on their craft. Some rappers can create a track in as little as an hour; with others, it could take months; if you are new to production, we'd advise you to make record speed the last of your priorities.

Just because you can instantly upload your music to SoundCloud and submit your music to hip hop blogs, that doesn't mean that you should jump the gun. Always go back to your track with a fresh mind several times. When listening to your mixes, think critically. Is there some originality in there? Is there room for improvement? How does it hold up to your favourite hip hop records?

2. Choose the Right Samples

Choosing samples on a whim is one of the biggest mistakes new hip hop producers can make. Having an ear for what fits is one of the most prized skills of talented producers. In the beginning, it will very much be a process of trial and error, but the more you build your sample library and spend time acquainting yourself with the sonic textures within it, the better position you will be in to bring them into your sound. Having a golden sample ear will never happen overnight; it can take years to build exceptional intuition. While developing that desirable skill, build your library of one-shot instrumentals, percussion, hi-hats, kicks, snares, shakers and 808s.

3. Bring the Kicks with the Bassline in the Right Time

One of the most gilded golden rules in hip hop production is never to let the bass and the kick clash; always make them play at different frequencies to each other. If you are new to hip hop production, utilise short kicks with strong sub-bass to reduce the interference. Sidechain compression can help you avoid the bass volume while the kick track is contributing to the original audio. All of the most popular DAWs provide this option; if you aren't acquainted with the process, head to YouTube in search of tutorials.

4. Saturate Your 808s

If you have always wondered how to get your 808s sounding thick and juicy, the trick is saturation. Your 808s should ideally carry a heavy low-end; you can check this by listening through your laptop speakers, which are generally not great at projecting low-end frequencies. If your 808s are sounding weak, you can guarantee that your track will lack energy. To put enough juice in your 808s so they resound regardless of the device listened on, insert saturation on a return channel before sending the original signal through.

5. Keep the Instrumentals Simple

Have you ever noticed how some of the most powerful hip hop tracks from across the decades, including our current one, keep the instrumentals simple and make the vocals the centrepiece? When creating your beats, always leave ample room for vocals to avoid making the mix busy sounding. Once again, this is another fundamental error of many up-and-coming hip hop producers.

Instead of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at your mix; practice making simple beats sound amazing; that means cutting back on drastic changes of melody and anything else that can interrupt the vocal flow. When starting on your instrumentals, all you will need is a solid bass structure, simple drums, and a couple of main sonic elements. If you do your research, you will find that the best hip hop hits only have a few core elements that run through the length of the track.

6. Pay Ode to Your Hip Hop Idols

Copying and assimilation will rarely get freshly emerging hip hop artists and producers anywhere. Yet, by studying the tracks that inspire you, you'll find the building blocks that will help you create a solid foundation for your tracks. Pay particular attention to when every piece of percussion hits, how subtle the changes are, the use of special effect to build tension, and how every instrumental interacts with the other. One of the best ways of building this skill is by trying to create your favourite instrumentals from scratch - for purpose of practice, not your own creation.

7. Get in the Loop with your Melodies

For aspiring hip hop producers without any knowledge of music theory, the prospect of creating beats from scratch can be daunting, at best. If chord progressions and melodies are where you are struggling the most, there is always the option of using royalty-free loops - you can always find ways of making them your own by using unique samples around them. Don't forget that some of history's best hip hop tracks were constructed by chopped up samples from vinyl records. However, it is extremely important to keep copyright law in mind if you're borrowing sounds from other artists and making them your own. One of the best ways to get around this is by using royalty-free samples for peace of mind.

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We may be in the anyone can make a hip hop beat on GarageBand age, but if you want to earn a spot in the hip hop hall of fame, there are a few things to consider to up your game and get attention for the right reasons.

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Whether you're taking your first steps into the world of music production or you consider yourself a seasoned pro who needs a simple refresher, here are our top 5 production tricks that every trap and hip-hop producer needs to know!

#1 Get the Kick and 808 To Play Nice

While many genres feature kick and bass sounds that are distinct from one another, trap and hip-hop producers often combine kicks and basses to create massive, low-frequency instruments, otherwise known as 808s.
After all, we just talked about giving your beats the competitive edge, right?
And what better way to do that than with custom 808s!

To do so, you'll want to get a kick sample with a punchy attack and short decay. You can then stack a sub sound underneath the kick with a slower transient and longer decay. Essentially, the kick fulfills the role of the punch while the sub fulfills the role of the sustain, all without competing.

While you can use a transient designer to adjust the attack and decay of your samples, an easier way to get these two sounds to play nice is with sidechain compression.

The idea here is you place a compressor on the 808 channel and link the sidechain to the kick. This way, every time the kick hits, the level of the 808 drops down for a split second to give the kick room to breathe. A free snippet from our Full Beginner Course show you How To Sidechain .

PRO TIP: Make sure to toggle your attack and release settings as fast as possible so that this effect is barely noticeable when the rest of the track is playing, though not so fast that you're creating unwanted distortion.

#2 Use Turnarounds

A "turnaround" is a fancy term that we use in place of "transition" when it comes to music. Turnarounds can help keep our beats moving forward, transitioning from a verse to a hook or vice versa.

For example, let's take a look at the drop at 1:32 in " " by Diplo and Zed's Dead. You'll notice that rather than keeping the beat going through the entire typical four or eight-count, they use a drum fill coupled with an aerospace-like effect to get us into the breakdown.

PRO TIP: Sometimes, using silence as a turnaround is a great way to surprise the listener and add depth to your track.

#3 Fill Dead Space With Pads

So many trap and hip-hop producers focus on three things:

Unfortunately, those same trap and hip-hop producers often forget about the space between those elements. Pads are excellent musical tools for creating ambiance and filling out space without life otherwise.

Pads also create depth, giving you a mix that feels like it's moving from front to back, rather than sitting in a single, dimensionless space.

Note that pads should not take away or distract from the three main elements of a great beat but should support the three, acting as a floating nebula in which the beat lives.

PRO TIP: Does your pad sound ? If so, spice it up with some production techniques! One of our favorites is using an auto-panner (e.g. Fruity PanOMatic) so that your pads move back and forth between your speakers.

#4 Pitching Your Snare Fills

One signature trap production technique involves pitching your 808 snare rolls to create unique fills.

To get started, load up your 808 snare sample and your piano roll, which should be routed to your snare. Next, find the root note of the snare sample (typically middle C). Then, start programming the pattern and the roll that you're after.

Once you have your pattern and rolls in place, move down to your "Control" section. Click "Control" and select "Fine Pitch." From there, click 'P' to pull up your pencil tool. From here, you can draw in pitch rises and falls at the ends of phrases to make your snare rolls more interesting!

PRO TIP: It's good to make use of the Velocity

settings of each snare in the "Control" section

as well, as this helps add a

#5 Take Advantage of Automation

The ability to slowly adjust various parameters in your compressors, EQs, faders, and reverb plugins over time is what truly separates seasoned producers from amateurs.

You might consider automating the volume of an effect so that it rises sharply before the hook hits or automating reverb sends so only the snares on the 2 + 4 beats get drenched.

Should Kick Be Lower Than 808?

While the answer to this question depends completely on the mix in question and your personal preference, it is typically a good idea to have your kick slightly louder than your sub-laden 808. In doing so, you'll avoid covering up the necessary punch that you want to get from your kick.

PRO TIP: If you can't quite seem to get the level balance for your kick and 808 right, use a VU meter! (e.g FL Stock WaveCandy) Place a VU meter on your 808 track and get the reading. Next, place another VU meter on your kick track and adjust the volume of your kick until the reading is above the one you got from your 808. You can also achieve similar result by marking 808 channel, reading the "Current" mixer channel volume and then marking Kick and repeat the process.

What Is the Best Scale for Trap Music?

While trap music comes in many forms, from Ghostmane to Lil Yachty, more often than not, the most common scales used in trap music include the minor scale and the harmonic minor scale.

Luckily, FL Studio has a feature where you can choose a scale, and the DAW will highlight the notes found in that scale. This way, you don't have to remember what these scales look like! We made a tutorial about scales

How Do You Add Saturation to 808?

While your 808s might sound great on studio monitors or in your car, you might completely lose them when you try and listen to your track on your laptop or through your phone speakers.

This is because your 808s probably the upper harmonics required to cut through on smaller speakers. Luckily, we have tools like saturation that can help.

The saturated track should not be overpowering but just audible enough so that smaller speakers can recreate your 808s when your track gets played on them.

Take Advantage of Automation - Taking Your Trap and Hip-Hop Beats to the Next Level

Trap and hip-hop music has changed drastically over the past decade. Nowadays, it's clear to see that it's exploding with popularity.

As a producer, it's important that you stay up to date with all of the top tips, tricks, and techniques to elevate your production value. Check out our in-depth FL Studio Courses to start putting these tricks and more into practice!

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top 5 production tricks every trap & hip-hop producer should know

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Top 5 Production Tricks Every Trap & Hip-Hop Producer Should Know

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Top 5 Production Tricks Every Trap/Hip-Hop Producer Should Know Modern trap and hip-hop music is filled to the brim with cutting-edge production techniques. With so many trap and hip-hop producers releasing thousands of beats every single day, you need the best tips and techniques to give your beats a competitive edge.

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Essential Features of Hip-Hop Production: Tempo, Instrumentation, Rhythmic Feel and Sonic Density

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Hip-hop is the musical genre that has most successfully merged humanity with the emerging technologies of our digital society. My book Hip-Hop Production: Inside the Beats focuses on the production techniques of recorded hip-hop music, exploring a timeline that includes commercially successful hip-h…

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DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v12i1-2.5410

Keywords:
corpus study, sound, Golden Age hip-hop, music production, empirical musicology

Abstract
The notion of a musical repertoire's "sound" is frequently evoked in journalism and scholarship, but what parameters comprise such a sound? This question is addressed through a statistically-driven corpus analysis of hip-hop music released during the genre's Golden Age era. The first part of the paper presents a methodology for developing, transcribing, and analyzing a corpus of 100 hip-hop tracks released during the Golden Age. Eight categories of aurally salient musical and production parameters are analyzed: tempo, orchestration and texture, harmony, form, vocal and lyric profiles, global and local production effects, vocal doubling and backing, and loudness and compression. The second part of the paper organizes the analysis data into three trend categories: trends of change (parameters that change over time), trends of prevalence (parameters that remain generally constant across the corpus), and trends of similarity (parameters that are similar from song to song). These trends form a generalized model of the Golden Age hip-hop sound which considers both global (the whole corpus) and local (unique songs within the corpus) contexts. By operationalizing "sound" as the sum of musical and production parameters, aspects of popular music that are resistant to traditional music-analytical methods can be considered.

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In Search of the Golden Age Hip-Hop Sound (1986-1996)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v12i1-2.5410 corpus study, sound, Golden Age hip-hop, music production, empirical musicology The notion of a musical repertoire's "sound" is frequently evoked in journalism and scholarship, but what parameters comprise such a sound? This question is addressed through a statistically-driven corpus analysis of hip-hop music released during the genre's Golden Age era.

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The Underwater Sound: Timbre and Beatmaking Process in Hip Hop Production, 1997-2018

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Explore millions of resources from scholarly journals, books, newspapers, videos and more, on the ProQuest Platform.

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He may be the East Coast's biggest name in hip-hop production, but DJ Premier still creates his tracks with an ancient Akai MPC60 and S950 sampler.

It would be hard to overstate DJ Premier's importance for American hip-hop. He's been referred to as "the true essence of hip-hop", the "cornerstone of hip-hop power", and "the king of underground hip-hop". He is said to have "created a benchmark for all the hip-hop producers that have come through since" and has been described as the main hip-hop kingmaker in New York. "MCs of the New York 1990s had one rite of passage above all else - they had to get by DJ Premier to be great," one writer noted.

Premier achieved his iconic status during the '90s through groundbreaking work as producer of classic hip-hop albums by the likes of Jeru the Damaja, NAS, Notorious BIG, Jay-Z, KRS-One and Mos Def, and as the DJ'ing and producing half of the influential duo Gang Starr. Premier, also known as Preem or Premo, has continued to make his mark in the new century. He delivered Gang Starr's The Ownerz album, produced more cutting-edge hip-hop albums for the likes of Snoop Dogg, Pitch Black and Freddie Foxxx, and expanded into the mainstream, producing songs for D'Angelo, Janet Jackson, Cee-Lo and Christina Aguilera. There's even talk of a Premier solo album called A Man Of Few Words, though that's 'on pause' for now.

Today DJ Premier continues to be one hip-hop's most influential producers, with a stature equalled only by his West Coast counterpart Dr Dre. Preem likes to describe himself as one of the few who keep the original, experimental hip-hop flame alive, providing light in the darkness of the commercialised US hip-hop/R&B that's been overwhelming the world's hit parades in recent years. To this end he has founded his own label, called Year Round Records, which aims to develop and promote up-and-coming 'hardcore hip-hop' acts. The producer explained in an interview that "raw NYC hip-hop is my medicine. I'm here to rescue that sound."

DJ Premier tracks tend to be characterised by short sampled loops, perfectly timed scratching, hard-hitting drums, deep bass lines, and lots of weird background sounds, all held together by a slightly behind-the-beat groove. His tracks are frequently described as aggressive, gritty and, indeed, raw, but they also have an impressive and infectious flow and logic.

Premier sounds genuinely pleased when this point is put to him. "Yeah, no doubt," he replies. "It has to do with the fact that I'm coming at it from a musician's point of view. My mother made me play piano. I did it until second grade, when I was about 10. Later I played guitar in church. She was also a concert-goer and I've been brought up with lots of great music. I saw Earth, Wind & Fire in 1978, and the way they constructed their music and harmonies. I saw the Commodores and Lionel Ritchie and Graham Central Station and the Isley Brothers in concert. I saw the Brothers Johnson with Quincy Jones, and Ike & Tina Turner. All that stuff trickled down to make me want to do my beats in a certain way.

"I'm 40 years old, and I was brought up in the era of really pure music, way before rap music even came out and prior to drum machines and programming beats. During my college years I learned to scratch, and we just used all the old records and extended them and rapped over that. The whole analogue thing will always be a major part of my understanding of music. It took me a long time to want to go digital and Pro Tools, because I was against it."

The hip-hop world can be rather unfriendly towards those who display conspicuous musicianship. It also tends to be selective in the kinds of artists and music that it regards as cool. DJ Premier's pride in his musical antecedents and skills, as well as in his boundless musical taste, are therefore particularly noteworthy. "I became a big fan of buying vinyl records and tapes," he says. "Thomas Dolby, Genesis with Phil Collins, Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Talking Heads, Talk Talk, the New Wave scene, punk, James Brown, Chuck Berry, the Jackson Five, BB King, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Ozzy Osbourne, Thomas Dolby, Parliament/Funkadelic - you name it, I had their records or had been to see them in concert."

It's rare to hear all of those names in one breath, but there you have it. Musical eclecticism and open-mindedness, or, put simply, a great love of music, is evidently at the heart of Premier's method and success.

Born in 1966, in Houston, Texas, the young Chris Martin went into DJ'ing during his high-school years, calling himself Waxmaster C. He was encouraged, again, by his mother. "When there was a party and they wanted to borrow my records, my mother made sure that I went too, and I would put the records on. I was fascinated with how records looked, the way they spun and the way the arm dropped automatically onto the record. When jukeboxes played in restaurants I peeked through the side to try to see the actual record playing."

Despite his love of analogue, the young Waxmaster, who in the late '80s changed his name to Premier because he wanted to be the first with everything he did, enthusiastically embraced the first pieces of digital kit that he encountered. "I learned a lot of stuff during my college days, when I was trying to make beats with Yamaha drum machines and stuff like that, but it wasn't sounding like these hip-hop records that were coming out, because I wasn't in New York at the time and did not know what they were using."

Premier moved to New York in the late '80s, where he met fellow up-and-coming hip-hop producer Large Professor, who used an Emu SP1200 drum machine. Preem began using an SP12, and also picked up some of the ins and outs of sampling and sound manipulation from his colleague. "Once I saw how he was filtering, I thought 'I'm going to do that too.' But it wasn't a matter of stealing his style. If you get an idea from somebody else, you have to use it to create your own style. You don't want to just imitate. With these guys I wanted them to love what I was doing without them feeling like I was biting [ copying] their style. This is what it's all about in hip-hop: do not bite, that's the number one rule.

"I've always been trying to create my own style, and when I use a sample, I still think I do it with originality. It's never just a straight rip-off. I obscure samples to the degree that people will go 'Where did you get that?' Even if I played it to the person who made the original sample, I'd like them to go 'Oh man, I like what you did.' I don't like to lift whole songs, like they sometimes do these days. I like to make it mine, in an artistic way. I don't just rip it off and loop it. It has to have substance to it."

DJ Premier's quest for originality bore fruit with Gang Starr. The late '80s have been called 'the Golden Era of Rap', a period during which various groups tried to outdo each other with unusual musical approaches and imaginative rapping. Gang Starr proclaimed their manifesto with the single 'Manifest' from their first album, 1989's No More Mr Nice Guy. It was distinctive not only because of the deadpan rap delivery of MC Guru, but for Premier's use of a sample from bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker.

"All I was trying to do was be different," says Premier. "I did not want us to sound like all the other producers. Everybody was into James Brown at the time, including myself. But again I wanted to have an outlook where everybody would look upon me as original. You had to be a leader, and I thought 'Nobody is tapping into the jazz stuff, so I can go into that world and see if I can put beats together with that type of music.'"

The jazz-meets-hip-hop experiment worked, and put Gang Starr on the map. Their next albums, Step In The Arena (1991), Daily Operation (1992) and Hard To Earn (1994) became hip-hop classics. Around the same time Premier also acquired a stellar profile as a hip-hop producer, creating pioneering albums by some of the hip-hop legends mentioned earlier - Jeru the Damaja, Notorious BIG, Jay-Z and Mos Def - and also by Lord Finesse, DJ Mike Smooth, Big Daddy, and many others. In addition, 1994 saw Preem dipping deeper into the jazz idiom he'd mined with Gang Starr, as he became involved in Buckshot LeFonque, the band of jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis (who also worked with Sting and Miles Davis).

Around this time, DJ Premier set up shop at D&D Studios in New York, which became a legendary focal point for East Coast hip-hop. "I was doing a remix for Lord Finesse's album, Return Of The Funky Man [ 1991]," recalled Premier, "and for that I went to D&D. He wanted me to do some scratches on it, and after I was done he gave me a cassette copy which I played in my sound system in my car, and it sounded so good that I thought 'Man, this is where I need to start doing my work.' It became a really beautiful situation where my sound was the strongest, and I continued to work there, and when they couldn't afford to keep the place open any more, we ended up doing a deal and I sold my house to finance it and bought the studio, without its equipment. We renovated it, and we're still there and it's rocking."

Premier named his studio after a fallen hip-hop comrade, HeadQcuarterz, and the core of the equipment that DJ Premier has there today is still the same as in the early '90s. Following the meeting with Large Professor in the late '80s that led Preem to switch to the Emu SP12, he also used an Alesis drum machine, and eventually settled on the Akai MPC60. Around the same time he also started using an Akai S950 sampler. The two Akai pieces of kit have been his main musical tools for more than a decade, complemented by his performance skills on keyboards, guitar and drums.

"The engineer I was using in the early 1990s introduced me to the MPC60," explains Premier, "and he was like 'Hey, you should try this - the way you lay tracks down and adjust levels, it's kind of like a tape recorder without the tape.' I gave it a try and have been addicted to it ever since. Akai gave me an MPC2500, but I have not yet used it, because it's a learning curve, and I have to learn all the commands. My schedule is so heavy, I haven't had the time to sit down with it and learn it, but once I do learn it, it'll take me to the next level of expertise with my production stuff and how I do my beats."

Having supplied his production services to a long list of hip-hop artists, DJ Premier is now also diving headlong into the mainstream arena. Last year he worked with Christina Aguilera on her Back To Basics album - 'Ain't No Other Man', for which the singer received a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance this year, was one of five tracks on the album that Premier played, scratched, engineered and programmed, and co-produced. And at the time of this interview, Premier was working on material for a new Whitney Houston album.

"My production activities are just another addition to what I always wanted to do," explains Premier. "I've always wanted to be involved in music, period. One of my favorite albums is called The Flat Earth [ 1984] by Thomas Dolby. It is well constructed and he wrote and produced everything on it. I decided 'I want to be that, I want to do everything.' Prince was one of my biggest idols, and he played and produced everything. And every song, every album, every cover, was different. I wanted the same thing in my work and in what I do.

"I don't want to be pigeonholed as a hip-hop producer, I want to be known as a producer, period. Hip-hop may be predominantly what I'm into, but I simply want to be known as a great producer. One day I hope to work with AC/DC in the studio. I'm a big fan of them. I'm also a big fan of Rush, and if I were to work with them, I wouldn't try to make them sound hip-hop. I'd make them sound rock, but I'd still put my input in, where they'd expect. I know what I'm talking about, because my knowledge of music is so vast, you know what I'm saying?

"With Christina, she's more of a 'feel' person, and that's what made our chemistry work. Sometimes I made a couple of mistakes in the way I was laying stuff, and she would say 'I like it the way it sounds. It feels good to me, leave it.' I'm totally in agreement with that approach. We actually wrote the songs from scratch, and she told me what she wanted. She would say 'You could put a scratch here,' and I did exactly as she told me. I did not take offence at that, because she really knew what she was doing. With 'Ain't No Other Man', she walked in and heard the drum pattern and the stabs and I wanted to chop it up and play it in a different way, but she was like 'No, this is pop music, you don't have to get over-technical with a pop song.' That's why I'm so proud of her album. I watched her orchestrate the whole thing."

Premier's preference for sticking with tried and tested working methods and gear is a recurring theme. He explains how this ties in with his quest for originality and uniqueness. "I'm in my happy comfort zone with the things I have been using, and I don't want to get caught up with having to look for things in the middle of working on songs. I tend to stick to anything that other people are not using any more, exactly because they are not using it. I still use my old Korg Trident keyboard, for instance. And I know how to use these things to enhance what I do.

"I like the difficulties of the older equipment. I don't sample with the MPC60, I just use it to trigger drums. Instead I sample in the S950 and trigger them from the MPC - everything, also my keyboards, is MIDI'd to the MPC. I can only sample 60 seconds of audio in the 950, and that also has to include kick and snare and other drum sounds, so that limits the sample time I have. This forces me to be creative with samples. If I find a sample that's longer than 60 seconds that I want to loop, the first thing I'm going to want to do is find a way to make it funky with the limited sample time I have available. I'll mentally create the idea in my mind, because the mind makes the machine do what it does. Any machine is useless without my mind making it follow my command. That's how you recognise creativity versus someone who is OK.

"When my ear catches something on a record that I like, I'll send a portion of that record from my Technics record player to the S950. Once the sample is in the 950, I truncate the parts I don't want, program what I do have, and assign it to one of the pads on the MPC. I'll experiment to see if it makes me feel good and if it starts to sound like something I would buy. If it doesn't sound like something I would buy, it's not ready to go. I have to like it - I don't care what anybody else thinks.

"Everything I do is experimentation. Real music is about experimentation. You have to play around until you get a vibe going, and not everybody knows how to do that, unless they have an ear for music. In order to have an ear you have to have a knowledge of music and my knowledge is so great. I know rock music, jazz, country, hip-hop, R&B, soul, punk, New Wave, whatever you want to call it. I appreciate all that music. I could shift gears 24/7, so when it comes to hip-hop I can do this with my eyes closed."

In DJ Premier's view, all his activities - DJ'ing, creating backing tracks and producing - find their roots in the same musical attitude. "I do everything with a DJ mentality. DJ'ing is my number one love. Producing is not my favourite thing, it's for paying my bills. Although, when I produce, I don't want any half-assed quality coming out. It has to sound great and I make sure that I put my all into it. Everything I do comes from DJing, because using samples is one of the ways in which we create music in the hip-hop world. It goes back to not having an instrument and not being able to afford to put a band together. So we used music that fits our atmosphere, and you have to understand how to convert samples into a format that works for our culture.

"To me, I'm a writer, even though I sample. There are songs in which I play all parts myself, but when I use samples I still do it in the same way a music writer would, because you still have to construct the track and shape it and make it blend with what you're trying to bring out of whoever is going to MC or sing it. And you have to understand and respect what you sample. When I constructed tracks in the past, I usually started with the samples, and then added the drums. Now it is usually the reverse. I may begin with keying a rhythm into the MPC, or play around with a little melody on my keyboards. This may be my Korg Trident, or my Roland Fantom, or my Yamaha Motif - I just got it and I'm still experimenting with it, but it has some really cool sounds. I may play on my M-Audio Oxygen 8 controller and use sound modules like the Emu Planet Phatt or Mo'Phatt. It is different every time, but today the majority of the time I'll get a drum pattern going, just a basic skeleton, and I then start to see if things fit.

"I tend to program my drums, but a lot of the time I'll turn off the 16th notes and I'll play the MPC live, so it sounds like live drumming. I like it to sound loose, and this is why my drums have a little bounce to them, more than with most people. I'm a big fan of Neil Peart from Rush and Buddy Miles, and in my whole production it's about the drums. Even with mellow stuff, like the song 'Nice Girl, Wrong Place' on The Ownerz, the sample is mellow, but the drums are still smacking. The bass is also very important. If the low end of the sample isn't really heavy, I'll always follow the exact bass line of the song and put that underneath. A lot of people ask me what EQ I use to get the bottom end of my samples to come through so strongly, but I'm like 'Man, it's not EQ. I'm playing the same notes verbatim.'"

While DJ Premier's writing setup - MPC60, S950, assorted keyboards and other instruments and record player - has remained the same since the early '90s, the next stage of his production process has recently undergone a dramatic change. Until not too long ago, Preem still loaded everything he composed with his writing setup onto two-inch analogue tape. But not too long ago, he too succumbed to the inexorable digital revolution, and swapped his reel-to-reel machine for Pro Tools.

"The first time I encountered Pro Tools was when I was working with Branford Marsalis on the soundtrack for the [ Spike Lee] movie Mo' Better Blues in 1990. I was amazed then, but it was way out of my league, and I loved using tape. It actually took me a long time to even want to go digital and do Pro Tools, because I was against it. The advantages are amazing, but I'm one of these people who tend to be stuck in their ways, and if it works, I like it that way. I had been on a lot of Pro Tools sessions with other people, until I went full-scale digital in 2005. That's when I felt totally comfortable doing it on my own.

"Once I have done all the programming with the MPC60, I load everything into Pro Tools, and then I begin shaping the final sounds and track. When everything is printed in Pro Tools, I start experimenting with how to enhance it. I have a fully loaded HD Accel system, stocked with plug-ins. There are many plug-ins I haven't even experimented with yet. But I like the [ Waves] Renaissance Vox and Bass plug-ins. I just play around until the sound has a nice shape. I can't just use mouse and keyboard when I work in Pro Tools, so I use the Control 24 board. I love that board, it's a beautiful thing. If I don't have buttons and faders, I lose interest.

"Now I love Pro Tools, I can't deny it. But I use it with a DJ mentality, and I'm still against it in certain ways. I think Serato [ Scratch], which I just started using, is more dedicated to the DJ who has paid his dues and has carried billions of records. I play what I have gained through my whole knowledge of music and my library, and the same thing applies to Pro Tools. I think Pro Tools is a great gift for all of us who have dealt with tape. It can do a lot of things that I couldn't do in analogue; it allows you to mess up, and re-mess up and redo and undo, and so on. I am just in a whole different world and frame of mind these days and Pro Tools just enhances me as a producer and a person.

"The whole sound quality and HD thing is very important. It's all about where your ear is at and what you want out of a record. Sometimes I like it clean and sometimes I like it dirty. If it's hip-hop, I don't give a fuck about clean. You can still get grimy and gritty with Pro Tools, it's all about knowing how to dust it up a bit. For example, I use de-essers to create a certain sound, rather than to take the crispness out of certain sharp words. I'm always experimenting. Sometimes Charles [ Roane, DJ's studio partner] will say 'Man, you have so many effects on this track, you need to take one off.' But I say 'It's hip-hop and there are no rules.'

"It's all about making a match with what the MC is doing. I'm like a tailor: I can tailor the suit to fit what you want. An artist like Jay-Z will tell me what he wants the song to be before he even comes to the studio. I then make the track and the atmosphere sound the way he wants. Somebody like Guru gives me the titles to the entire album, and I make tracks to that. Other artists may come in with no ideas, they just want a hot Premier beat, so I'll listen to songs I like by them and come up with something that really fits them, so we get a marriage. It can't be just beats and lyrics, it has to be beats and lyrics intertwined, like when you clasp your hands together.

"You just have to know what you're doing, and hands down I totally know what I'm doing. God put me here to create music and do it well. My knowledge of music is so vast, there's no way I can ever mess up what I do."

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He may be the East Coast's biggest name in hip-hop production, but DJ Premier still creates his tracks with an ancient Akai MPC60 and S950 sampler. It would be hard to overstate DJ Premier's importance for American hip-hop. He's been referred to as "the true essence of hip-hop", the "cornerstone of hip-hop power", and "the king of underground hip-hop".

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One of the largest publishers in the United States, the Johns Hopkins University Press combines traditional books and journals publishing units with cutting-edge service divisions that sustain diversity and independence among nonprofit, scholarly publishers, societies, and associations. Journals The Press is home to the largest journal publication program of any U.S.-based university press. The Journals Division publishes 85 journals in the arts and humanities, technology and medicine, higher education, history, political science, and library science. The division also manages membership services for more than 50 scholarly and professional associations and societies. Books With critically acclaimed titles in history, science, higher education, consumer health, humanities, classics, and public health, the Books Division publishes 150 new books each year and maintains a backlist in excess of 3,000 titles. With warehouses on three continents, worldwide sales representation, and a robust digital publishing program, the Books Division connects Hopkins authors to scholars, experts, and educational and research institutions around the world. Project MUSE® Project MUSE is a leading provider of digital humanities and social sciences content, providing access to journal and book content from nearly 300 publishers. MUSE delivers outstanding results to the scholarly community by maximizing revenues for publishers, providing value to libraries, and enabling access for scholars worldwide. Hopkins Fulfillment Services (HFS) HFS provides print and digital distribution for a distinguished list of university presses and nonprofit institutions. HFS clients enjoy state-of-the-art warehousing, real-time access to critical business data, accounts receivable management and collection, and unparalleled customer service.

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Giving up Hip-Hop's Firstborn: A Quest for the Real after the Death of Sampling on JSTOR

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Publisher Information One of the largest publishers in the United States, the Johns Hopkins University Press combines traditional books and journals publishing units with cutting-edge service divisions that sustain diversity and independence among nonprofit, scholarly publishers, societies, and associations. Journals The Press is home to the largest journal publication program of any U.S.-based university press.

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Origins and the old school

Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying, or "turntabling"; rapping, also known as "MCing" or "rhyming"; graffiti painting, also known as "graf" or "writing"; and "B-boying," which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as "postural semantics." (A fifth element, "knowledge of self/consciousness," is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s. As the hip-hop movement began at society's margins, its origins are shrouded in myth, enigma, and obfuscation.

Graffiti and break dancing, the aspects of the culture that first caught public attention, had the least lasting effect. Reputedly, the graffiti movement was started about 1972 by a Greek American teenager who signed, or "tagged," Taki 183 (his name and street, 183rd Street) on walls throughout the New York City subway system. By 1975 youths in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn were stealing into train yards under cover of darkness to spray-paint colourful mural-size renderings of their names, imagery from underground comics and television, and even Andy Warhol-like Campbell's soup cans onto the sides of subway cars. Soon, influential art dealers in the United States, Europe, and Japan were displaying graffiti in major galleries. New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority responded with dogs, barbed-wire fences, paint-removing acid baths, and undercover police squads.

The beginnings of the dancing, rapping, and deejaying components of hip-hop were bound together by the shared environment in which these art forms evolved. The first major hip-hop deejay was DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell), an 18-year-old immigrant who introduced the huge sound systems of his native Jamaica to inner-city parties. Using two turntables, he melded percussive fragments from older records with popular dance songs to create a continuous flow of music. Kool Herc and other pioneering hip-hop deejays such as Grand Wizard Theodore, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash isolated and extended the break beat (the part of a dance record where all sounds but the drums drop out), stimulating improvisational dancing. Contests developed in which the best dancers created break dancing, a style with a repertoire of acrobatic and occasionally airborne moves, including gravity-defying headspins and backspins.

In the meantime, deejays developed new techniques for turntable manipulation. Needle dropping, created by Grandmaster Flash, prolonged short drum breaks by playing two copies of a record simultaneously and moving the needle on one turntable back to the start of the break while the other played. Sliding the record back and forth underneath the needle created the rhythmic effect called "scratching."

Kool Herc was widely credited as the father of modern rapping for his spoken interjections over records, but among the wide variety of oratorical precedents cited for MCing are the epic histories of West African griots, talking blues songs, jailhouse toasts (long rhyming poems recounting outlandish deeds and misdeeds), and the dozens (the ritualized word game based on exchanging insults, usually about members of the opponent's family). Other influences cited include the hipster-jive announcing styles of 1950s rhythm-and-blues deejays such as Jocko Henderson; the Black power poetry of Amiri Baraka, Gil Scott-Heron, and the Last Poets; rapping sections in recordings by Isaac Hayes and George Clinton; and the Jamaican style of rhythmized speech known as toasting.

Rap first came to national prominence in the United States with the release of the Sugarhill Gang's song " Rapper's Delight" (1979) on the independent African American-owned label Sugar Hill. Within weeks of its release, it had become a chart-topping phenomenon and given its name to a new genre of pop music. The major pioneers of rapping were Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kurtis Blow, and the Cold Crush Brothers, whose Grandmaster Caz is controversially considered by some to be the true author of some of the strongest lyrics in "Rapper's Delight." These early MCs and deejays constituted rap's old school.

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Hip-hop | Definition, History, Culture, & Facts

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Hip-hop, cultural movement that attained popularity in the 1980s and '90s and the backing music for rap, the musical style incorporating rhythmic and/or rhyming speech that became the movement's most lasting and influential art form. Learn more about hip-hop's history and culture in this article.

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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