Just wanted to drop this here for the hip-hop heads. The first half of the album is all beats, either from my MPC One or my Pocket operator. It was definitely a challenge to get these beats done in a day apiece, but I had fun doing it and hopefully got a smidge better at making beats.
(The rest of the album isn’t hip-hop so ignore that for the purposes of this post.)
Dope! Sounds to me like you’re becoming a master of the mpc…
Here’s my latest video… I’m trying to improve my videomaking skills. I’ll try to post beatvideo’s every 1 or 2 weeks!
Very nice beat! Also, love the vid. Very nice shots.
Question: are you preparing your samples/loops in a daw to get them in the right bpm? Or do you use a Digitakt like approach to “time-stretching”?
So, the million dollar question -
What are your views on using sample packs?
some discussion here
I usually use drums from sample packs, and occasionally I will use a one-shot (heavily processed) I don’t do premade loops, just doesn’t feel right for me.
Haha uhm neither…Everything is done in the AR itself without any timestretching. I guess I’m used to working the old school way: I normally just sample something, pitch it, then set the samplers’ bpm to match the sample, and build the rest around it.
This particular beat has no real loops by the way, even the violin sample is partly chopped up, so I can adjust bpm without any pitching or timestretching.
Mede Nederlander trouwens?
Ha! Klopt, lees het nu terug en die eerste zinnen zijn behoorlijk Nederlands in syntax 
leuk een mede-Nederlander. Waar in het land zit je ongeveer? Ik zit in Amsterdam.
Nu even terug naar het Engels voor de rest:
Very cool to hear about that way of working. Even cooler that it sounds like a loop to me, in the sense that it sounds really organic and natural.
As I come from electronic music, I am used to starting with a drum pattern and setting the BPM to something that feels right. Then I usually try to fit in the samples. I guess it makes sense for me to try doing it the other way around like you are describing 
Lovely tracks @PineappleDave (only got to track 3/day 9 so far and what a banger!) and @Sleepyhead (super lush sounding track mate).
Sample packs… In my made up in my head rules, one shots are fine, maybe a shaker loop is fine as long as it’s used to underpin my own drums./rhythm, straight loops - naaaah. I’m ok with a straight loop from youtube though if it sounds good. But even then I’d want to add to it. Straight loop from a ‘producer pack’ doesn’t sit right with me,
guess it’s one of those things where if you love it enough to have learned all the rules nobody’s gonna fault you for breaking them
not an endorsement either way, but i also think of when loops or samples from producers’ packs make their way into popular songs by hit artists. producers will shop around beats to MCs and others, then get credit when they get picked up. so in some sense, i don’t think it matters a whole lot if you’re using stuff from a sample pack or chopping beats yourself or playing all your own instruments. did the process make you happy? did you like the results? did anyone else?
on the other hand, it does feel disingenuous to pass off as original something that you cobbled together from a few pre-made loops. sometimes i’ll do this while noodling on an idea, trying different instrument loops over a break or whatever, but i won’t upload that stuff to soundcloud or try to pass it off as all my stuff. i’m sure there are many people — even somewhat successful folks making money via music — who would have no issue doing this.
if your banger uses a drum loop from one producer, and a melodic loop from another, and everyone’s credited for the work and is cool with it, maybe that’s okay, too.
I’ve got a few break records from J-Zone and a Samples from Mars thing with 606s and 909s. Other than that, I’m not really into sample packs. I’ve been collecting records for over 20 years. All the Jamuary stuff I did was just me getting around to using some stuff I recorded years ago because I thought I might want to flip it at some point in time. Now I also make a lot of my own samples.
I also mainly use a Digitakt which has a lot of room for samples if you’re pretty conservative about it. I might think differently about this if I were using an MPC or one of the new 404s.
Oh yeah, I did get one of those Smack Packs because I wanted to participate. There was a lot of great stuff in there. And I really liked the beats I made for it.
I’ll just throw it out there that if you or anyone here wants me to try and come up with some bass lines for your tracks I’d be happy to give it a whirl. I have come to really love writing bass lines and it is usually the part that takes me the most time (mostly because I enjoy the process). I aim for simple, in-the-pocket stuff. Below are some demos I wrote that showcase my style on bass. While these aren’t hip hop per se, they are definitely inspired by simple repetitive Boom Bap bass lines.
I’ve been messing around with the Digitakt trying to get some granular type of things going. This one is all Uno synth. I sampled one note and kind of went from there. I also made it the Uno synth act like a drum machine. It’s a good time.
So, on the topic of sampling. I have a confession. Not only don’t I like using loops, but aside from the beat battles, I don’t really enjoy sampling records or other people’s recording anymore either. From a couple of decades of digging for samples, I pretty much mostly just listen to old jazz, funk, reggae/dub, psychedelic stuff, etc, rather than hip hop as well.
Around maybe 2007-2008, I was listening to a lot of Meters/JBs/funkadelic, etc and got back into playing guitar again. Because I was hanging out with a lot of musicians at the time, I got it in my head that what I really wanted to make was music like the stuff I was sampling, probably because most of the people I was hanging out with didn’t really understand/respect what I was doing on an MPC at the time.
I’ve never quite accomplished what I set after, but over the years I’ve taken funk and jazz guitar lessons and I’m studying flute now. I also went deep into VST and orchestral libraries for the last couple of years and took some composition lessons from a TV/film soundtrack composer to help fill in some theory gaps, as I love old library music.
A discovered the Kingsway/Frank Dukes sample libraries a year or two ago, and thought “Damn! Someone is actually doing this!” The first track on this library is such an inspiration to me. Definitely the kind of thing I would love to make.
I made a dub track recently that used no recorded material, just VSTs and live instruments. That’s definitely the direction I’m going now, and I’m hoping to put together an EP of all original stuff this year. I’d love to own all the material and just have it be 100% my work. That’s probably why that Fake Break series above resonated with me so much. With VSTs and orchestral libraries, it’s possible to do what I’ve set after without having to buy/learn to play every instrument or hire session musicians. Kontakt is a beautiful thing.
Anyway, this all started from listening to hip hop and digging into the tunes the producers were using. I’m not sure if anyone else has gone this crazy path.
That said, the beat battles are my guilty pleasure. I love the challenge of having limitations and sampling records is definitely the core of my musical roots.
Also, while I love instruments and VSTs and I’m trying my hand at composition, my true love is samplers, so even if I decide to do something with all original material, I’ll still be using a sampler, and making tracks like I would make beats, I just want to make and sample my own material.
I’m very much on the same page as both @looms and @DimensionsTomorrow: While I love the idea and process of sampling, and it’s the way I generally approach music making, there’s a thin line between the quite romantic concept of making something new out of something old, and the hypercapitalist idea of making mass produced music as efficiently as possible by using readymade loops sounding like the latest hype thing.
Sampling to me is a way of referencing something old, like using it’s historical connotations in an original way. Readymade loops feel soulless to me.
Yeah. I think that at the end of the day, I also know if something I have made feels like art or not. I think it’s important to push oneself.
I think the whole, “I can make a beat in 10 minutes” thing is just missing the point. I wish that hadn’t become a thing for people to brag about. I watched Marlow Digs’ Q&A today. Someone asked him why he doesn’t make a beat start to finish for his channel, and his response was that they take him a long time, and nobody would want to watch that.
I can totally relate to that and respect it. My production process is long and tedious. I basically have to wear headphone as I about drove my wife crazy from listening to sections of songs over and over for hours. Haha.
i’m kinda in the same boat here. sampling has been around for awhile. it’s an accepted form of music making. when i started getting into sampling, loops, and chopping, it felt like a cheat code, opening up all kinds of opportunities. but it also put my lack of musical training into perspective, which made me want to go deeper. soul, funk, and jazz have been a constant in my life for a long time. bands like lettuce, the el michaels affair (the mighty imperials “thunder chicken” is amazing), dub trio, and others have backed hip hop acts for years. i love their stuff and aspire to play my own music with such soul.
I think if the end product sounds great nobody should really worry if a sample pack or anything else was used to create it.
While I totally think that flipping samples and even having a great ear for digging loops is an artform and a great skill, I also increasingly started doubting stealing other people‘s creations without clearing them over the years.
I feel guilty when I produce stuff with sampled records. No offense to anybody, just my feelings.
While I still do it for the fun of flipping samples, I started to use sample packs and even subscribed to Output‘s Arcade for a while.
I think, building a collage of one shot samples for example, and make them work together as if they originated from the same record, can also be a nice challenge when making beats.
But this whole topic was actually one reason that made me move from sample based hip hop to more electronic, synth heavy genres, cause you can build up all the sounds on your own from scratch.
A nice way to make acoustic sounding beats would be using kontakt libraries etc as @DimensionsTomorrow mentioned. Building up your own samples, that you could chop. But it’s quite a challenge making those sound realistic. They probably never sound as good as some sweet 70s Motown sample