Tips For Recording & Mixing HipHop Tracks
HipHop Crunch has put together a collection of tips that you can use the next time you’re recording or mixing some hip hop beats. We plan to add a new tip to this each week, so stay tuned.
#1 Slicing a beat
Say you got an eight bar beat that you want to use. You might not want to loop that entire passage every time. Perhaps there are a couple of chords that you would like to save for a chorus or something?
Cut, copy and paste! I’m sure you know you can do that if you’ve been playing around with music apps, but how do you do it correctly?
The first thing you’ll want to do is zoom into the waveform rather close and try to make the cut where the waveform neither is on it’s way up or down. Why? Because if it is, you’ll hear a click or pop when you play it back. It’s important that the waveform ends at the same place as the copied part after it begins, and the easy way is to have it “in the middle”, where it doesn’t go up nor down.
Sometimes it seems close to impossible to do this, but don’t worry, there’s a solution for that as well. Many audio applications have something called “fades” (look it up in the manual, they’re done differently depending on the app). Make a very short fade where you have made the cut and the click or pop will disappear.
That’s all there is to it, now go and be creative.
