Hip Hop Production Thread Part Deux

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Musician's Lounge > Hip Hop Production Thread Part Deux

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

I haven't posted anything in a while but here's something I came up with pretty quickly tonight. It's kind of grungy/dubsteppy but I was approaching it as hip-hop, which has gotta count for something.

http://soundcloud.com/lemondropkid/maglight

edit: upon listening to this on my work headphones, while I still stand by my patch design, I must need to tune my room some at home because it didn't sound that muddy or the sub bass that awkward before.

Shovelbearer fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Sep 18, 2012

# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 03:53

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:17

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

THNDRTHF posted:

if ur down i would love the opportunity to mix/master this and possibly use it

gently caress yeah dude I'm gonna add a couple more little variations and then I'll hit you up with stems

# ¿ Sep 19, 2012 15:05

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Nermal. posted:

Where the hell are you guys getting acapellas? The place I used to go SUCKS now.

http://www.acapellas4u.co.uk/ is the only place I regularly go.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2012 21:18

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

MrThf did you get that maglight zip I sendspace'd you?

# ¿ Oct 9, 2012 15:15

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

dorks go hard too. WE GOIN NERD IN 2012

# ¿ Oct 9, 2012 18:05

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

MitchFM posted:

drat Sega? Least my poo poo 16bit but lol, good looking on feedback honestly i think the problem with the sound is Reason, I was playing with Kontakt 4 today and the sounds in there are much more liver, thinking about going the NI route or either SampleTank throw something else up here in the AM tho, thanks for feedback.

Reason isn't my jam but people can get great sounds out of it. Kontakt or SampleTank is a better option if you want stuff that sounds more like real instruments, but if you want synthesizer sounds, Reason is a fine option. You just have to spend time learning to make it your bitch.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2012 15:06

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

THNDRTHF posted:

the MPC vs Reason vs Ableton vs Cubase argument holds no water and any particular "sound" comiing from any of them is a result of the siignal handling by the engineer

if you sample your drums hot directly from vinyl into an mpc, and your levels are cracking it is always goiing to sound better than some chintzy stock drums iin FL

if you use one of those Platinum XXL edition drum kits in Reason its always goin to sound better than the built in 909 kit on the MPC

the sound you get out at the end depends on how well you follow the rules from the inception of the beat to final mastering

if you handle poo poo clean from point A you are going to have the possibility to end up with a better final output

no platform is inherently better than another untiil you start to get a handle on it, once you prefer a platform iit is usually because you are able to get a defined result that you have shaped and eventually perfected

This information should be pushpinned on every message board populated with aspiring producers.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2012 18:18

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

ashgromnies posted:

What's everyone's writing process like? I usually don't really feel the stuff I write after sitting on it for a few weeks and I think it's a side effect of A) lack of experience, just gotta write more and B) not having a clear idea of what I want to produce

Usually I will just sit down "to write music". I will hit up YouTube/Spotify and find a break to chop or something I think would make a cool sample, or I will open a synth and design a patch I think sounds nice, and then I try to write a song around what I came up with. So my writing process is basically exploratory until I find something I think is cool, then I try to write a song around it.

I'm just not feeling my stuff though. I know you're your own harshest critic and all but I know it's not very good and I want to keep improving. I just gotta keep producing(and analyzing my production and other people's production) to improve, but I also feel like maybe I need to find a "direction" or "inspiration" because what's music without passion? Cool noises.

So where do you start? Do you already know what the song should sound like when you start writing, and then try to fill it in with samples and patches that match? Or do you start with the sample or patch, explore and find an interesting way to play it, and proceed from there?

Non-genre-specific song structure advice here:

Sometimes if I have a basic beat or chord progression that I like and want to build it out to a full track, I'll take a song that I like and that I feel has good flow and energy and I'll import it into an audio track in Ableton, warp it so it matches the beat markers, then insert locators with labels like "4 bar instrumental break", or put "Verse 1 - 16 bars" at the start of a verse, and if something happens halfway through the verse like "Becomes spare and tense" I add one for that too... I then listen and identify as many different instruments or sounds as I can in the track, and I add a midi channel for each one. So if a track has drums, bass, flutes, scratching, a couple of samples from a movie, some sound effects and an electric organ, I'll add 7 midi channels. I might actually bump that up to 8 because I like to give myself an "extra drums" midi channel for fills and miscellaneous extra hits.

Then I move on to sketching out the patterns and parts I'll need. I start with the drums, since in most songs the drums will be there almost all the way through. I'll try to identify how many bars of drumming there is before it loops back to the start of the pattern. Then I'll insert a blank midi clip, label it something like "Main 4-bar pattern" for that amount of bars, starting at the first place that pattern occurs. Then I'll copy and paste that clip to match every instance of that pattern in the song. If there is a different pattern that occurs, I make a different empty clip, calling it something like "Alternate 8-bar pattern", and against paste copies of that empty clip everywhere that pattern occurs. If there are different fills that happen throughout the track, then I go through and identify where they happen. If one happens in the last bar of a 4-bar pattern, then I shorten that instance of the 4-bar pattern by one bar and insert an empty clip on my Extra Drums channel and label that "Fill 1" or something.

Move through every identified instrument in the song until you have populated the entire song. If you want, you can be more descriptive and label a clip "moody, descending 4-bar bass pattern" instead of just "Main 4-bar basss pattern." A portion of a song might look like this:

After the song has a complete skeleton, so to speak, you can take creative liberties. Think one of the choruses should be repeated? Cool, duplicate that portion of the track. Just be careful that you don't do something that fucks up the cool energy and flow that you liked about the original. If you don't think a flute matches the tone of what you've started or what you have in mind, you can pick a different sound that might cover the same frequency range (a guitar, maybe) and just rename your "Flute" track to be "Guitar", but leave the empty clips arranged as they are.

Now, take the music you've already written and fit it into that grid. If you have, say, a 4-bar drum pattern and a matching bass line that you think should be the chorus of the song, fill out the chorus parts with that. Then you'll have all these leftover empty clips where you have an idea of, "Oh, I should work on an electric organ or whatever sound I want to use in the role that electric organ played in the other person's song. It looks like I need to write an 8-bar pattern that matches up with my drums and my bass." So on and so forth. Hope that helps.

e: I know not everybody uses Ableton but some version of this method should be applicable to each DAW.

Shovelbearer fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Dec 19, 2012

# ¿ Dec 19, 2012 23:04

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

lanzy posted:

Freddy, thunderthief, anyone fairly talented, pls rap over this

https://soundcloud.com/postpre/oyasumi-sleeps-never-easy

This poo poo is lovely. Really surreal and chilled out.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 06:51

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Let's get soulful and aggressive. https://soundcloud.com/lemondropkid/lemon-drop-kid-piano-beat

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 09:36

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

If anyone listened to the last thing I posted, any thoughts on the kick/snare levels or if the piano was too bitcrushed?

# ¿ Dec 27, 2012 22:06

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

whoknew posted:

Sounds good to me.

Ok, that works! I think I have this mentality that there must be something wrong that can be ironed out with every piece so I tend to go to message boards and such looking for those.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2012 00:51

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Had some down time at the office yesterday so I wrote this there and then tweaked and mixed it at home last night. The bass definitely bumps in my car.

https://soundcloud.com/lemondropkid/dont-encourage-him

# ¿ Dec 29, 2012 16:56

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Ayatollah Hermione posted:

I've been away for a while; hopefully this is the first of many regular offerings in 2013.

https://soundcloud.com/mixerbio/o-scrubber

Good vibe and cool progression. I like the mid-range synth that plays throughout a lot but I think it has some frequency clashes with the bassline as things seem to get a little cluttered in there. Maybe EQing the mid synth a bit to reduce the frequencies that are strongly present in the bass synth would clear that up. The kick has a nice click to it but I feel like it could be given a bit more actual bass, and then probably sidechain the bassline to duck whenever the kick hits. Overall it's a cool beat though.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2012 17:11

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

I'm always sad when THNDRTHF's macros aren't links

# ¿ Jan 13, 2013 17:09

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

THNDRTHF posted:

doc oc is a goon

Doctor Octagoon

# ¿ Jan 22, 2013 08:29

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

I bumped that a lot in December

# ¿ Mar 22, 2013 21:15

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

KaosPV posted:

I like this, is shoegaze hip-hop the next big thing?

Also I'm back, got some monitor headphones, free time from work and hopefully will be able to pump out some poo poo.

What headphones did you get?

# ¿ Apr 8, 2013 14:59

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

I like it a lot too, but is that a Klan hood on the image?

# ¿ Apr 30, 2013 19:33

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Anyone ever tried making tracks *in* their car with a laptop plugged into the aux jack? Might be fun.

# ¿ May 3, 2013 06:04

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

^^ Depends on my mood. If I'm doing something that lends itself to being very quantized, I'll usually throw some kind of groove from the pool on there just to make it less robotic. Also sometimes I just take a breakbeat and recreate the pattern via midi (all the way down to lining up my midi notes to like .0001 seconds of the timing of the original part) then save that as a groove just so I can have it around later.

# ¿ May 13, 2013 06:41

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Thoogsby posted:

new new
https://soundcloud.com/winemouth/like-honey

I like how psychedelic it is, and I like those mid-range synth stabs that kind of sound like distorted 808 cowbells. The bassline isn't as bad as I was preparing for based on your previous post... maybe a little less release time on the sidechain compression would give it a little more definition

# ¿ May 15, 2013 18:28

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Freddie Gibbis posted:

sup guys. gonna try to engage in here a bit more frequently cuz i miss you guys

here is my newest song, all of the sounds on it except the synths and the kick / snare are live percussion poo poo cuz my wife got me a huge box of like maracas and cabasas and guiros and poo poo for my birthday, hahaha

the song is about RAP HANDS

https://soundcloud.com/satellite-high/rap-hands

Excellent, well done.

# ¿ May 22, 2013 16:03

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Thoogsby posted:

I stayed up for a long rear end time sampling death metal tunes
https://soundcloud.com/goobermusic/from-sweden-with-heaters

This is pretty rad. I like your kick and snare a lot.

So, my main music buddy met this rapper and recruited me to be half of the production team working with him. The rapper in question remarked that the two sounds that move him the most are bass guitar and electric organ, so I've been working on developing some stuff that features those sounds. This isn't a finished product but I'd like some feedback on the direction of the sound here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/lemondropkid/GeneSyS2_01.mp3

edit: after listening to it in a few different scenarios, some frequencies were bumming me out so I've re-EQ'd it, in case anyone had downloaded it.

Shovelbearer fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 23, 2013

# ¿ May 23, 2013 04:19

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

KaosPV posted:

Saw Death Grips and Killer Mike last night. It was cool, Death Grips were so loving noisy they had my bowels vibrating with their basses.

OK, I wanted to ask you guys some advice on making snappy tight snares. I'm thinking about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42GTZYaCz0A

(Min 1:35, first beat that comes in).

Any compression, EQing techniques, base samples to look for recommended?

Thoogsby posted:

You can recreate punch like that by taking a 707 tom and pitching it up to ~200kHz, also parallel compression all day.

Transient Shaper or something similar, with it set to be heavy on the attack and light on the release, is also useful.

# ¿ May 24, 2013 16:01

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Freddie Gibbis posted:

http://soundcloud.com/satellite-high/a-superstar-of-saturday

jay nyce got to me first

this song goes hard btw

Ha, this is great. I don't know how many will appreciate the "Kerry Von Erich but I steady the bike" line but that's funny.

# ¿ May 24, 2013 17:56

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

On some lortab rap vibes https://soundcloud.com/lemondropkid/cyborg-justice

# ¿ May 24, 2013 18:03

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Freddie Gibbis posted:

that's a pretty neat vibe. did you play the bass yourself?

No, just sequenced out with Scarbee bass in Kontakt and then hosed with it a lot to make it sound human.

# ¿ May 24, 2013 18:05

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

poo poo, that goes hard. I just started my day with a deep bass colonic.

# ¿ May 26, 2013 15:08

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Chwoka posted:

Closed by Brian McKnight.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/cf82ab2ab2/how-your-p-ssy-works

# ¿ Jun 27, 2013 15:33

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

More of an atmospheric/trip-hop instrumental:
https://soundcloud.com/lemondropkid/molten-magic

# ¿ Feb 17, 2014 17:40

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Radio du Cambodge posted:

This is pretty cool, I like the last third better than the middle though. Like starting from around 1:30 where the piano-like sound comes in a bit and then at 2 minutes onwards is awesome, the middle section feels a little uneventful in comparison. Also I found the drum beat kind of faded to the background, maybe its too static? I'm not the best on that front.

Made a slow & serious sounding beat.

https://soundcloud.com/zmbeats/neo-heliopan

Think it was the drum pattern or the sounds? I was pretty happy with the sounds (they sound the way I want them to on my speakers, in my car and on my headphones, so.. the big three) but yeah it really is just one pattern played throughout with me turning parts on and off.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 17:33

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

^^ I rather like it.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2014 22:28

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Haven't posted here in a while, but here's something different. I just got the PO-33 KO which is an $89 "toy" phrase sampler that is actually pretty dope if you can find one. Good lo-fi crunchiness and lets you manipulate stuff in a lot of ways. Here's the first thing I made dicking around with it. Shot with phone because it felt like the spirit of the thing.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl3R24DlnS3/?taken-by=ldk47

Sadly, insta cuts it off in the middle of bar 8 :/

and now I will peep thndr's album

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 18:20

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Tetramin posted:

This thing looks like fun. Can you have more than one sample mapped to the chromatic buttons? Or is it just one per pattern

So a quick rundown:
40 seconds of sample memory divided across up to 16 sound banks.
8 sound banks are melodic and 8 are drum/slice banks
4 note polyphony
Each individual bank is monophonic
So for the 8 melodic banks, it takes the sample and pitch-maps it out chromatically across the 16 pads (you can also pitch it up and down so you can get a decent range)
You can also record a longer sound into a melodic bank, copy it to a drum bank and it will automatically chop the original into 16 even steps. You can then adjust the trim on each pad.
Sequencing is 16-steps with bpm and swing params
You can also sequence the filter, volume and pitch settings for each step that you input into the sequencer.
And finally there are 15 different fx (and a "no effect" effect mostly for erasing poo poo you messed up) that apply to the entire loop, and you can record turning them off and on. You can hear where I applied some of the pitch-up, pitch-down and retrigger effects on this loop but I didn't really use any of the other ones on this.

So there's a ton of flexibility with just enough limitation to inspire some creative work patterns. Pretty incredible for $89, like I said the downside is finding one. I had mine ordered on Musician's Friend for 3 months before they got one.

edit: here's an actual line-out recording of the loop from the video:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4z6lefigoqucfbn/ldk%20-%20po33%20beat%201.mp3?dl=0

Shovelbearer fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Jul 31, 2018

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 20:49

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 09:17

Shovelbearer: Oct 11, 2003; Paragon of Lexicon

Hey here's one.
https://soundcloud.com/dcompose/wax-tulips

# ¿ Oct 16, 2018 05:43

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > No Music Discussion > Musician's Lounge > Hip Hop Production Thread Part Deux