A Quick Introduction To Old School Hip Hop

Gathering a bunch of old vinyl albums and scratching them with all your strength, is not what performing hip hop music is all about. You have to have a feel for the rhythms and a flair for mixing everything together to bring out a unique sound that audiences will crave.

There are hundreds of books out there, telling stories of the old school hip hop scene, its music and techniques. Reading about it, and performing it, are two totaly different things, one can give you info and the other the actual experience.

If you want to perform this type of music, you need to start by listening. Find the records and listen, listen thoroughly to the beats and how it goes with the lyrics. Begin to discriminate in your head between beat and lyrics while you listen.

Now, you begin to understand old school hip hop music.

The beat is the heart of hip hop music sound. The crowd is kept listening and dancig to a flow of lyrics carried along the sequences and samples. Developing your own system of mixing is the next step of performing old school hip hop music.

Beats have to flow into and back out again of the sample tracks, moving the audience on a wave of rhythm towards the next sample cluster, again and again until the end of the song.

If the beats are the heart of old school hip hop music, then lyrics are its soul. All the excellent beats in the world would be worth for nothing if the lyrics fail to relate to its audience.

The roots of old school hip hop are in the poetry brought by immigrant artists, and to be able to perform the music right, you must be able to make a connection to those roots.

You will need technical gear to blend it all together into an old school hip hop music sound, of course. Quality wouldn’t come cheap, top of the line equipment could be quite expensive. You will need an industry standard sampler to start.

Gear that will allow you to record snatches of rhythms and beats in a quality fashion without distortion. Then you need a sequencer that it help you get the beats into the rhythm.

To advance your adaptaion of old school hip hop music you will need a mixer, one that is top of the line. This mixer will allow you to synthesize and blend together samples, and sequences into a good stereo sound. The final piece is multi-track recording gear to let you get it all down in style.

If you are low on funds, but still have the itch to recreate old school hip hop music, turn to your home computer.

There are softwares that could produce sound mixes with quality that could rival those produced with studio quality equipment.

Burn some CD creations and play them on a good stereo system to see if you’ve gotten all the effects down like you want them.

Patience, good listening skills and some creativity will help you on your way to recreating old school hip hop music.

Let the flow of the beats carry you and touch your soul with poetry, then, you make your own creations and try to see if you can pay homage to old school hip hop music in your own way.