First thing first, I’m Dj Nejo, a DJ Producer, composer, not exactly a beatmaker. Sometimes it happens to make beats, for a remix which cannot be made “house music style”, for someone who asked me to create a track for his lyrics, for a track that I wrote for myself, even if it’s not exactly my genre.
(There a nice video on the difference between a beatmaker and a producer, we’ll discuss it in a next article.)
So, straight to the point here is the key points to make awesome beats and to create your own unique sound.
- Don’t use only a single library
When you’re starting as a producer or beatmaker, you don’t know exactly where to start, so you tend to get one or a few libraries and exploring them.
If you pick p.e. an hip hop sample pack, you start from the kick, and then snare, clap, hi-hat and so on to get your own drum.
First advise is not to limit yourself with an only pack. Combinations are just a few, you may ends with something at least similar to what other people with the same library have created. Instead if you start with two or three different libraries, you can have your own personal mix of different sounds and try to build your own idea.
- Don’t limit yourself into a single genre
It’s good for the kind of producer you want to be, to get comfortable in many different situations and always maintain your own style. But if we’re talking about beats, it might sounds a little weird. If I’m creating an hip hop track why should I pick a loop made for House Music?
Well, this is when your creativity comes out. A kick is a Kick, a Clap is a Clap. There distinctive sounds for each and every genre, but you can find also awesome solutions if you mess things up a little bit.
For example, in this track I picked an hi-hat which it was originally made for Trance Music, at 145 bpm (!!) and I pitched it down to 118 bpm for my track Tell’em (at 1'37") .
It was really different than the original sound, but it suited well into his “new dimension”, and it was something unexpected, something that cannot happen if you use only the usual libraries.
If you search and experiment in many different directions, you may find something good to use that you couldn’t even imagine.
- Play with samples
It’s really rare that I choose a sample and it’s completely Ok for the track I’m making. Usually I split it into different parts and try to get the best out of it. I can loop the first two bars and put the rest atthe end of the measure; I can remove some sounds or variations, I can isolate a single sound and repeat it on and on. Sky is the limit, really. Don’t let your arrangement be only a bunch of loops put one after the other. Interact with them, play, stretch them. Be creative. You can make many different parts with just only a sample,
- Don’t use only samples.
After you got the most out of your sample, there’s another universe that can open his doors. You can add recording of real instruments or create something new with virtual instruments.
You may not be a drummer, but you can use your hands and a mic, you can record sounds from your room and put them into your arrangement; you can open a drum machine from your DAW and try other loops, presets or invent one from scratch.
If you mix samples with recordings and plugins, you can make beats really uniques, that cannot be repeated just buying the same library.
Becoming a producer or a beatmaker seems hard at the beginning, but don’t get stressed too much, just put yourself in front of a computer or a mixer and let music entertain you. Something good is going to happen.
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