1. Intro
Make Your Own Beats > A Free Online How-To Guide
If you’re interested in how to make your own hip-hop beats but don’t know where to begin and don’t want to break your wallet, you’re on the right track. This free online guide was intended for those with little to no knowledge of how to make rap beats and want to delve into the world of computer-based production. I’ve created this free guide to teach your how to get started, from ground up – starting with your computer, a collection of useful software programs, and a few handy tools to get you on your way. With the help of this guide, you should be on your way to make your own beats you never knew you could create with a limited set of inexpensive tools. Like you, as an aspiring hip-hop producer, I’ve had to learn how to get started from the ground-up; from finding out which tools were best for me and getting over the humps and steep learning curves a beginner goes through. It’s a continuous learning process and you’ll find the more you do it, the more comfortable and better you’ll get. So without further ado, get started and learn how to make your own beats.
Developing the mindset:
First things first, the most important thing you need to make your own beats is a good ear. No, you don’t need to necessarily be the next Beethoven, or a superb musician for that matter. Hip-hop, like other genres of music, is an expressive art form. As an expressive art form, making beats is like creating through feeling, emotion, and influence. It can start with an idea – whether you hear the complete song in your head, or maybe just a drum pattern playing in your head. As a creative art form, you may find everything comes easy to you, but like other art-forms you could also suffer from a serious creative block. Luckily, there are several advantages of learning how to make your own hip hop beats. First, as I stated earlier, you don’t need to be an extremely gifted “composer”, in the sense that you don’t need to be able to play several instruments or know how to read or write music, although knowing these things can definitely be an asset. You still need to be musically inclined, and more importantly, have a sense of rhythm. As you know, hip-hop is a loop-based genre, dependent mainly on drum and percussion sounds. Most importantly, hip-hop is all about creating a fresh, new sound. Fortunately, hip-hop is extremely innovative and (in most cases) receptive to new sounds: THERE ARE NO RULES. With that in mind, you may very well pick up on your own style for your music, and as long as it stays within the open confines of conventional hip-hop music, you may very well be creating the new hot sound. Now that you know the type of mindset and have gotten through a quick Hip-Hop 101, the next thing is the have the right gear.
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