hip hop production

For the live performance counterpart to a hip hop producer, see DJ. Hip hop production is the creation of hip hop music. Modern hip hop production utilizes drum machines, turntables, synthesizers, hardware and software sequencers, and live instrumentation.Though the term encompasses all aspects of hip hop music, it most commonly used to refer to the instrumental, non-lyrical aspects of hip-hop.

Concept

Hip-hop instrumental music is classified as sampled breaks dubbed over sampled music. The two parts are often interpolated post factum using a variety of playback devices such as a turntable or CD player. The playback is sometimes recorded as the final version of an instrumental that goes on to mixdown with vocals.

The pipeline of hip hop production involves one or more of the following:

All of these elements can be either analog or digital in nature and replication. A drum beat can be sampled, a riff can be replicated live, and scratching can be sampled and dubbed over a song.

History

Origins

The first instruments used in hip hop production were two turntables, a mixer, and a microphone. DJ Kool Herc used the mixer fade controls to switch between two turntables playing identical records; this is called beat juggling. The result was that a section of a record could be effectively prolonged or looped, the parallel to today's loop-based DAWs and hardware loop equipment. During the 1970s, Grandmaster Flash pioneered many turntable techniques. He was the first to use the cue output. His cutting and scratching techniques, stemming from sessions with "Mean Gene" Livingston and his brother (Grand Wizard Theodore), whom he later battled with, have revolutionized the DJ culture and have been imitated ever since.

Early singles on Sugarhill Records were played by the house band, and it was not until later that a DJ was incorporated into recording sessions. Early examples are "Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" and the Wild Style soundtrack.

The 1980s

Kurtis Blow became the first hip-hop artist to use a digital sampler, the Fairlight, in a song. The Roland TR-808 was introduced in 1980. The 808 was heavily used by Afrika Bambaataa, who released Planet Rock in 1982, which gave rise to the fledgling Electro genre, along with the genre's own pioneers Derrick May and Juan Atkins. The song interpolated Kraftwerk's "Trans Europa Express." In 1983, Run-DMC recorded "It's Like That" and "Sucker MCs," two songs which relied completely on digital beats, ignoring samples entirely; much like early songs by Bambaataa and the Furious Five. The E-mu SP-12 came out in 1985, capable of 2.5 seconds of recording time. The SP-1200 promptly followed with expanded T-burc & EDK recording time. One of the earliest songs to contain a drum loop or break was "Rhymin and Stealin" by the Beastie Boys, produced by Rick Rubin. Marley Marl also popularized a minimal style of using one or two sampled loops in the late 80s. The Akai MPC60 came out in 1988, capable of 12 seconds of sampling time. Dr. Dre with World Class Wreckin' Cru recorded 'Juice' and 'Before You Turn The Lights Out.' The Beastie Boys released Paul's Boutique in 1989, an entire album created completely from an eclectic mix of samples, produced by the Dust Brothers. De La Soul also released 3 Feet High and Rising that year. Their producer at the time, Prince Paul, mixed sounds from funk, rock, disco and even children's records.

The 1990s and on

Public Enemy's Bomb Squad revolutionized the sound of hip-hop with incredibly dense production styles, combining tens of samples per song, often combining breaks with a drum machine. Their beats were much more structured than the early more minimal and repetitive beats. The MPC3000 was released in 1994, the AKAI MPC2000 in 1997, followed by the MPC2000XL in 2000 and the MPC2500 in 2006. These machines combined a sampling drum machine with an onboard sequencer and became the centerpiece of many hip hop producers' studios. The Wu Tang Clan's superproducer Rza is often credited for snatching the eye of hip hop from Dr. Dre's more polished sound in 1993, with his more gritty sound with low rumbling bass, sharp snares and unique sampling style. With the 1994 release of Notorious BIG's Ready to Die, Sean Combs and his assisting producers ushered in a new style where entire sections of records were sampled, instead of short snippets. Records like "Warning" (Isaac Hayes's "Walk On By"), and "One More Chance (Remix)" (Debarge's "Stay With Me") epitomized this aesthetic. In the early 2000s, Roc-a-Fella in-house producer Kanye West made popular the "chipmunk" technique, which had been first used by 80's electro hip-hop group Newcleus with such songs a "Jam on It". This technique involves using a digital pitch shifter to make a vocal sample very high pitched, resulting in a vocal sample that sounds similar to the singing on the television show "Alvin and the Chipmunks". West adopted this style from J Dilla and the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, who in turn was influenced by Prince Paul, the pioneer of the style of speeding up and looping vocal samples to achieve the "chipmunk" sound.

Elements

Sampling

Main article: Sampling (music)

Sampling is integral to hip hop production. It's used as a substitute for expensive musicians, equipment, and other costs associated with genuine live recording.

Sampling is controversial in modern hip hop. Seeing as sample clearance can take substantial parts of profit out of record sales for artists who sample, producers opt to create completely original recordings using computer-generated beats. Another solution is to overdub or re-record the sampled part with a live musician and then interpolate it enough to disassociate it from the sampled material entirely. The fees associated with the latter solution and the costs associated with the former can be significantly lower than sample clearance fees.

A particular brand of "sped-up" sampling which famously used by Roc-A-Fella artist Kanye West (and less prominently Just Blaze, Danny! and various other hip hop producers from the post 2000 generation), is now popuarly considered as its own style of hip hop production. Although Wu-tang clan member RZA introduced this style of production before Kanye, it is Kanye West's vast amount of production work with artists (such as: Common and Jay-Z in recent years) that has popularized the use of sped-up samples.

While the majority of producers sample a relatively default niche of 1960-1980 soul, R&B, disco, and funk records, any record of any genre from any era is often fair game for sampling. Jazz records from every era are also sampled. Producers such as P. Diddy, Dr. Dre have been known to sample blues artists such as Bill Withers. Due to the aforementioned concerns with clearance fees, many producers opt to seek out very rare and obscure records to lend their records a unique style and to avoid being forced to pay a clearance fee. People Under The Stairs openly acknowledge not clearing their samples, hoping that the record companies whose artists they sample don't take action.

Beats

Main article: beats (music)

The drum beat is another core element of hip hop production. Its speed and complexity dictates the pace and impact of the recording. While some beats are sampled, others are created by drum machines such as the Roland TR-808 and the Alesis SR-16. Others yet are a hybrid of the two techniques, sampled parts of drum beats that are arranged in original patterns altogether. Another mainstay in hip-hop is the use of Ensoniq's ASR-10 synthesizer to provide beats, particularly by The Neptunes and the MPC 2000.

Since the percussive element of hip hop music is the very punctuation of its sound, the sounds a producer chooses to represent the percussion are important. Some producers have drum kits all their own, such as Dr. Dre, Timbaland and Neptunes. Some drum sounds, such as the TR-808 cowbell, remain as historical elements of hip hop lore used in modern hip hop to lend a more credible and mature sound to the recording.

Scratching

Main article: scratching

A turntable is used to interpolate samples or beats and sound. Due to the versatile time and pitch control of a modern DJ turntable, the turntable becomes an instrument all its own, capable of producing unique and original sounds. It is often used to provide a human touch to an otherwise "clean" recording. Of the most popular turntables, some are the analog Technics SL-1200 or Vestax PDX-2000MkII and the digital Pioneer CDJ1000.

Studio parts

A producer's studio is the environment where they produce music. It can be as varied as a four-track sequencer and a collection of tapes or a multi-million dollar studio loaded with advanced sound processing hardware.

Recording

In hip hop, a multi-track recorder is standard for recording. Digital ADAT tape recorders have become standard over the years. Alternatively, a producer can use a PC as a multi-track recorder, with or without external hardware (outboard).

Vocal recording

Generally, professional producers opt for a condenser microphone for studio recording, mostly due to their wide-range response and high quality. A primary alternative to the expensive condenser microphone is the dynamic microphone, used more often in live performances due to its durability. The major disadvantages of condenser microphones are their expense and fragility. Also, most condenser microphones require phantom power, unlike dynamic microphones. Conversely, the disadvantages of dynamic microphones are they don't generally possess the wide spectrum of condenser microphones and their frequency response is not as uniform. Many hip-hop producers typically used the Neumann U-87 for recording vocals. But today, many producers in this musical genre use the Sony C-800 tube microphone. Compressors, both software and hardware, are also prevalently used during recording and post-production.

Sequencers and Samplers

See also: Music sequencer and sampler (musical instrument)

The AKAI MPC2000 sampler

A sequencer or a sequencing device or module is used invariably with instruments. One of the most popular sequencers in old-school hip hop was the Akai MPC60, whose successors MPC2000, MPC2500, MPC3000, and MPC4000 have been quintessential in modern hip hop production. Since a sequencer triggers instruments instead of simply playing back music, it is used in more sophisticated production environments than the basic "two turntables and a mic" configuration that most live hip hop is produced with. A sampler is used to play back samples that will not be interpolated as a media. Most sequencers, like the aforementioned Akai MPC products, are also samplers. Among standalone samplers there are the ShaBoo 3000 S-series samplers, the Roland S-series samplers, and others.

Digital audio workstations

Main article: DAW

DAWs and software sequencers are used in modern hip hop production as software production products are cheaper, easier to expand, and require less room to run than their hardware counterparts. Some producers oppose complete reliance on DAWs and software, citing lower overall quality, lack of effort, and lack of identity in computer-generated beats. Sequencing software often comes under criticism from purist listeners and traditional producers as producing sounds that are flat, overly clean, and overly compressed.

Popular DAWs include:

Synthesizers

Main article: Synthesizer

Synthesizers are used quite often in hip hop production. They are used for melody, basslines, as percussive stabs, and for sound synthesis. The use of synthesizers has been popularized largely by Dr. Dre during the G-Funk era. Modern use of synthesizers is rampant by producers such as Jim Jonsin,Cool and Dre, Lil Jon, Scott Storch, and Neptunes. Often in low-budget studio environments or environments constrained by space limitations, producers employ Virtual Instruments in place of hardware synthesizers. Virtual Instruments are also now running ramped in high-budget studio environments.

Live instrumentation

Live instrumentation is not as widespread in hip hop, but is used by a number of acts and is prominent in hip hop-based fusion genres such as rapcore. Before samplers and synthesizers became prominent parts of hip hop production, early hip hop hits such as "Rapper's Delight" (The Sugarhill Gang) and "The Breaks" (Kurtis Blow) were recorded with live studio bands. During the 1980s, Stetsasonic was a pioneering example of a live hip hop band. Hip hop with live instrumentation regained prominence during the late-1990s and early 2000s with the work of The Goats, The Roots, Common, DJ Quik, and OutKast, among others. Instrumental hip hop is hip hop music without vocals. Hip hop as a general rule consists of two elements: an instrumental track (the "beat") and a vocal track (the "rap"). The artist who crafts the beat is the DJ or the producer, and the one who crafts the rap is the MC. In this format, the rap is almost always the primary focus of the song, providing most of the complexity and variation over a more or less repetitive beat.

Instrumental hip hop is therefore hip hop music without emcee accompaniment. This format affords the DJ or producer the flexibility to create more complex, richly detailed and varied instrumentals, with less emphasis on vocals. Songs of this genre may wander off in different musical directions without the vocal constraints of the MC.

Instrumental Hip Hop

In hip hop's earliest days the beat was the focus of the music: a DJ would isolate the percussion breaks from hit funk and disco songs, mixing two copies of the same song between two turntables and thus repeating the break, as these were often the most popular and danceable parts of the songs. The origin of this practice, known as cutting, is widely credited to Kool DJ Herc. As this practice of breakbeat DJing became more popular performers began to speak over the music in order to introduce the DJ and excite the crowd. This practice (which became known as rapping, and the performers as MCs) became more and more stylized and quickly became as much a part of hip hop as the beat itself. As hip hop became commercially viable the MC began to take the spotlight, but the DJ's practice of isolating a break for the MC to rap over continued and expanded into turntablism and hip hop production, incorporating techniques such as scratching, beat juggling, and sampling. An early example of instrumental hip-hop from this era was Rockit, by Jazz artist, Herbie Hancock.

Purely instrumental hip hop tracks were not popular throughout the 1980s, but producers and DJs (such as DJ Mark the 45 King) have made and released hip hop beats without MCs since hip hop's inception. The release of DJ Shadow's debut album Endtroducing... in 1996 saw the beginnings of a rise in instrumental hip hop. Relying mainly on a combination of sampled funk, hip hop and film score, DJ Shadow chose to describe his music as "cinematic hip hop", and he has influenced countless producers and musicians from many genres ever since. In recent years, artists such as RJD2, J Dilla, Danny!, Madlib,and Blockhead have garnered critical acclaim with a number of instrumental hip hop albums.

Instrumental hip hop has yet to be fully recognized as a genre unto itself, and is often lumped in with trip hop, downtempo, electronica, or industrial music. This may in part be due to the fact that it is so hard to classify, as when a hip hop beat is separated from rapping and varied enough to hold a listener's attention by itself, it can go off in many musical directions.

External links

Warbeats Free website for novice beat makers to learn about hip hop production. Site has videos and project files for study.
Hip Hop Samples Blog Discussing Hip Hop Sampling, Crates Digging, and Hip Hop Production with Free Downloads.
FREE Hip-Hop Instrumentals100's of free instrumentals for emcees. Top notch hip hop production for RnB singers and Hip-Hop artists.

Hip hop music
Music	Production • Rapping • Beatboxing • Beats • DJing • Turntablism
Culture	Breakdance • Graffiti • Fashion • Dance
People	Rappers • DJs and Producers • Groups • Beatboxers
History	Roots • Old School • Golden Age •New School • 2007 in hip hop • Genres • World hip hop • Southern hip hop • East Coast hip hop • West Coast hip hop • Midwest hip hop
See also:	List of hip hop albums • Jazz music • Funk music • Slang • African American culture

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