Free Drive Download Ultimate Boom Bap Drum Kit.
This Pack contains all the essentials you need to produce fire boom bap old school beats. Pack includes basses, claps, shakers and percs, snares, kick, and more sounds designed to give old-school beat vibes.
What Is Boom Bap?
Real, authentic boom bap is representative of an era. And with that particular span of time, the Golden Era of Hip-Hop in the late 80s-90s, you have to take into account the technology available used to produce it, the music that was available to sample and the medium that sampled music was on (primarily vinyl).
Samplers were limited to 8 and 12-bit processing power and later 16-bit (CD quality is 16-bit depth, 44.1khz sample rate). Why this is important is that when a record was sampled it was sampled at a low resolution and when played back the sound had grit and crunch adding to the characteristic of the sound. The most iconic samplers were the SP12, and the SP1200. Both 12-bit at around 26000-27500 kHz sample rate with analog filters on the outputs. Records were sampled sped up at a higher pitch to allow the producer to get more sample time as these machines were limited to 5–10 seconds of sampling time. The samples were then pitched-down it would add even more artifacts (aliasing) to the sound. It is important to note that even though there are bitcrusher plugins and emulations that attempt to recreate the grit and artifacts that these machines imposed onto a sound that none of them come close. There is nothing like a real SP1200. Many hit records were made on the SPs. Another key characteristic is most boom-bap is in the 90–100bpm range.
This is, in contrast, to trap where the sound field is squeaky clean. Not to say that trap can’t be gritty, but producers aren’t limited to 10 seconds of sampling time and vinyl sampling. It’s a different era where technology is unlimited as to what you want to do and get the sounds you want. The early trap was typically sequenced at 140bpm with a half-time feel that feels like 70bpm. Since trap took off in popularity the tempo is varying as producers experiment with the genre.
How to make Boom Bap.
There are 2 things that make a good boom-bap beat.
1: A good sample
2: A good groove
For finding a good sample what I’d recommend for learning how to sample properly is using songs that have been sampled before, just looking up a crate-digging playlist on Spotify, listen for a good 4-8 bar loop. Count the beats to make sure it’s 4/4 (unless you want to get into chopping) the best tip I can give is try and find one where the snare isn’t too loud (ex. 80s songs, they are hard to eq out).
Get the song file online through a YouTube downloader whatever then use any software of your choice to cut the audio down to the 4-8 bar loop. Try to make the loop as seamless as possible and as on beat as possible. Then what I’d do is try and whether the loop would sound best slowed down, sped up, or the same speed. It’s generally just a feeling for me. EQ out the low end enough so that the bass and kicks are quiet or nonexistent but not so much so that it changes the sample too much.
Next is the drums, find a good boom-bap drum pack. Then map out drums to the drum pad and just play drums while looping the sample until I find a good groove. If you want help finding the beat put the kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4. However, some people do kick on 1, snare on 3. It’s just how your tempo is set up and what feels best.
The bass is the next important part, you can either create your own bassline or use the one from the sample. If you choose to make your own, either use a real bass sound, or a real bass sound that’s been eq’d to really low frequencies and bounce around the drums and sample. Just play until you find a good groove. If you are using it for the sample, copy the sample into another track, eq out everything except for the bass, and add effects and other stuff to make the bass louder and clearer, but not so much so, just enough that it sounds better.