Hip hop production is the creation of hip hop music in a recording studio. While the term encompasses all aspects of hip hop music creation, including recording the rapping of an MC, a turntablist or DJ providing a beat, playing samples and "scratching" using record players and the creation of a rhythmic backing track, using a drum machine or sequencer, it is most commonly used to refer to recording the instrumental, non-lyrical and non-vocal aspects of hip hop.
Hip hop producer and rapper RZA in a music studio with two collaborators. Pictured in the foreground is a synthesizer keyboard and a number of vinyl records; both of these items are key tools that producers and DJs use to create hip hop beats.
Production and Songwriting[]
Hip Hop Producers credited as the record producer and songwriter, are composers of a musical composition and creative directors involved in guiding and supervision of recording sessions. This can range from a single song to a full-length album or EP.
A hip hop instrumental is colloquially referred to as a beat or musical composition and its composer is referred to as a programmer, songwriter or beat maker. In the studio, a hip hop producer functions as a traditional record producer, being the person who is ultimately responsible for the final sound of a recording, for guiding the artists and performers and giving advice to the audio engineer on the selection of microphones and effects processors and on how to mix the levels of the vocals and instrumentals. Since Hip hop producers generally co-write the original music such as the beat, they are known as Record Producer / Songwriters, that's wearing two hats. They generally receive production and songwriting credits for both acting roles esp Pharrell Williams, J.R. Rotem, Tricky Stewart, Teddy Riley, Bryan-Michael Cox, Rodney Jerkins, Dr. Dre, Scott Storch , Timbaland etc.
Producer tags[]
Modern producers commonly use producer tags, also known as audio tags, musical tags or simply tags. They function as a watermark for producers and beatmakers to make sure that they are given credit. These can range from producers (or artists that they work with) reciting the producer's name or stage name to a phrase unique to them. An example of the former is when Drake starts his song "In My Feelings" with the lyric "Trap, TrapMoneyBenny", shouting out one of the song's co-producers. An example of the latter is Metro Boomin's "[sic] Metro Boomin want some more, nigga!" which comes from a sample of Young Thug on his track "Some More" in which he shouts out Boomin, who co-produced the song along with Sonny Digital and TM88. Producers and beatmakers often times utilize a number of tags in order to personalize the track. A prime example is producer CAB's variation between "CAB you're crazy for this", "CAB!", and "Yo, it's Charlot". These originate from hip-hop record producers shouting their name over a track before it started, and eventually vocal processing became involved, resulting in tags that sound like part of the song, and eventually in artists shouting the producer's name rather than producers doing so themselves.
History[]
| “ | Hip-hop, the dominant turn-of-the-century pop form, gives the most electrifying demonstration of technology's empowering effect [...] [T]he genre rose up from desperately impoverished high-rise ghettos, where families couldn't afford to buy instruments for their kids and even the most rudimentary music-making seemed out of reach. But music was made all the same: the phonograph itself became an instrument. In the South Bronx in the 1970s, DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. Later, studio-bound DJs and beat maker's used digital sampling to assemble some of the most densely packed sonic assemblages in musical history: Eric B. and Rakim's Paid in Full, Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet, Dr. Dre's The Chronic. — Alex Ross, Listen to This (2010) | ” |
1980s[]
The Roland TR-808 drum machine was introduced in 1980, and consisted on an analog machine with step programming method. The 808 was heavily used by Afrika Bambaataa, who released "Planet Rock" in 1982, in addition to the electro hip hip groundbreaking classic "Nunk" by Warp 9, produced by Lotti Golden and Richard Scher, giving rise to the fledgling Electro genre. An especially notable artist is the genre's own pioneer Juan Atkins who released what is generally accepted as the first American techno record, "Clear" in 1984 (later sampled by Missy Elliott). These early electro records laid down the foundations that later Detroit techno artists such as Derrick May built upon. In 1983, Run-DMCrecorded "It's Like That" and "Sucker MC's," two songs which relied completely on synthetic sounds, in this case via an Oberheim DMX drum machine, ignoring samples entirely. This approach was much like early songs by Bambaataa and the Furious Five.
Kurtis Blow was the first hip hop artist to use a digital sampler, when he used the Fairlight CMI for their 1984 album "Ego Trip", specially on the track "AJ Scratch". The E-mu SP-12 came out in 1985, capable of 2.5 seconds of recording time. The E-mu SP-1200 promptly followed (1987) with an expanded recording time of 10 seconds, divided on 4 banks. 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 style of restructuring drum loops by sampling individual drums, in the mid 1980s, a technique which was popularized by the MC Shan's 1986 single "The Bridge" which used chops of "Impeach the President" on two Korg Delay/sampling triggered by a Roland TR-808. The Akai MPC60 came out in 1988, capable of 12 seconds of sampling time. The Beastie Boys released Paul's Boutiquein 1989, an entire album created completely from an eclectic mix of samples, produced by the Dust Brothers using an Emax sampler. De La Soul also released 3 Feet High and Rising that year.
1990s-present[]
Public Enemy's Bomb Squad revolutionized the sound of hip-hop with dense production styles, combining tens of samples per song, often combining percussion 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 1999 and the MPC2500 in 2006. These machines combined a sampling drum machine with an onboard MIDI sequencer and became the centerpiece of many hip hop producers' studios. The Wu Tang Clan's producer RZA is often credited for getting hip hop attention away from Dr. Dre's more polished sound in 1993. RZA's more gritty sound with low rumbling bass, sharp snare drum sounds and unique sampling style based on Ensoniq sampler. With the 1994 release of The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die, Sean Combsand his assistant 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 the "chipmunk" technique popular. This had been first used by 1980s electro hip-hop group Newcleus with such songs as "Jam on It". This technique involves speeding up a vocal sample, and its corresponding instrumental loop, to the point where the vocal sounds high-pitched. The result is a vocal sample that sounds similar to the singing of the popular cartoon singing animals "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. Kanye West has used the "chipmunk" effect in many of his songs, and has been used in many other artists' music in the 2010s.
Elements[]
Drum beat[]
Main article: Beat (music)[]
The drum beat is a core element of hip hop production. While some beats are sampled, others are created by drum machines. The most widely used drum machine is the analog Roland TR-808, which has remained a mainstay for decades. Digital samplers, such as the E-mu SP-12 and SP-1200, and the Akai MPC series, have also been used to sampledrum beats. Others yet are a hybrid of the two techniques, sampled parts of drum machine beats that are arranged in original patterns altogether. The Akai MPC series and Ensoniq ASR-10 are mainstays for sampling beats, particularly by The Neptunes. Some beat makers and record producers are sound designers that create their own electronic drumkit sounds, such as Dr. Dre, Timbaland, DJ Paul & Juicy J, Swizz Beatz, Kanye West and The Neptunes. Some drum machine sounds, such as the 1980s-era TR-808 cowbell, remain as historical elements of hip hop lore that continue to be used in 2010s-era hip hop.
Sampling[]
Main article: Sampling (music)[]
“Hip hop does not simply draw inspiration from a range of samples, but it layers these fragments into an artistic object. If sampling is the first level of hip hop aesthetics, how the pieces or elements fit together constitute the second level. Hip hop emphasizes and calls attention to its layered nature. The aesthetic code of hip hop does not seek to render invisible the layers of samples, sounds, references, images, and metaphors. Rather, it aims to create a collage in which the sampled texts augment and deepen the song/book/art's meaning to those who can decode the layers of meaning.”
— Richard Schur, Hip Hop Aesthetics and Contemporary African American Literature (2008)
Sampling is using a segment of another's musical recording as part of one's own recording. It has been integral to hip hop production since its inception. In hip-hop, the term describes a technique of splicing out or copying sections of other songs and rearranging or reworking these sections into cohesive musical patterns, or "loops." This technique was first fully explored in 1982 by Afrika Bambaata, on the Soulsonic Force tape Planet Rock, which sampled parts of dance act Kraftwerk and experienced vast public acclaim. This was followed up on in 1986: then-Def Jam producer Rick Rubin used Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin loops in creating the Beastie Boys' debut Licensed to Ill, and the following year rap duo Eric B. & Rakim popularized James Brown samples with their album Paid in Full.
The technique took a bi-coastal turn when discovered by a young Dr. Dre, whose first gig was the DJ of Afrika Bambaata-esque electrofunk group, the World Class Wreckin' Cru. In 1988, Dre began his use of sampling in hip-hop when he produced the N.W.A album Straight Outta Compton, a landmark in the genre of gangsta rap. In 1989, Jazz-sampling pioneers Gang Starr followed in 1991 by Pete Rock & CL Smooth and A Tribe Called Quest both appeared on the scene, popularizing their brand, and sampling took on a full role in hip-hop, spreading to prominence in high-profile projects like the Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, Dr. Dre's The Chronic, Nas' Illmatic and Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die.
In the 2000s, sampling began to reach an all-time high; Jay-Z's album The Blueprint helped put producers Kanye West and Just Blaze on the map for their sampling of soulrecords. Kanye West himself scored early hits with "Through the Wire" and "Jesus Walks." His 2004 album, The College Dropout, included two sampled hits featuring Twista which led to the Chicago rapper's Kamikaze selling platinum. On September 7, 2004, however, a U.S. Court of Appeals in Nashville changed the nature of musical copyright infringement by ruling that a license is needed in every case of sampling, where previously a small portion of the song could be copied without repercussion. The law immediately began rarefying samples in hip-hop; in a 2005 interview with Scratch magazine, Dr. Dre announced he was moving more toward instrumentation, and in 2006 The Notorious B.I.G.'s 1994 debut album Ready to Die was temporarily pulled from shelves for a retroactive sample clearance issue. As a result, more major producers and artists have moved further away from sampling and toward live instrumentation, such as Wu-Tang's RZA and Mos Def.