Make Hip Hop> Beats: Not hard to get started
Article by JP Jones
In the past few years I have helped many people get started in the world of making your own beats online. They have ranged from curious beginners to seasoned musicians, and I’m satisfied in saying that they all showed some serious progression in their skills. Okay, let’s get started.
Just what does hip hop mean? The whole thing started in the South Bronx in the seventies as a local movement. It was a lifestyle and culture of expressing freedom from social and cultural oppression, namely oppression to the African-American community. This expression came in the form of graffiti art, break dancing or “b-boying”, clothing style, DJing, MCeeing, and of course “rapping” or rhyming over beats. All of this started in New York and spread all over the world like wildfire. Today it is one of the most raw and rugged forms of expression.
When making hip hop beats, you have a great deal of creative freedom. However, to fully express that freedom in the digital realm, one needs a hip hop beat making program. There are many offline-based hip hop beat makers, however for the beginner these can be cumbersome and overly-technical. If you want to get a head start in making hip hop beats, you have to cut out the technical fluff and strip a program down to it’s basics. I also suggest learning from somebody who can teach you how to make beats.
There is one website that solved all these problems for my students and I by accident: it’s called Sonic Producer. It started as the world’s first social music production community based around common software. Their beat making software is what drove them to fame: as part of membership to their site they offer access to their proprietary 16-track sequencer with thousands of preset samples and loops, and mp3 export capability. This was more than I could ask for since most of my students simply wanted to save their beats as mp3s to burn on CDs for car rides with friends or get-togethers.
They blew my expectations out of the water when they started adding thousands of free hip hop beat making lessons on video with membership to the site. For $ 29 you get access to the hip hop beat maker, the giant preset sound and loop library, and unlimited free video tutorials on how to make beats. To be honest, they kind of took my job from me… it’s easier for me to tell my students to get a membership there, watch the videos, and then report back to me with what they learned. Most of these students are increasing their beat making skills faster than I thought possible: a few of them have already licensed beats to local and even bigger rap and hip hop artists.
So if you’re looking to get a head start making your own hip hop beats online or offline, Sonic Producer is the place to start. After you become proficient at making beats, check back here for more tips and guides. What are you waiting for? Start making hip hop beats today!
