How To Make Beats On A Keyboard
Making hip hop and rap beats is a very popular hobby, with perseverance it can actually become a profession. The fact that most present day home computers have more than enough power to run a decent music production set up makes it really easy to get started. Here I'll review some of the equipment needed to make your own rap beat.
A Music Production Software
There are plenty of music software to choose from these days. Fruity Loops for example, let's you download a fully working demo that comes with some lessons, but you can't save anything until you pay.
After doing some research I found an 'internet only' product named Sonic Pro. This package is pretty impressive, for a mere .00 USD it offers a sequencer, sounds, effects and instruments.
What sets this program apart is that it includes a bunch of tutorial videos about how to make your own beats. The videos are not only for the included software but also for more popular choices like Pro Tools and Logic.
An Audio Interface
Most computers come with a sound card included, where you plug the speakers. The problem of these is that they are susceptible to a horrible amount of latency.
Latency is the amount of time the computer takes in processing an external signal. This creates the very common problem of playing a note now and hearing the sound 2 seconds later.
To record a live performance of any kind would be almost impossible this way. Also if you want to plug musical instruments or mics audio interfaces have the proper inputs.
A Midi Controller
Playing a midi controller forces you to learn many things: how to record enable tracks, how to set up a metronome, how to quantize and with time even make you decent keyboard player.
Midi used to be difficult to deal with but not anymore, most of today midi controllers connect via USB and are automatically recognized by most popular music software. Their price and size have gone down dramatically in recent years, midi controllers are available now as low as .00 USD.
Monitors
Small computer speakers can not reproduce very well the entire audio frequency spectrum, so they hype up certain frequencies to make up for it. Problems are bigger in the extremes, in particular low end which is a very important range for rap and hip hop beats. Low budget monitors would not take care of this completely, but they will definitely help.
