“Notes on
Hip-Hop Production” by Mike Daley
York University, May 7, 1999
In the spring of 1998, I undertook a “performance option” course
which consisted of weekly one-hour lessons in hip-hop studio production. My
teacher was Derek San Vicente, a Caribbean-Canadian DJ/producer who goes by
the name “Power”. As well as being a member of the Toronto hip-hop
group UBAD, Power creates tracks for a number of area rappers and has also contributed
remixes to several compilation releases. He also works as a DJ for local dance
events and teaches workshops in hip-hop production at community centres. Our
lessons consisted of a combination of demonstration, interviews and Power guiding
me through my own hands-on attempts at rhythm track creation. In the process,
I learned something about Power’s hip-hop aesthetic as well as some of
the rarely studied details of hip-hop musical creation. In this paper, I will
detail some of the processes involved in Power’s hip-hop production style,
with a focus on his solutions to various sonic problems. As well, I will discuss
some of the difficulties that I experienced in trying to learn about these skills
as a musical-cultural insider/outsider.
Power’s productions take place over two stages: the first involves the
creation, manipulation and assembly of samples into a MIDI-sequenced rhythm
track, while the second deals with final recording and mixing to tape in the
studio, including the addition of vocal tracks. My work with Power concentrated
on the first stage, which is completely MIDI controlled. His studio is simple,
but it is effective for getting this pre-production work done. More than recording
or MIDI equipment, the room is dominated by records. Stacking units run along
one long wall, while smaller piles reside between the studio components. In
a way, these records are the heart of Power’s studio, as they are the
sonic wellspring from which his productions take shape. I will describe here
each of the production stages in turn, beginning with the selection of source
material, to the sampling process, to the manipulation of samples, to the assemblage
of samples into a rhythm track.
Even before this, the very first stage of production is Power’s mental
conceptualization of what the track might sound like. At times, he may have
a set of rhyming verses that have been provided for him by his brother, rapper
Rugged (Ramon San Vicente) or by Ebony, another rapper and member of UBAD. A
fair bit of Power’s production work is freelance as well, and in those
cases he is usually supplied with an idea of the rhymes before he begins. Other
times, Power creates a beat with no preconception about rap verses, and the
track can later be matched to a set of lyrics that fit, or a new set can be
composed to fit the track. In one instance that I observed, Power created a
track as a replacement for one of Ebony’s raw backing tracks (Ebony, who
is incarcerated in Kingston, creates rough backing tracks for his rapping using
a Roland VS-880 digital multitrack unit, and then sends the masters to Power).
I will describe this process in some detail later in this paper.
No matter how Power comes to create a beat or backing track, he tends to have
some mood or emotional feeling in mind from the beginning. The mood of a track,
usually suggested by the lyrics, will determine the tempo, as well as the timbral
qualities of the samples. Power tends to associate certain recorded sounds,
his sampling source material, with certain moods. As his samples generally come
from old records, the perceived lyric theme of the source song will often guide
Power towards using a sampled portion in a track. For example, Power told me
that he associates the sounds in James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m
Black And I’m Proud)” with serious political messages, and he often
finds himself gravitating towards that track when he is trying to create that
mood.
He starts by programming a short drum pattern on an E-Mu SP-12 sampling drum
machine. He usually uses the preset sounds of the machine for these early stages,
but he almost never uses them on final tracks. The exception to this rule is
the hi-hat. Hi-hats are difficult to sample from records, and Power doesn’t
have much of a preference for different versions. Thus, often uses factory preset
sounds for the hi-hats. The kick and snare are a different story, however. When
Power feels that he has the beginnings of a suitable groove, he begins to think
about which records to use for the kick and snare samples. First, though, he
must select a tempo.
He says:
I find the tempo by feel, though I know what BPMs each tempo is. I usually
come between 85 and 95 BPM. Before in hip-hop it was around 116. The dance music
now comes in around 116, 110. It depends on what kind of mood I want to create
in people. Sometimes I want to do a song that's really contemplative, that tells
a story. That type of song is usually more spaced out as far as the rhymes,
so it'll be a little slow. Sometimes I want to do a song that's more hyped,
that gets people to want to party, and that's more upbeat. The rhythm is more
bouncy, the tempo is faster. Certain types of sounds will be different, too,
like maybe a high horn will be used in an upbeat song. Different pianos and
guitars will have different moods too. When you hear just a beat, you imagine
the types of rhymes that could go on top, and that will show you how to shape
the song. (Vicente 1998)
Power has a large collection
of vinyl LPs, including quite a bit of 60s, 70s and 80s pop in addition to hundreds
of R&B, soul, reggae and jazz albums. He draws mostly from 60s and 70s soul
and funk for his samples. He notes that most records after 1977 or so have a
different drum sound than what he likes, so he tends to use older records as
a rule, but not too old; he also tends not to go before 1967. He hears in the
1967-77 period a warm, grainy sound that fits in with his sonic aesthetic, and
as a result he seldom strays from that window of time. He also observes that
in the 1967-77 period, rhythm was the main focus of soul music, because of the
influence of James Brown.
In my time with Power, I saw him draw from Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers,
Sly and the Family Stone, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Jungle
Brothers, Perez Prado, Mongo Santamaria, Santana, James Brown, the Meters, Barry
White, Bob Marley and Eric B. and Rakim.
Power listens through the records for drum breaks when he is looking for drum
samples. Once he finds a suitably isolated section of drums, he will listen
to the break over and over again to find the best example of the drum that he
is looking for. That means a loud, clear, dry, isolated drum, preferably with
a clean decay (though if a clean decay is impossible, Power will use a shorter
sample and add reverb later to recreate the decay). Quite often I observed him
using kick drum samples that also had closed hi-hats sharing the attack. He
doesn’t seem to mind this, and he often filters out the treble anyway,
obscuring the hi-hat.
Most of his records Power knows quite well, and there is little trial and error
in finding the right records. He imagines his sounds, then matches them with
sounds in his memory. Sometimes, as noted above, Power will associate a sound
bite with a particular mood. Other times, Power thinks in terms of isolated
timbres, remembering the snare from this song, the kick from that. His knowledge
of James Brown and the Meters is particularly encyclopedic. At the same time,
he is not completely rigid about choosing samples. On more than one occasion,
he solicited me for ideas and openmindedly incorporated my suggestions into
his own tracks.
This stage of the production was one that I found very difficult when working
on my own tracks. I am accustomed to listening to songs and even albums as wholes,
with transient sounds rarely pondered over or remembered. Power, I suspected,
is attuned to another mode of listening, one that hears songs holistically as
well as in fragments. Clearly he sometimes listens to records as potential sample
sources, taking note of interesting, isolated sonic gestalts and storing their
location and character away mentally. When I tried to create my own beats, I
was often at a loss as to where to get a decent snare, kick, bass guitar or
other sound. Part of this would have to be attributed to the fact that I was
drawing on someone else’s record collection. But I was quite familiar
with a number of records in Power’s collection. I just could not remember
where a clean isolated snare occurred, let alone having a number to choose from
based on the desired mood of the track. On one occasion, I decided to use the
opening snare shot from Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”,
a sound that had struck me in the past as an exciting, timbrally rich, isolated
snare drum sound. But when I sampled it (Power did have a copy of Highway 61
Revisited, though he had never listened to it), we found that the decay was
cut off too soon and the drum was too heavily reverbed to be of much use. When
we truncated the sample to the proper length, it sounded like a gated snare
from an 80s pop record! For this reason, it became clear to me why so many producers
rely on prepared sample CDs as source material. Sifting out useful sounds for
sampling from records is more difficult than it seems at first.
Once a kick drum is selected, it is assigned to a pad on the drum machine, usually
replacing the preset kick drum. Samples are always auditioned both in isolation
and in the context of the programmed groove. A snare drum is selected in the
same manner. Next is bass, but this is sampled to the Ensoniq EPS-16 keyboard
instead of the drum machine. This is so that Power can use the keyboard to create
a bass line. Again, he will have sequenced a bass line using a dummy sound,
to be replaced with a record sample.
Power does not have formal musical training, so he crafts bass lines by ear
and through the use of simple keyboard shapes. Often his lines are quite odd
to my ear, avoiding the usual funk and R&B cliches. They tend to work both
‘with’ and ‘around’ the kick drum line. Isolated bass
sounds for sampling purposes are hard to come by on records, so Power often
uses the same sample, stored on floppy disk, for several different tracks.
Unlike some other hip-hop producers, Power rarely uses a sampled phrase or groove.
When he does, he gives credit in the liner notes for the original source material.
Most of the time, though, he samples by the single note or sound. In other words,
Power relies on “musematic” rather than “discursive”
sampling (to paraphrase Middleton 1990: 267-293). He does not give credit for
these samples, as he believes that he is not stealing intellectual property
when he appropriates a single note or timbral quality.
By this point Power has a basic groove looping on the sequencer. In my time
with him, I noticed a propensity towards four-measure phrases. He tends towards
a rather minimalist approach overall. In attempting to make my own tracks, I
found that I consistently used too many notes. Power seems to be able to predict
the density of the finished track, and thus keeps the basic tracks sparse. Once
the groove is composed and the basic tracks are done, Power will sometimes manipulate
the samples. By far the most fretted-over sound is the kick drum. For the most
part, it is soul or funk kick drums that are being sampled, and as a rule those
kicks (in their original forms) lack the sub-bass frequencies that Power associates
with hip-hop. So he will “detune” the kick using the pitch control
on the sampler (literally lowering the pitch of the sample) and/or add low end
with the EQ controls on his mixer. The EQ solution is only a temporary one,
as he will have to add the low end again in the studio when committing the tracks
to tape. But this allows him to check if the kick can be sufficiently “lowered”
with EQ - if not, he may have to detune the sample or even re-sample the kick.
Alternately, Power will layer the detuned sample over the original sample for
an even bigger sound.
For a studio monitor, Power uses a single, large Cerwin-Vega PA speaker. He
explained to me that his other speaker was blown, but that it didn’t matter
as he didn’t work in stereo at this point in the production process. What
was important was the sub-bass response of the speaker. Power often reiterated
to me the importance of “feeling the kick in your chest”. The medium
to high volumes that Power works at help to reinforce this.
When doing final mixes in the studio, Power is careful to “match”
the bass with the kick drum. This means placing the frequencies of the bass
so that they don’t mask the kick or sound below it in the frequency range.
He says “the bass has to ride the kick. Not really around the same frequency,
there has to be a difference between the two, for separation; they have to be
matching”. As well, he will sometimes put compression on the kick for
extra punch, though he notes that the SP12 drum machine adds a little bit of
compression already.
After the basic groove is down, Power will begin looking for additional sounds.
These may be drawn from any source and may be any sound. This is one of the
rare situations where he will sample an entire musical phrase, though the phrase
rarely survives in any recognizable form after Power’s cutting and pasting.
I saw him use horn shots, guitar fills, organ chords, noise, bits of rap, and
other sounds. On one occasion, he sampled a guitar lick from “Stand!”
by Sly and the Family Stone. He then mapped three copies of the sample to three
different keys on the keyboard. Each sample was then truncated differently -
one was complete and started on a pickup beat, one was clipped to begin on the
down beat, and another was truncated to only sound the last note of the phrase.
Power then played around with different combinations of the sample to come up
with a phrase that was interesting to him. The resulting highly syncopated phrase
was a sequence of the three truncations in the order 1+3+2+2.
On another project, Power sampled the phrases “come on now” and
“all right” from the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take
You There”, as well as an “uh huh huh huh huh” from Grandmaster
Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and mapped them
over the keyboard to try out combinations at various points in the groove. He
is quite meticulous at this stage, carefully testing different keystrokes and
timings for the desired articulation. When he feels that the track is good,
he will play a cappella rap remixes along with it to hear how well they work
with a vocal. This requires a fair bit of cueing and turntable speed manipulation,
skills at which Power is adept because of his DJ experience.
Sometimes he will conclude that the track is too empty or too dense, and will
start adding and removing things. If he feels satisfied. he will simply save
his samples and sequences to disk until it is time to bring his equipment into
the recording studio for mixdown.
I observed Power tackling one particular production problem that was unique
in my experience. Ebony, a Jamaican-Canadian rapper, has been an associate of
Power’s for several years and a member of UBAD. Unfortunately, he has
also been an inmate at Collins Bay Institution in Kingston, Ontario, for seven
years. Nonetheless Power and Ebony continue to collaborate. Both men own Roland
VS-880 digital multitrack recorders, which allow them to record multitrack digital
audio and transfer it to a JAZ disk, which can then be sent through the mail.
The multitrack master can be altered ad infinitum until the desired result is
achieved.
Most usually, Power begins the process of collaboration. He creates an instrumental
production on the VS-880, complete with a MIDI synchronization channel, saves
it to a JAZ disk, and mails to disk to Ebony. Ebony then overdubs his vocals
and returns the disk to Power for further production and final mixdown. In the
session which I will describe, however, Power was working with a production
that had already been more or less completed by Ebony.
Ebony’s production contained five separate tracks:
1. drum machine
2. bass line
3. piano sample
4. Bob Marley sample (see footnote 1)
5. Ebony’s vocal
Ebony’s studio setup
is described by Power as “primitive”: other than the VS-880 and
JAZ drive, he uses a “really old” Alesis drum machine, an unidentified
small sampling keyboard and a Shure SM-58 dynamic mic. As a result, the sounds
on Ebony’s recording were very raw, with uneven levels, low timbral fidelity
and a great deal of noise. Power’s main task was to “clean up”
Ebony’s recording, while remaining faithful to the basic arrangement.
While talking with Power and his brother Rugged, I became aware of how reverential
they are towards Ebony; he is older than both and represents truly raw and real
rapping to them. Power’s interest in preserving the integrity of Ebony’s
vision on this track, even to the point of finding the original sources for
his samples and re-sampling them with higher fidelity, is further evidence of
his respect.
Most of Ebony’s recording collection in prison is in the form of cassette
tapes, a notoriously low-fi and noisy medium. Thus, his samples are often too
muffled and hissy to be used on a final product. Where possible on this track,
Power attempted to ascertain the original source for a sample, resample it from
a record, and replace the old sample in the track. I observed this process with
a short Bob Marley vocal sample, the line “Do you know what it means to
have a revolution”1. Power had simply re-sampled the line and replaced
Ebony’s original, flawed sample. This is a very difficult and time-intensive
process, as the sample must be truncated and filtered and then placed at precisely
the right spot in the track.
When Power was unable to re-sample the original source, he sampled Ebony’s
samples and attempts to clean them up digitally by compressing them, filtering
out high-end noise, or truncating out unwanted sounds. Power did this with Ebony’s
noisy bass track, filtering out tape hiss with a lowpass filter, but he was
unable to do much with the higher frequencies of the piano sample.
My experience in Power’s studio was a valuable one for working towards
understanding the ways that sampling and sequencing are used in hip-hop production.
He is something of a sonic archivist, using his vast record collection and his
knowledge of 60s and 70s funk, soul, reggae and rap to construct new music.
In this way he is an examplar of the hip-hopper as black cultural historian,
a trope that runs through much of the existing work on rap and hip-hop music
(see, for example, Rose 1994 and Potter 1995).
There were some difficulties that I encountered, though, in the process of taking
lessons with Power. I have mentioned some of them in the above paragraphs, but
I would like to expand on them here and suggest some reasons for these problems.
Hip-hop production, by its very nature, is a highly technologized practice.
This means that a great deal of time is expended in the studio, dealing with
patch connections, knobs, switches and dry numerical values. A large part of
the learning process is spent reading manuals, playing with the equipment, and
making time-consuming mistakes. In other words, I spent much of my time with
Power ( a series of one-hour sessions conducted on a weekly basis over the winter
1998 term) bogged down in what I considered to be mundane technological work.
Just in terms of time management, this meant that I could not delve very deeply
into Power’s music, as we would just be getting going when the time would
run out. I feel that a weekly lesson simply does not do justice to the complexity
of hip-hop production because of the particular emphasis on technology.
This is not to imply that the manipulation of technology is not loaded with
specific cultural practices and aesthetic values. Clearly, a drum machine or
a sampler (or even a tape recorder or mixer) can be used (or abused) in a number
of ways. Tricia Rose (1994) has documented the emphasis on distorted, raw timbres,
for example, in some hip-hop production. I myself noted that Power relied on
an old, conventionally obsolete drum machine because of its “raw”
sound. Levels can be maxed, samples can be truncated to sound slightly “late2
”, and low end can be boosted to body-shaking levels. But the musicking
process is less transparent when observing a producer pushing buttons than with
the more obviously kinesic processes of singing or playing an instrument. I
would attribute this partly to a common visual bias in observation - we often
hear and feel with our eyes, and if nothing is going on visually, we tend to
think nothing is going on at all. Cynthia Fuchs, in a paper given at IASPM-US
in Pittsburgh in October 1997, noted this problem with audiences at concerts
by DJ-performers like Tricky - how does a live audience deal with a performer
who is barely moving and is not playing an instrument?
In any case, the problem in observing a visually “quiet” musical
practice becomes one of not noticing things when they happen. In other words,
Power looks just like I do when he is manipulating a sampler or mixer. How do
I note significant differences in our respective practices? This brings up the
issue of cultural distance in learning of this kind.
In regards to my own cultural position and set of skills and experiences, my
relation to Power was insider/outsider, and this is a particularly difficult
position because the commonalities sometimes obscure the differences. In an
abstract way, I have done everything over the years that I saw Power do, in
a variety of recording settings from four-track cassette to twenty-four track
two-inch tape. I “know” how to program a drum machine, I “know”
what a sampler does. Yet Power and I achieve vastly different end products.
In some ways, I believe that Power wanted to obscure the differences between
us as musicians. He does not want to be seen as a cultural artifact, he wants
to be seen as a musician and producer. Power’s desire to be seen as a
producer who specializes in hip-hop, not a hip-hop producer, is clearly to be
respected, but this makes it difficult to analyze and synthesize his approach
to production.
If anything, I would advise future students of hip-hop production to eschew
a lesson-based approach in favour of ongoing “live-in” observation
if possible. Obviously, this is the ideal learning situation for a number of
unfamiliar cultural practices, but the highly technologized practice of hip-hop
production is, in my opinion, particularly ill-suited to the hour-long lesson
model.
*
References:
Middleton, Richard 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular vernaculars: hip-hop and the politics of postmodernism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Rose, Tricia 1994. Black Noise: Rap
Music and Black Culture in Contemporary
America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.
San Vicente, Derek. 1998. Interview with the author. February 7, 1998.