Over the years I’ve had a lot of beginner’s approach me for advice. They want to know how they can get started making their own hip hop beats. Well, we were all beginners at one point or another, so I like to help these people get on their feet and started in the wonderful world of making hip hop beats.
What is hip hop? It started in New York in the seventies as a cultural movement. It was a lifestyle to express freedom from cultural oppression, mostly by African Americans. This expression came in the form of graffiti art, break dancing or “b-boying”, clothing style, DJing, MCeeing, and of course rhyming over “breaks” and “loops”. This movement began with the South Bronx as it’s epicenter and spread all over the known world. Today it is one of the most popular forms of human expression.
When making hip hop beats, you have a lot of creative freedom. However, in order to fully express that in the digital world, 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 accidently solved all these problems for my students and I: 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 far exceeded my expectations however, 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!
