East Coast Beat Tips

Series Summary

Are you a songwriter? Do you love to play music? Are you in a band? Well, there are a number of ways for you to get your songs recorded and out in the marketplace—or even just to make copies for you and your friends. In the past, musicians polished their material over and over, until it was radio-worthy. Then they went into a professional studio to cut a demo or an album. Fast forward a few years and you had the explosion of small home recording devices that could be purchased for a reasonable price. Now, in the next generation of the home recording saga, we have stepped into the Digital Age with both feet. Anyone with a computer, a bit of recording software, a USB interface, an instrument, and some patient ingenuity can make a recording that would border on professional quality. Is making beats in your blood? Do you have a dream to be the next Dr. Dre? Well that dream begins with a great beat. In this free music video series, get instructions by a music studio owner and producer how to make phat beats. He'll explain beat by bye starting with the drums, snare, clap and various kicks. Next move on to putting down some hi-hats, percussion, cymbals, rim shots and open hats. Finally, complete the beat with shakers and snaps. Soon you'll be dropping dope beats with help from our expert.

Video Transcript

"All right, now we're going to talk about, we're going to start talking about making east coast sounding beats. Well the first thing you want to do when you're making an east coast sounding beat is start off with the break beat. A lot of times you can find these break beats on different sample CDs. And break beats, what a lot of people like to call break beats are beats that are maybe taken from like old samples like a James Brown or old funk songs, or just like old songs from the sixties. So what you want to do is find some break beats, you could find it from old records, or there's actually a lot of loop CDs out there that have break beats, there's different websites that you can download break beats for free. So what you want to do is like I said find some old funk beats and a lot of that is in the middle of the songs, they're just a little drum solo. These are just some typical things a lot of east coast beats have. So what you want to do when you're making an east coast beat, the first thing you want to do is find a break beat, check it out, let me show you what a break beat is. This is an old break beat right here. This is actually from an old song, but I got this from a break beat CD, it's like a data disk you can buy at different music stores, but this is just a break beat. See, that's just nothing but an old drum beat looped, and what I did was just chop it, chop it up, made it a loop, and a lot of east coast beats you'll hear have those old type of break beats. Now these ain't for every east coast beat, but these are just some typical things when I sold a lot of east coast beats, these are some of the techniques that I used when I was selling these east coast beats."