5 Ways to Improve the Sound Quality of Your Hip Hop Beat Production

Making beats has become a very lucrative profession. Beats can range from $25 to upwards $20,000 with points on an album. These days, anybody with beat software, a computer and headphones can make hot rap instrumentals and potentially make some good money. Just recently, I was in a recording session and an artist brought me a 2 track stereo mix of some beats she produced. One of the beats was way off, the kick was to soft, the instruments weren't defined and the left channel was lower than the right. I thought to myself, she just doesn't know what she is doing and it's not her fought, she just doesn't know. From that observation, I wanted to write an article to help other newbie producers improve the quality of their hip-hop production.

1. The first way to improve your quality is to purchase a decent beat making program. There are many out there but try to find one easy to use that comes with high quality sound kits. This will help out tremendously, because half the battle is won for you. High quality sound kits already sound good; this will make it easy to find good sounds to play with and nice drums to bang out. Look for beat software that has a 16-track sequencer, most come standard these days but you never know. A sampler is a must, there's software that will let you download directly from you tube. Try to locate one that will let you produce directly from your laptop keypads, producers are always on the go and to be able to bang out right from your mac/pc will keep you less stress from carrying around a midi keyboard.

2. The next way you can improve the quality of your beat production is by exporting individual tracks to a recording program such as Pro-Tools or Cubase. There is a plugin called rewire which will allow you to record tracks between both programs in real-time. If you're using a program that doesn't support real wire don't worry, simply export them individually and line up the tracks inside the recording program. Once you have all of your tracks inside your daw, now it's time to do all of the effects, edits, pans, copy/paste, leveling to get your beat sounding decent for vocals. You have room to breath, beat programs are designed, for the most part, to do what they claim and that is to make beats!

3. The third on the list to beat perfection is to not clip the meter and over compress everything. Really good programs come with great sounds that are already compressed; there is no need to add more compression unless that is what you're going for. Clipping meters is bad for digital recordings, try to keep the levels under -3db, if you want to hear it louder, turn up the monitor volume. Major producers understand that after mixing come mastering and if there is digital distortion in the mix, mastering will bring it to the forth front, so pay attention to the levels.

4. Fourth way to improve the sound quality is to record at the highest resolution possible. That means to set up your recording session for 96k/24bit depth. High bit rate recording ensures that your recording is at its highest level of quality; the popularity of mp3s makes this rule even more important. You can always go down in quality, but once it's there, you can never come back up, so start at the highest possible resolution.

5. The fifth and final step to improve the quality of your hip hop beat production or any type of recording is to have a good ad/da convertor. Convertors make sure that what's coming from analog to digital and digital-analog does not lose any of there bit during the transfer of information from one source to the next. A good Apogee and Rme makes some affordable ad/da convertors for under $800.00, you can tell the difference when running beats through them. Using all the steps I outline in this article will defiantly improve the sound quality of your hip-hop beats.