Hardware for Making Rap Beats

Series Summary

Rapping, also known as emceeing, MCing, spitting, or just rhyming, is the spoken, rhythmic delivery of rhymes and wordplay, and one of the elements of hip hop music and culture. Although the word rap has sometimes been claimed to be an acronym of the phrase "Rhythmic African Poetry", "Rhythm and Poetry", "Rhythmically Applied Poetry", "Rapping About Poetry," "Racing Always Pacing," or "Rhythmically Associated Poetry", use of the word to describe quick speech or repartee greatly predates the musical form. Rapping can be delivered over a beat or without accompaniment, yet stylistically, rap occupies a gray area among speech, prose, poetry, and song.

The driving force of any rap or hip hop song is the beat, or the music that accompanies the rapping and singing. In this free video series, an expert in music media will teach you how to create rap or hip hop beats from scratch. Beginning with the hardware and software needed, you'll go on to learn how to create a tempo, melody, harmony, and drum beats as well. You'll also learn about sampling, using audio and MIDI data, and how to edit rap beats on a computer. With these tips and techniques, you'll be that much closer to producing your own hip hop or rap music.

Video Transcript

"This is Jose Caban. Mac OSX, Reason, and Q bass are registered trademarks of their respective companies and I am in no way affiliated with Apple, Propellerhead or Steinberg. Today I'm going to teach how to make a basic hip hop beat. Let's start first by identifying the studio equipment that we have, so that you know what you would need in order to make something like this. You have hardware, you have software. Let's start with the hardware. Hardware is anything that you can pretty much put your hands on, including instruments. Hardware is a mixer, a keyboard, a guitar, a computer, a microphone. These are all things that are hardware. This is what we're using in our studio here today. Here we have a keyboard. It has many sounds in it so that it can be not only a piano, but it can be a violin, a saxophone, any type of brass, woodwinds. Any other instrumentation you can think of. It's a form of sampling, because it has these different instruments in it, and then it uses MIDI to sample those sounds and play them back to us. Now, let's have a look at our guitar. Our guitar is just a basic, acoustic guitar. Okay, there's no pickup in the bottom of it. So we are going to be just using a basic, acoustic sound. And we're going to be recording it through our microphone. Now, as far as our microphone goes, we're going to be using a standard, dynamic mic. There's two types of microphones: a condenser mic and a dynamic mic. The dynamic microphone doesn't run on auxiliary power, doesn't have power of its own. And it records in the shape of sort of like a mushroom top here, starting at the head of the microphone. If you were using a condenser microphone, such as a shotgun microphone or - most of the time when you see the long, skinny microphones, those are condenser microphones. They have their own power source. They usually have a battery inside the microphone, or they use phantom power which a mixer provides to the microphone to make it power up and be usable. This is a dynamic microphone. It does not have its own power source, or require one. Let's take a look now at our computer. Now, our computer, I'm using a Mac G5. We're going to be running a lot of different applications with this, including MIDI in and out, with a lot of different audio inputs and outputs, as well. You really need a good strong computer, whatever your choice is, to be able to power all of these things to make the whole studio talk with itself well and work well together. Okay, now let's have a look at our mixer. This is a basic sixteen channel mixer. We have everything patched in together so that it gives us maximum flexibility."