Making hip hop beats is easy to get started doing, however, perfecting the craft is a process that never ends. There are many approaches that you can take to getting started. The two main approaches in my opinion are pre-made loop based and sample based, in which you make your own loops. Both have pros and cons. The only pro about using pre-made loops is that you can get started right now, and make beats on the fly without alot of training. The beats you produce can be professional, and most people won't tell any difference. Most hip hop music is VERY repetitive, by it's nature it almost must be. For that reason I recomend a new user to check out the Acid series of software. You can even download Acid Express for free, which I highly recomend doing. You can mix up to 8 loops without restriction, and get a very good feel for loop based music creation.

To get us started, we're going to need some loops. You can find many free loops on my site here, and all over the internet for that matter. When you need to purchase a professional collection, I hope you'll give one of ours a shot. Once you have some loops, you need to put them all in one place for your own sanity, and try to organize them by what type of loop they are (beats, synth, bass, ect..).

Load the Acid Xpress software that we downloaded, and on the lower portion of the screen you'll see a windows explorer type window. Use that window to browse to your loops. From within Acid, all you have to do is click the loop and it will begin playing, if it's one you want to use, simply drag it to the workspace on the top half of the screen. Continue doing this until you have a few sounds that you think will sound great together. Make sure to change the tempo to just about anything but 120. For a good slow rap beat I like 85 -90, although some prefer to go as high as 140.

Select the paintbrush tool from the toolbar at the top of the screen, and to the right of the loop names in the workspace, simply "draw" where you want to sounds to go. This will make alot more sense with a little experimentation, and you'll find this to be the easiest way to produce beats. There is alot that you can do with the ACID software that goes far beyond the scope of this article, but if you want even more control I HIGHLY recomend FL Studio, which is my all time favorite music compostion program. There is also a demo version of Fl Studio for free, although it is less functional. Good luck, and please post your tracks for review in our forum.

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