Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - Making hip hop beats that really sound like hip hop

jedilaw · 10th September 2008

Part of what people are talking about when they discuss "real Hip-Hop" is the sound qualities that you get from certain technical limitations in the older gear. The 12-bit converters on the MPC-60 are outdated from a technical point of view, but those were the common converters during the "golden era" of rap, so that's what people's ears associate with "real" hip-hop. The same can be said about the scratchy sound of sampled vinyl: the imperfections in the vinyl itself are being captured in the sample, and those imperfections are added to the imperfections of the tape that is capturing the MPC-60, ASR-10, etc. Tape saturation is likewise the result of what is technically a flaw or limitation in the mechanism. It's just that we're used to those flaws.

I see the same thing all the time in the 3D VFX community (I'm a CGI artist in addition to being a sub-mediocre bedroom producer): first people try to learn how to make things "perfect", then they learn how to simulate flaws like lense flares, camera shaking, and film grain. We look for the imperfections that we're used to.

10th September 2008	#59
jedilaw Gear maniac Joined: Aug 2008 Posts: 272	Part of what people are talking about when they discuss "real Hip-Hop" is the sound qualities that you get from certain technical limitations in the older gear. The 12-bit converters on the MPC-60 are outdated from a technical point of view, but those were the common converters during the "golden era" of rap, so that's what people's ears associate with "real" hip-hop. The same can be said about the scratchy sound of sampled vinyl: the imperfections in the vinyl itself are being captured in the sample, and those imperfections are added to the imperfections of the tape that is capturing the MPC-60, ASR-10, etc. Tape saturation is likewise the result of what is technically a flaw or limitation in the mechanism. It's just that we're used to those flaws. I see the same thing all the time in the 3D VFX community (I'm a CGI artist in addition to being a sub-mediocre bedroom producer): first people try to learn how to make things "perfect", then they learn how to simulate flaws like lense flares, camera shaking, and film grain. We look for the imperfections that we're used to.