Home hip hop beat tutorials - Sampling methods

Hi, welcome to my first home hip-hop production tutorial on sampling methods. I am going to show you some effective sampling methods for hip hop and R&B beats using with very limited music hardware. In my first videos I started of with a 512Mb Ram 1.6Ghz Laptop, an Oxygen M8 keyboard, a cheap sound blaster audio interface and sound very cheap PC speakers.

Currently I use a 4Gb RAM Desktop, 3.2Ghz, Presonus, AUDIOBOX USB, an Edirol PC-50 keyboard, some Fostex active speakers and of course Reason 4.

I believe that making beats, whether its hip hop, soul, pop, dance, house, rock it is all about creativity, not about having top of the range hardware and resources for sounds. Of course, once a track is completed you may want to pass it on to somebody professional who can clean up your track making it radio friendly. Since hip-hop is traditionally sampled based, we don't need multiply tracks and effects which require a high end PC. Basically, on the sequencer side of things you can get away with around 4 tracks. 1 track for the sample itself (usually looped), 2nd track for the baseline (unless you are using one that's contained in the sample), the 3d track can be the percussion and the 4th track for the vocals. A low low end PC should be able to handle 4 tracks with no issues. Low-end PC's may run into issues if you start to add multiple effect plug-ins to each track.

This method is quite simple but effective. I loaded a section of the song into Re-Cycle and used the software to split the waveforms.

Re-cycle is a few powerful tool, it analyzes the audio file and then listens and identifies where the attack of the waves are. The attack of the waves the points where you would normally chop a wave for sampling. Re-Cycle does this for you, although a bit of tweaking of self editing may be required depending on the type of audio file you are sampling. Audio files with few instruments and a clear drum pattern are usually easy to auto-chop.

Audio files with a lot of background instrument and a not so dominant drum pattern are usually hard to auto-sample, some editing maybe needed.If you count the bars and beats and input the correct figures, the software will automatically work out the BPM for you. Another good feature is the time stretching functions, this can get you sample segment an extended tail for smooth transitions when the sample doesn't match the beat perfectly.

One finished with re-cycle I then open Reason and load the sample into in the Rex-player, which enables me to play the samples through the keyboard. The each sample segment from Re-cycle is mapped into individual keys on your MIDI keyboard. You will be able to play the samples real-time along with your track, for me this is the easiest and fastest method to incorporate samples into my tracks.

This is the fun part. Once the wave form is saved as a recycle (.rex) file. It can loaded in to Reason via the Rex-file module (see the photo below).This is very simple to use, use loaded the sample segments are automatically mapped into the keys of your MIDI keyboard starting from the left. With this setup you can simply play the samples along with your track until you find something that fits. You can then record the wave segments into the rex-player and edit them afterwords if you wish. Using this method I have been able to drop samples onto tracks within minutes. If the sample is too short or long for any section then it can be time stretched. However over stretching leads to distortion.

People often say that this method of sampling is cheating or skill-less, but I tend to think that good production involves creativity with samples i.e. know how to manipulate a sample, understand what instruments will compliment a sample and imagining how a sample will sound in a potential track. The way of physically chopping up samples is more of a technical engineer thing rather than a musicians skill. Whether you chop up samples manually or automatically, remember it's the creativity of the sample what counts in the end.

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