How To Pick The Right Beats! A Rapper’s Guide to Hot Instrumentals
For any up and coming hip-hop artist, there are two things you need to make sure you have: mic skills and hot beats. To a certain extent, beats are the most important thing you need, because often times, people won’t even care what you are talking about if your beats aren’t hot! I’m sure you know some rappers who get plenty of attention with limited skills because they get crazy beats, so it makes it that much more important when you can really spit.
Choosing the right type of instrumental for your song is also really important. There are all kinds of categories of beats to choose from as well. Old school, dirty south, east coast, west coast, trap, electronic and more are out there to choose from. so make sure you pick a style that works for you.
East Coast beats tend to have very compressed, “dirty” drums, lower tempos, 85-100 BPM or so and may incorporate pianos and strings. These types of beats also frequently use samples of other music to flesh out the track.
West Coast beats often have very clean drums, lots of guitar sounds can be found, and very often the track has elements of funk music. The drums can be programmed to ‘swing’ and the basslines often roll like in traditional funk music.
Dirty South/Trap Beats are very popular now and they usually don’t use any samples at all, done all through keyboards, drum machines. These tracks have very precise drums with extra emphasis on 32nd and 64 note hi-hat sounds to accent the beat. These beats will use very ‘epic’ sounding brass and string keyboard patches to create a wall of sound.
Also popular today is adopting techniques from European dance music. Rappers like Flo-Rida, Pitbull and others can be heard rapping over track with heavy inspiration from House, Trance, Electro,Techno and other dance music styles to cater to audiences in a club setting. These beats feature lots and lots of bright, synthesizer lead sounds and usually a relentless 4/4 beat driving the music the whole time.
Your music won’t sound real if you are using beats that match. Think about your audience, do you want to appeal to the clubs? Then it wouldn’t really make sense to pick a down tempo, Pete Rock or RZA type beat with a tempo less than 110-120 beats per minute (BPM). On the other hand, if you want to appeal to the ‘conscious’ audience, it might not be the best plan to pick a 130 BPM will.i.am/Rick Ross sounding beat either. Ultimately, the choice is yours though, to do whatever you feel will help your music the best.
Of course, since the internet is everywhere, it can be much easier to download instrumental music than to try to find a beat maker locally who can do a great job and make the beat just for you. Unfortunately, talent isn’t distributed evenly across the world, so if you live in, say, Iowa it’s not as likely that you will find the tracks you’re looking for near you, no matter how talented you are. If you are looking for hit beats to drive your career as an artist forward, spend time finding a good source of beats online is a much better option. You should check to see the variety of beats they have, and definitely investigate as to whether or not they can customize beats just for you.
If you’re looking for affordable, downloadable beats, look no further than http://www.thehitbeats.com where you can download beats straight to your computer with no hassle. East Coast, West Coast, Gangsta Rap, Dirty South, and more is just a click away!
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