BeatTips

The BeatTips Manual, 7th Edition, Limited paperback edition beattips.com/the-beattips-ma…

Whenever somebody asks me, “The Beatles or Rolling Stones?” I always say, “Led Zeppelin.” Maybe it’s just me.

Excerpt from The BeatTips Manual: The Art of Beatmaking, The Hip Hop/Rap Music Tradition, and The Common Composer, 7th Edition beattips.com/the-beattips-ma…

In the hip hop/rap music tradition, the “rap” or the “rhyme” describes the chief (native) form of vocalization, while the “beat” is used to describe the entire instrumental.

Hip hop theory is further distinguished by the fact that it governs and speaks to two different but co-equal and interdependent layers or dimensions of musical activity: the beat and the rhyme — the instrumental and the vocal.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this thread, hip hop/rap music is the first music in the world to be created exclusively through the use of prexisting songs and other sound recordings.

Also, hip hop/rap music is a hybrid of pre- and post-industrialism, coupled with great advancement in recording technology. More telling, hip hop/rap music is the born product of urban American street culture and neglected lower class Blacks and Latinos, not privileged whites.

It’s a music tradition that is well embedded within the Black (African American) music tradition. It’s not a descendent of seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth-century European music traditions.

We must also not forget that hip hop/rap music is a different musical convention altogether — the hip hop/rap music tradition is an amalgamation of a number of things.

But music theory, as a whole, is an inadequate means for surveying and truly understanding hip hop/rap music and beatmaking.

However, not all musical cultures use a written notation to express their theories. (Some areas of hip hop/rap music can be analyzed and understood by some of the basic language and concepts of music theory, some areas cannot.)

Again, all musical cultures use some sort of music “theory”, i.e. a way of forming and expressing (describing, explaining) how and what musical events have occurred.

While some of these processes are sometimes filtered through standard tropes of the European concept of music composition and theory, they are not guided by such tropes.

Hip Hop Theory… Hip hop/rap music is an art form and system governed by its own principles and rules. It’s based on methods, techniques, practices, and processes cultivated from within its own tradition and the larger Black music tradition.

“Many traditionally trained musicians who become beatmakers (producers) often attempt to do two things that are actually contrary to the tenets of hip hop/ap music - things that often lead to the creation of hip hop/rap-like beats at best, or just plain wack beats at worst.”

“In terms of the "drumless hip hop" aesthetic that was best popularized (not first done) by Roc Marciano in 2010, there's some confusion about and misrepresentation of what ‘drumless’ actually means.”

Durag Dynasty - “360 Waves”

“No matter how we differ in our initial approach to getting a new beat started, we all set out to find relatively the same thing: A base (primary) rhythm framework that has the right drums and the right overall sound.”

Brand Nubian - “All for One”

“One of the things that makes beatmaking such a unique musical tradition is the fact that its compositional method can incorporate, integrate, and convert any other music form into its own.”