A Beat Making Tutorial On A Budget - By Illmuzik's Own - BERSERK

ill o.g.
Battle Points: 3
If you don't like beats made using samples - Stop reading now!

This is a tutorial on all the different elements of beatmaking on a budget by me - Berserk.
You might disagree with a few things or feel you need to add something extra.
If so just bang on a reply.

Digging
You don't need to have the world's greatest vinyl collection, by no means do you even need a turntable, you can sample off absoloutely anything; TV, Tape, CD, MP3. Even your pet animals and pieces of celery. So don't worry about going to collector's stores. What I tend to do is go to HMV and look for box sets, You can normally find lots of different varied music box sets for around £4.99 for 4 cds, Thats about 80 tracks, and about 30 tracks worth of sampling material and sometimes more. Just look around (I tend to grab Funk, Movie, Jazz & Classical). Once you got your box of magic download a grabber. A Good grabber/ripper is Audio Catalyst. Once you got this start ripping away tracks with either samplable intros/interplotations/breaks. A good way to find "hidden" samples is by checking the Left/Right Stereo sides and just taking them.

Looping
Once you got your samples ready you're gonna need to loop them somehow and make it a full song. Get yourself a fully working Cool Edit Pro and play about with the looping function for a bit until you got something that sounds nice. Once you got this loop save it and look for another loop from the same song, you're gonna use this for the fourth bar. If you can't find another loop don't worry you can always make a sliced beat, sliced beat's often sound immensely ill so i wouldn't get too stressed out if you can't find a loop. Now bang you're loops in Fruity Loops by dragging the saved file to one of the little grey boxes on the drum pallette. Now you're gonna have to play around with the bpm and where you place the sample. Making it faster by putting it nearer the top often makes an easier loop with an easier bpm to find. It also sounds better a lot of the time.

Slicing
If you want to have that stop starty feel to your loops in Fruity Loops your gonna need to take your sample back to Cool Edit Pro select the whole loop, right click and then click wave properties then look for a looping option which has a white box with new & remove below it. Click new and Loop1 should appear. Click ok and save the file. Go back to fruity loops and reload the sample and select, use loop points. Now when you insert the file on the piano roll change the length with the horizontal arrows; the loop should now stop once the length of the little bar is up.

Drums
Get drums from f***ing anywhere, internet, sampling - anything. Normally you want hard, un-cheesy sounding drums. The best beats are normally simple with a nice melody behind them, so don't try and over complicate things unless you're trying to be the next Timbaland.

Snares
Same with snares, jack f***ing everything. You want a nice live snare half the time. By live i mean it should have a goodd snap and not sound too computerised. If you have a nice snare but it isn't snappy enough put a glock or low clap over the top. If you have a mic, get a piece of celery and snap it over the mic, then put that on top of your snare. Lol, trust it sounds good. Some1 told me this as a joke and I did it and it worked.... Jokes on him...

Hi-Hat/Shakers
Hi hats normally need to be continous simple metronome pattern and any hi hat normally works if its a nice short tick. Shakers can be all over just experiment. Also with hi-hats and snares experiment with the panning, adds an extra dimension to the track.

Bass
Bass is a hard one, I can't make a bassline for s**t, but good basslines normally stick in your head, are simple and are thumping... I'm afraid that's all I can say.


I hope this has helped a few of you, cos it took me f***ing tiiime to write!

(This article is taken from UKHHF- UK Hip Hop Forum)
 

Rhythmikal

Beat's Disciple
ill o.g.
all good except for the Bass part lol.

the best way to make bass is to have it follow the main melody of the track, or at least in the same key/scale as the melody. and maybe drop out/add the odd note. use a bass sound which doesnt overpower the track, i hear alot of good beats spoiled because the bass is too booming.

sAfE.
 

berserk

Monster Music
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 33
^ yeah since i wrote this i learnt a few things about bass...
 
D

DRUMAT!C

Guest
never, never, never, ever let your basslines exceed -6db in the mix. Jay dee usually uses about -9db to -7db and his shit sounds butter smoothe.

DRUMZ.1
 

brooklynstyle

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
I got problems with the basslines too. Now I got this tight ass piano loop lets say but i need bassline to follow the piano melody. Is it possible to make the piano loop sound muffled like bass without using midi? How can I do that with soundforge?
thanks
1
 

MarkN

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 55
brooklynstyle said:
I got problems with the basslines too. Now I got this tight ass piano loop lets say but i need bassline to follow the piano melody. Is it possible to make the piano loop sound muffled like bass without using midi? How can I do that with soundforge?
thanks
1

sumtimes if theres a bass already there i'll filter out all the hi end stuff so im left with just the bass from the sample i'll boost this add it back into the loop and it sounds good like that otherwise get rid of the bass from your sample and get the keyboard and work out the notes and play your own bassline !
 

brooklynstyle

ILLIEN
ill o.g.
i should try this. But sometimes i got some real nice breaks i wanna sample and i got drums on them i dont want so that bugs me a lot. How d'yall get rid of those?
thanks

oh shit i just tried this shit. It's tight man
thanks
1
 

Rhythmikal

Beat's Disciple
ill o.g.
when i used to use Fruityloops i just created the melody and then copy and pasted the piano roll into the bass channel, and then dropped the octave a few. i then used to just add/take a few notes and this sounds really tight.

sAfE.
 

berserk

Monster Music
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 33
no problem mate... it's a bit old school... but a nice one for real beginners...
 

FuzE

i make beatz
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 99
DRUMAT!C said:
never, never, never, ever let your basslines exceed -6db in the mix. Jay dee usually uses about -9db to -7db and his shit sounds butter smoothe.

DRUMZ.1



I'd like to reiterate ^^^^^ helluva good tip!
 

sYgMa

Making head bangers!!!
ill o.g.
Battle Points: 26
I always hear (or read) people talking about adding, changing the frequency of a sample... how the h@ll can you do that with fruityloops (or do you need another program?)

I know, for instance, that when people talk about Dre's drums (specialy the Kick) they say that he works a lot for it to sound thumping. I can hear it, but HOW? With what program? hardware? is it complicated?

What I do is superposing different kicks, snares, basses to get a different sound... and I play with the cutoff and the volume, but that's it... I want to go a step further.

I know a lot of people here talk about it, so you probably know how to do it. And please, dont talk theory... talk practical, please
 
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