laying out your beat

How do you guys lay out you beats, before you try to sell them, I know it's suppose to be three 16 bar verses and two the three hooks, but time lenth wise what is 16 bars, and what would the hook be.


Also what is tracking a beat?
And when you give away or sell a beat to you give them one wav on a cd, or do you give them a wav files for evey sound. Like a cubase file with sounds.

Thanks

markusv3000 wrote:I know it's suppose to be three 16 bar verses and two the three hooks

Suppose to be? Well, not exactly my friend. Although it is pretty standard but, rules were made to be broken, dare to be different

markusv3000 wrote:Also what is tracking a beat?

Separating each individual sound from your beat into different tracks. This works wonders for mixing purposes Example...
Snares-Track 1
Kicks-Track 2
Hi Hats-Track 3

markusv3000 wrote:And when you give away or sell a beat to you give them one wav on a cd, or do you give them a wav files for evey sound. Like a cubase file with sounds.

Sure, you can give them one wav on a CD. There are different ways of going about this, different cats have their own methods. One way to do it (if you have a beat CD ready) is to have some snippets of your beats and you can add some tags on the CDs of you saying "Hey! This is such and such productions 2004" or something like that, this may help prevent your beats from gettin jacked cause Im pretty sure most cats arent gonna want someone yelling out a bunch of non-sense in the background of their songs, well some rappers do, but you know what I mean

For me:

4 bar intro
8 hook
16 verse
8 hook
16 verse
4 bridge
8 hook
16 verse
8 outro.

This is most of the time for me, not always though.

Beets explained it well.

And when you give away or sell a beat to you give them one wav on a cd, or do you give them a wav files for evey sound. Like a cubase file with sounds.

Most cats that will buy your beats won't be worried about the individual wav files, but you might have some that will ask for it, but as a rule of thumb give them the 1 wav on a cd but always have the wav for every track available just incase they may need it later.
Also when you're selling your beats let your customer's know that you have it copy written ( so if they happen to sell a million records, you will get your royalty %). I know alot of people that will quote 2 different prices, 1 for the song and but you keep the copyrights and 1 for the song and they keep the copyrights.
Peace.