Disclaimer#1-WARNING LABEL

This article is not meant to cure or diagnose any sonic problems of your Hip Hop beats or rap masterpiece, but is intended to give you ideas of possible troubled areas to look at, and help you self diagnose things in the future from and engineering stand point. Whoa!

Usually, when an artist comes in to our room, they might bring in a demo groove or beat on CD, and the question will pop up time and time again, “Yo Home Skillet, why does my demo sound so muddy”, or “How come it doesn’t sound like a store bought CD? Disclaimer #2 This article is assuming that you are producing music in a nice room with maybe some treatments (i.e. foam) on your walls, using real studio monitors, in other words my brothers and sisters, I’m assuming that you can trust the room and the monitors to tell you the truth. Nuff said! Moving on.

Are you with me so far?

When you’re listening to your favorite rapper or hip hop artist on the radio, you can feel that kick, that pop of the claps or snare and, you are loving the bass drop, right? Folk, you hear those elements, and you think, “How do they get such a deep, deep bass and kick sound”, “How do they juggle all the other frequencies so it don’t sound muddy.”

Are you ready for this?

Let’s say you’ve got a simple kick and clap beat, with a tight hat, nice fat bass, maybe some bell sounds and some flo in the background. Don’t touch the EQ just yet.

1. I’ll begin by setting my master fader to its detent spot.

2. Listening at 85db, or if you got neighbors to keep happy, just go for as loud as possible without damaging your ears or the monitors.

3. At your optimal level of volume, start adjusting the faders of the kicks, the snare or claps, add the hats. Go for a volume that makes those elements feel right. Very Important!

4. Slip the bass in under the kick drum, till it feels good. Hopefully it’s starting to breathe at this point. It’s that feel thing again.

5. Add your bells and keyboards sounds. Is it happening? It’s gotta feel right at your optimal volume. If it does not feel right, something will have to change in the arrangement.

6. At this point, I would take the master fader down to almost completely off just to listen at a quite level to see if you can still hear everything in the arrangement. Also listen for anything that might be jumping out of the mix. If it sounds good at this point Playa, your doing great.

7. Lets bring the master fader back to optimal position. In you workstation/mixer hopefully you’ll have EQ available, so lets start with our bells. Now, your first thought might be that the bells are high pitched right, so let’s add a ton of high end EQ. Big no no! Instead, let’s remove some, or maybe all of the dirty, dirty low end off of those bells. On such a high pitched instrument like those bells, there isn’t anything really going on below 150 hertz, so roll it out Man! While your track is playing take it slow and let’s start by rolling off with your low cut filter or maybe your bass shelving knob till the bells start to clear up. You may not need anything below 150 hertz. You be the judge. Use you ears. If it sound good, it is good. I said you may not need anything below 150hertz, but go higher if you think it sounds good. If you were using a piano instead of bells, try the same. By removing the dirty mud, you are really cleaning up your sound. Can you dig it?

You know you’re ready for this!

You can try this with the kick and snare, claps, and hats as well, just use caution and don’t take out to much or it will sound harsh and very painful to listen to. Can you dig that? As far as the bass, depending on the sound of the bass itself, try cutting some of the really low garbage at the bottom first, then if it needs a little help try boosting a little somewhere around 100 hertz to start. Remember, when it feels right, then it is right.

I’m saving compression, panning, effects and limiting for a future article, meanwhile I hope this will help you get started in the right direction.