Hip hop production

Hip hop production is the creation of hip hop music. Modern hip hop production utilizes samplers, sequencers, drum machines, synthesizers, turntables, 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. This means that Hip Hop producers are the instrumentalists involved in a work. In Alternative Rap/Hip hop, there may be more than one producer.

Concept

Hip-hop instrumental music is classified as a drum beat dubbed over sampled music.

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

History

Origins

DJs (starting with Kool DJ Herc) began using several breaks (the part of a funk or jazz song in which the music "breaks" to let the rhythm section play unaccompanied) in a row to use as the rhythmic basis for hip-hop songs. Kool DJ Herc's breakbeat style was to play the same record on two turntables and play the break repeatedly by alternating between the two records.

The emergence of samplers and sequencers allowed the beats to be manipulated with greater precision and granularity and recombined in more complex new ways than was possible with vinyl alone, which gave birth to hip hop production.

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

Sampling is integral to hip hop production. Samples are usually taken from vinyl and imported into samplers/sequencers.

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

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 the Ensoniq 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.

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

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

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

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 asJim 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 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 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

Purely instrumental hip hop tracks were not popular throughout the 1980s, but producers 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, MF Doom, 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.