How to Make Hip Hop Beats

Hi! Welcome to my site :)

The main subject of this blog is going to be tips and tricks for making beats of all kinds, but especially hip hop beats! Whether you are old school and use samplers, turntables, and keyboards - or you're more new school and use computers, synths, and sampling cd's - this website will hopefully give you some decent information about how to make your  beats better, how to write better music, and how to improve your production quality!

^ This is my current studio setup!

First, a little bit about myself. My name is Ty but I go by beatmaker4life because I've been producing hip hop, techno, rap, dubstep, jungle (you name it!) for going on 14 years now, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon! Making beats is a life time hobby for me and I aim to get better and better as time goes on, that's why I thought it would be a good idea to start this blog. I've learned so much on my music production journey that I thought if I could help others out too, then they could accelerate their learning process and get to where I am in a much shorter frame of time!

So again, welcome to the site, and I hope this place is really going to help out your production skills. So let's jump right into it. This article is going to be geared towards new beat makers who don't really have any idea on where to get started, or even how to make hip hop beats. Whether you want to be making hip hop beats or techno or pop music, the starting point is pretty much the same. You need some decent software and a decent computer.

A good video to watch for new hip hop beat makers

But don't worry, you don't need anything crazy expensive, especially these days when technology has come so far and is so cheap. Chances are you can use the computer you are on right now and spend maybe 30 bucks on some beat making software, or even find a free beat maker! This should be more than enough to get you started.

But before you download some software, there are a couple of fundamental terms you should know when it comes to beat making. The first is Samples: these are the individual sound pieces that you use to construct beats, they are the individual building blocks that you snap together to make musical patterns, drum patterns, etc... The second is Sequencing: this is what allows you to fit the samples together into more complicated patterns. A sequencer is typically a grid like layout that allows you to drag and drop sample files around using your mouse and keyboard!

So there you have it, that really is the basis for beat making. Once you have your own production software installed then all of this will become much more clear to you and you will be able to grasp exactly how this works quite easily. If this all sounds complicated to you right now, just know that it's not! And if you have any questions about all of this I would be more than happy to help you out so please drop me a line!

Thanks guys, I hope you enjoyed my first post!