How To Make GRITTY Boom-Bap Hip Hop Beats

1. Course Intreo: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another tutorial with yours truly key around the main ways of assessing make great music, and teach you how to make your own. And in today's tutorial, I've been super inspired by this new Danger Mouse song. And so I wanted to show you how I go about remaking it. So I'm gonna show you how I found the BPM of this song. And then we're going to take the same sample, rework it, and do a little hip hop magic to it. So if that sounds fun, Curio to get locked and loaded and let's jump into it. 2. Chopping The Sample: Okay, so the first thing that we're going to do is jump into here and I'm going to help you find the BPM. So what I normally do is when you'll drive the song in like this and it will come into you with a little bit of tail. Like how do I line this up properly? I'm going to show you, you're going to come in here to warp, say yes. Then you're going to want to find the beginning where the song is in place, a warp marker there. So you set 11 here. I just right-clicked set 11 here. Boom. Now we know we're starting at the one metronome on, Super off. But here's the thing. If you change the metronome, then it's going to actually warp this speed of the song because it's warped. That's not what you want, but you're going to want to do is unwarranted. After we worked are going to warp it. And then we're going to come in here. And now when we change the tempo, you can see that the song actually adjust the width. So we're not changing the actual speed of the song anymore. We're just finding the BPM. So it started AT a lot of times these hiphop sounds like it feels a little slow to me. We're close. Not quite so I know I'm going to want it a little faster. And what I'm gonna do is try to line this up with that line. So if I bump it up a bit, it's 82. So I got the same sample that they use for some of this. And so let's see what we got going on here. Right there, that little drum brake. Many received his brand new wife brought this drop-down and it needs some big popsicle sticks trace down the current. Go DO don't have to. I think that's where we're at. That's what we're looking for if you don't have to write there. Okay, so let's get, let's run that are brand new. Mini, 25 years of his brand new. What brought this drop-down and it nice and big popsicle stick trace down occurring. The next American popsicle sticks trace down occurring. So we're going to want to make sure this is on tempo too. But that's where we want. It. Sees his brand new wealth brought this drop-down and it needs some vague popsicle sticks trace down occurring. Is brand new. I'm actually not going to sit 11 here yet because I'm going to duplicate this out just that we have another copy of the sample. I'm gonna jump in here and see if I can mess around, get this maybe a little more fun. Cool, cool. So I think we're going to speed that up a little. And worked at again, I'm just putting everything, I'm just pushing everything on the time a little bit with these warp markers. Okay, So that's one chop. I don't love that. Let's see what happens if we maybe pitch up and down a little. So that's like one chop, potential chop. I don't love it, but I'm going to keep looking around in this track to see if I can find other pieces that I might want to use. Mini lab. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's a little chat that we can use. Low chop that we can use to have two of them. Once you go here. I like this job. So I'm actually going to like, I'm just, I'm just building these chops out. I'm going to bring this, I'm gonna duplicate that down here and now we're gonna, I'm gonna see if I can get this. Let me see if I can get this a longer bar. Oh, that might be it right there. I need, I don't love this as a loop yet. I wanted to get a nice eight bar loop like they have in their beat. I don't love this loop yet, but we're getting there. I think maybe one more beginning chop and then we can we're going to work a little bit from there. You feel me. So let's jump into this. How do I play it? Play the track? Why is my little plane thing come up? Fine? We're getting there, We're getting there. That could potentially work. We're getting there, but I want to find one way that doesn't have it doesn't feel like it loops so much into like worry and worry. So I'm going to look for one more piece that maybe we could put in here that would fit a little better. 3. Chopping More Of The Sample =): Okay, make sure I have found one more chart. We have a couple of our little slices over here. You're going to see, I'm going to turn this into a real song, but I want to, I need one more that I don't want to start the bar with worry. I want to start just like kinda rockin. Then you don't have to cut out. So I kinda know what I'm looking for. Someone to actually take this chalk and bring it down because I want room to work, more, room to work. So that's rad, we're close. That's like part I feel like that could be don't don't, don't. Maybe we put that in here. Let's try this. Let's try this. Let me put this down here. Actually, we didn't we didn't like that. Not quite. I need like I'm just going to experiment a little bit and just see what happens if we put these up and down a little. Let's see what they're doing again. So many 25 years. He sees his brand new from this drop down and it needs some vague trace down according to what the next American gets to Craig, dangling on the facade. Jennifer wants to stay on to one diabetes, so crazy, It's so hard. All you need is a good loop. You can make it happen. We're not quite there, but we're getting there. We're getting there, We're getting there piece by piece by piece by piece. I'm going to keep look and see if I can find maybe another piece of the song that I'm going to use. It's kind of cool. So what we've got going on down here, this is kind of a cool piece. I haven't messed with this. It looks like yeah, this could be cool. I'm just I'm just figuring out the chops. Yeah. Hello. Be right there. Yeah, maybe it right there, that might be it right there. We don't own. All right. Let's see happens if we pitch these up, grab it on the final sale where it goes? Raps on the mic though. Still in my flight close. Okay. Yeah, this could work. Let's see where this goes. 4. Adding Drums: Here's what I did. Now, I have my four kind of chops. It's these different little loops. And then I switched out, I added this one just for a little bit of diversity so we could have a full eight bar loop. And then this one is the same as this one. Okay, so what we're gonna do is now that we have our sample, I'm going to start looking at this as maybe adding some drums to it in maybe, maybe a little bit of base and kind of seeing where we can go with it. So let's, let's listen to this and see what they added those in a different sample by the way there, which is why it sounds so rad, but I can definitely, definitely think that they added jumps to it. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to EQ out some of their drums. I'm actually going to, I'm going to make, I'm going to add a kick here so we get a little bit of a low end and then I'm going to EQ, there's out. So let's go kick. Let's see we can find a cool hip hop kinda kick. Like a dusty kick, dusty, dusty kick. Know. So we're going to come back and see if I can find no, I want something like maybe something like that. Some kind of dusty. I'm going to add this as chick. And let's see, we got EQ that you'd go off again. All right. We want to still keep the energy, the main sample, what we're going to try to maybe add a little bit of punch to the low end with their own kicks in. A little bit of high-end love snapping to the snares. I'm just trying to get a little bit of EQ on these. I'm just going to maybe EQ off a little bit at these. I want to be the ones. It's still kinda feel cohesive. So I'm gonna roll up a little this high-end. We'll blend that into the soup the sample leader in. Now I'm gonna see if I can find a snare that goes along with this. Sounds like that. So this is what it sounds like without the extra drums added. A couple of things I'm going to do to it. We'll do in the next piece. 5. EQ + Effects: So to me, it's still, it's still is like it sounds good, but it still isn't quite rapidly because of the quality sounds really pretty distorted and bad. So I feel like we're getting there in terms of the drums, but I want to clean the sample up a little bit and I want to retro it out a little bit, maybe add a little bit of compression. I'm thinking going to EQ it a little bit and maybe add a little bit of just some fun effects too. Make it feel a little more cohesive with the drums. So first of all, let's EQ this a bit. I'm going to do a little bit of subtracted bq here. I feel like these are just kind of hurting my ears and you get that that right there. That's what I'm looking to get rid of it. That little whistling sound. I showed off some of the high-end justice. So it wasn't quite so bright. These down here, these are the bass notes. If I wanted to add my own base, I would probably roll off more, but I'm going to try to keep their base. This snares now poking out to me. So I'm going to roll off some of the highs and the snare. Going to add a little retro coach if we can retro this out a little bit. Let's go. Let's see. Let's just try a few of these. Just makes it a little bit less bright. I kinda like that. It's just a preset, by the way. What's a nice I'm liking it. I'm liking it. It's a nice We're getting there. I'm going to add a little bit of compression to the master bus and start to get this does feel like a real loop. It's still sounded to me like the things are poking out too much. So what I'm gonna do is plug in, I love I actually take that back. I don't love it, but I do use it sometimes. It's called it's not called the FL Studio, it's called sooth. And this is cool. It's kinda helps you find problematic sounds and take them out. But I want to be careful because this is going to take out all the cool high-end stuff too. So I'm going to try to be selective with it. This is just like kind of smooths things out a little bit for me, which is what I was kinda looking for because as we continue to pump the volume, those things will start to come out and start to feel weird. So that's kind of the way that I would probably start with this loop. And then I'm gonna show you one more little trick that I use for this. 6. Arrangement + Final Tips: Alright Josh, so one last thing I want to show you on this real quick. This is just a quick beat. I wanted to show you something quick and a little loop colon. This is something you can do a cool trick. So first of all, I'm going to, I'm going to take this, I'm going to bring it all the way over here just in case so that I have it in case I mess things up. And then I'm gonna come in here and I'm going to join the clips. That was just Command J on a Mac, so I don't have to mess with each little individual clip. And so here's what I'm gonna do. We have these pretty much these three elements, right? And that's not what I wanted to do. And now I'm going to bring this up here. So you have a kick, we have extra snare, then we have our sample stuff. So here we have our main sample at a drums or anything like this. And this is where I would probably, I'm going to add auto filter and automate this to add a little bit of song structure. And then I automate that. So that way. Well, let's just do it real quick. So we're gonna go like this, go to automation, go to device on. And we want this device to be on here, but off here, it's going to turn it on here, boom. And then we're gonna go to our filter frequency. Eric going to go check this out. Then I might add a little drop here. A look. So you'd keep, you could track however you want. And then maybe a thing that you would do is maybe, excuse me, add another Auto Filter here. Sorry, it's raining. Close this window. And then we're going to bring it, actually going to come back to frequency and we're going to bring this back down a little bit. This is when the other rapper would come in and it'd be like 1. First, you have your 16 by verse and then this would be like the in-between before another app comes in. Yeah. You guys do it for just one bar. One thing I want to show you guys really quick. So here's something that I do sometimes as well just to kinda, if you want to make this all more cohesive and feel even more old school, like really off of a record or something like that. I'm going to do is you can export audio video. I might export the beat and then be rough to then import it back in. And another thing that you could do if you could just freeze all of this as audio. But I find that like when I export it and import it back in, then allows me, it just gets it because it's already a mastering effects to it that it's it just feels like almost like just a worst quality for some reason. Stormy out there. Okay, so let's take this out. And then we're gonna go sample to actually going to export it and then bring it back in. So this is what like, all of it just feels like it's glued together better. So it depends what you want. I'm going to show you the difference between this. You can hear almost the kick and snare here. They feel like more distinguished, almost. And this one, though, it'll feel more. It just feels like it's just more cohesive. Nothing you can do, which is cool is you can take this one now it's your whole track and you can pitch it down, which could be cool. Let's see how once you push this down, a couple hey, look. Right now. Yeah, would've been in the fast lane. I hope that was helpful. Now you can see a little bit kinda how I go about making an old-school boom bap. A couple of top tips. Find like add cool drums that fit the sample and then try to mix them in so it sounds like it's part of the sample. If that's what the vibe you're going for. Tip number two, EQ out some of the crappy frequencies as you start to add volume, things will start to sound worse in three, export the entire track, import it back in, pitch it down and add more effects to that final track to get more of a cohesive real record sound. Thank you so much for tuning in. As always, if you want any of my production resources, you can check all that out in the description below. Thanks so much for tuning in. I appreciate Joe. Piece.