Common Myths Re: 90s ERA Beats!

I've been a long time reader here and I've seen quite a few posts about making 90's era boom bap beats ala Large Pro, Pete Rock, Showbiz etc. Along with those posts I've seen a lot of misinformation..thought it would be helpful/interesting to expose some myths you've seen on message boards about producing golden era boom bap.

One of my favorite myths is QUANTIZE OFF to get a more "human feel". The vast majority of golden era producers quantized their drums. Sloppy isnt always good and in fact usually sounds bad. Alot of 90s producers quantized to 1/16th triplets and didn't tweak the velocities of their hi hats another "golden rule" on message boards.. Also a lot of guys simply looped drum breaks where quantize is null.

Another one is stacking drums..while i believe layering drums can sound good in some instances, i don't recall many golden era producers who did it. From guys i spoke with, it was simply diggin for drums and tweaking them in certain machines and some obviously just gritty from being run through the SP1200 etc. If you you are trying to achieve a real drum feel i dont know any live drummer who play 3 snares and 3 bass drums at one time.

Another : CHOP everything into small parts..again if you study or followed early 90s boom bap it was a lot of straight loops some chops but usually not down to 1/8 note chops with stabs. In addition, those guys used filters on vintage machines and simply replayed the same loops I know of one producer who used such short chops in a good way and that's Premier..most other guys it doesn't sound musical and on point to me.

Last myth of the day: You need incredible sick booming drums which should take hours to tweak to make your track work! Wrong. I can name countless tracks that are carried solely by the arrangement and the sample..in these instances the drums are sub-par if you really listen to it. Sub-par to the point you would call them wack if you heard them in a free online drum kit. Alot of RZA's stuff, while insanely sick, doesnt have crisp pounding drums.

Feel free to add on if you agree or disagree if you like.

Great site.

not sure of specific times where those pieces of advice were given to make 90's hip hop... but some of those tips are pretty good ones to new people who are learning to make music for the first time and are using an mpc.

and stacking drums isn't supposed to sound in the end like 3 snares playing at ones. it's to create a new tone and timber (ie: a more bassy meaty snare combines with a bright snapping snare but lacks in the balls department) ... at least that is what I assume they are talking about when suggesting that. And Im sure producers did that.. ie: damu I think said he did to create "his drums" that he uses on a lot of his work...

Me personally, I dont have any drums I always use... I pick something and make it from scratch on every song pretty much (eqing, chopping, etc..)



as for chopping small, that was a symptom of oldschool gear.. sometimes people would use looping to fill gaps where the sample was too short. But you are right about primo using gaps as an additional element.. it sounded great IMO.

I really don't believe most 90s era guys stacked drums at least the couple i spoke with didnt but i would like to hear if any did that you or anyone knows of.

i hear you though i see how stacking drum can create a different sound but heard more cases of it doing more harm than good..i think it over complicates things for a newbie.

Take for example..Shook Ones..its fully quantized and there are no velocity edits its all one volume for the hats and snares etc. Makes sense because it was tedious on the EPS16 to change velocity. Havoc was limited by the equipment of the times.

Also, alot of the sloppy sounding boom bap you heard back in the day was simply everything quantized to 1/16th at the same volume.

my best tip for new producers is using the double tempo sequencing i've seen debated here. most new guys have trouble programming the down beats in regular time and to mitigate it for your straight boom bap sequence, simply double the tempo and play a hat to each metronome hit and don't play your drums at the desired tempo of your beat but play it mad slow.

mr_debauch wrote:not sure of specific times where those pieces of advice were given to make 90's hip hop... but some of those tips are pretty good ones to new people who are learning to make music for the first time and are using an mpc.

and stacking drums isn't supposed to sound in the end like 3 snares playing at ones. it's to create a new tone and timber (ie: a more bassy meaty snare combines with a bright snapping snare but lacks in the balls department) ... at least that is what I assume they are talking about when suggesting that. And Im sure producers did that.. ie: damu I think said he did to create "his drums" that he uses on a lot of his work...

Me personally, I dont have any drums I always use... I pick something and make it from scratch on every song pretty much (eqing, chopping, etc..)



as for chopping small, that was a symptom of oldschool gear.. sometimes people would use looping to fill gaps where the sample was too short. But you are right about primo using gaps as an additional element.. it sounded great IMO.

yeah I feel that.. for me, I will leave quantize at 16/3 or sometimes 16 for hats etc.. and once is a blue moon I bring it down to 1/8 for the snares... the reason for that is because the sloppyness I get isn't from some swing setting.. it's chopping with air in front of the sample. A long time ago I always chopped right on the dot and you could turn quantize off on say.. the hats to get a bit of an untimed vibe.. but it just isn't my thing anymore.

and yeah, super late snares weren't an everyday thing.. often to my ears it was straight drums like you said.. maybe a bass note that hit a slight bit earlier than the kick to give it some bounce.

as for mob deep, yeah I think you are right about not using different velocities.. probably things like adding a sleighbell on the kick and/or snare might have made it feel that way almost along side the hats..


I guess golden era hip hop though can be viewed as quite wide ranged.. so many styles from various producers.

as for powerful drums, yeah I feel your point... but I still like a good drum on beats.. portishead from 94 (dummy) is a prime example of an album where every song except maybe one of them has fantastic drums. Though not rap music..

golden era's original post is 100% correct

alota people talk about layering drums here. layering drums can give you fatter drum sounds. sum drums just sound fat to start with. from listening to lots of 90s hh i feel layering wasn't part of every producers style. i feel like snares and claps get layered alot but i feel producers don't layer the clap till after the drums are sittin on the 1,2,4 bar loop.

i feel like classic filters were used alot on boombap era drums quite often

90s samplers filters and effects gave it that sound

the easiest way to get it is hardware and just using the old 90s machines

you can also get it with software but its more work

what about the mixing/mastering engineers?? I guess they also played a BIG role as far as the sound from the classic blasts from the past goes.

discuss

peace

It's pretty obvious when you listen to a beat if the kick is layered or not.

It's pretty obvious when you listen to a beat if a sample has been looped or chopped to 16th's

It's pretty obvious that backbeat drums were quantized straight with other elements of the rhythm section (ie ghost notes) swung/shifted/recorded live.

I sometimes find that if you listen to the track closely you can pretty much hear what's going on, especially if you know the sample source.

In my mind, if you're going for the 90's 'sound' there are only two rules of thumb.
1. Sample stuff very loud. (assuming your using a legacy smapler ie. pre 1995)
2. Sample from a non compressed sound source (like those big round black things)

Makes sense not to layer your drumsounds when working on a S950 or SP1200.
Those samplers only had 8 mono voices, so layering drumsounds inside an oldschool sampler would eat up too much voices.

The only way they probably 'layered' something was when they layed down the drums over the drum hits in the melodic part of the sample.

There are no rules. There wasn't even a formula to make beats because producers back then were interested in doing different things to sound original.

RZA's Constant Elevation by Gravediggaz was layered drums and there were a few others that layered sampled drum breaks with drum machine sounds. Also most producers had to layer drums because samples would contain traces of drums so the producer had to create a pattern that drowned those out, like Black Sheep's Flavor Of The Month.

Hip Hop is just making something out of nothing. Take what you have and make the best of it. As for 90's beats, I like that heads create their own theories, we all like to try something new. Maybe its not what they did back then but the craft can sure use some innovated techniques to evolutionize that sound because its the roughest and rawest form of Hip Hop music.

Not trying to thwart the thread, no. Just opinions yeah

Some good points in this thread - one thing to remember though - quantize "off" does NOT equal "sloppy".. It just means no time correction.. So you can still play the pads clean with a good tight groove without quantize on , just depends who you are I guess.. Maybe some people who make beats can't hit the pads in time , I dunno ..

I don't use quantize cause I want it to play back as I really played it.. Sometimes ill quantize my snares to tighten it up for example, but there's no reason that turning quantize off has to equal sloppy.. Just sayin!

I will agree about Premier most of his beats have the very loose feel although i dont think he varies the velocities of his drum hits at all but that's his sound and no question he is the man.

I am pretty sure on some old Gangstarr joints he quantized some stuff because some of them arent nearly as loose as the usual Premier stuff.

Can i point one other misconception that bothers me? The E-digging makes you wack talk. Again, the reason alot of older heads used Vinyl because that's what was mostly available then. It's not like guys could just walk into the dollar bin and find 70's Turkish Prog. I guarantee you if RZA, Primo etc could've used the web to dig online they would have. I think only sampling off vinyl limits you greatly.

On a side note, was listening to some Gangstarr stuff and got emotional. Blessed in the sense i got to grow up on golden-era hip hop but sad to see dudes like big l ,guru, biggie etc gone and wonder what couldve been. I'm sour in my old age and like what i like.