That sax sample sounded familiar and then it hit me - who the hell samples Micheal Nyman’s “The Piano” soundtrack for their hiphop track?? Heheh
I like to listen to quite a bit of hiphop, but I don’t think I can pull it off properly at the moment. It’s a lot harder to do well than people think - I think a lot of beginners make the mistake of leaving their notes on the grid.
~r
I tend to hear that a lot, but I think this is overrated. Most great hip hop is actually done with the notes “on the grid” I think.
(But I am curious to what kind of songs you are referring to. Can you provide some examples?).
if you shift your notes off the grid, you’re just building a new custom grid for them. i agree hiphop (and many other styles of music for that matter) shouldn’t sound too rigid, but the fact of the matter is that ‘the grid’ can have a lot of flow just by itself.
I agree. Usually syncopes and shuffle/groove is what gets rid of the rigidness. So notes can stay on the grid 
First of all, of course there are no rules, for any principle that anyone puts down, someone else is going to make something unique by breaking it.
That being said, generally speaking I’d disagree with this - if you’re going really deep into hiphop beat construction, it’s more than swing and templates. It’s especially important in hiphop because the beat is so central and so repetitive, if you don’t have a really compelling 8 beat loop, you don’t have anything. With electronica, it’s a different story obviously… and I love a lot of electribe/renoise gurus who’s stuff is entirely on the grid.
First of all, the way in which notes are nudged becomes very personal reflection of the playing style. For instance, someone self-taught may have a particular way of lagging/chasing the beat. Timing (and imperfections in timing) is a direct reflection of the way one has played and performed over the years and turning up the swing parameter, randomly adding offsets to a template, or using someone else’s groove templates is generally not going to capture a personal style in the same way. Of course, once you know your own style, you can do your best to capture it by other means (manually adjusting the template to mimic how you play), but I’m willing to bet that most people who use swing/templates don’t use it in this way.
The list of artists is endless, but personally I like RZA and Timbaland. With RZA he’s not formally trained and you can hear that - but the apparent sloppiness makes the music much more personal and genuine. With timbaland, he has a very unique sense of groove - anyone can mimic the way he distorts beats, but no one can time beats the way he does (I realize he’s unpopular in tracking circles cause of the plagiarism thing, but that’s a seperate issue). Keep in mind just because something sounds like a drum machine doesn’t mean it was on the grid. Often 808s and whatever are sampled and re-performed through a sampler. Even in a lot of the early hiphop, you’ve got people like Mantronik and Public Enemy doing tape edits or using primitive samplers to give the music some groove. In fact, in a lot of the early PE material, the full backing track was one live ensemble performance.
Also, micro-timing can blend into sound design. For example, offsetting (in ms) the kick, snare, and clap in different ways can thicken the sound of a hit in different ways, even more so if the sounds are being squashed together into a saturator or compressor.
~r
i sometimes try doing this, micro-timing as you call it, offsetting hits by a line or less, working with delays etc, but 9 out of 10 times i cannot hear the difference. do you think that is because it is not easy to hear the difference in a listening test (try setting 1, listen, try setting 2, listen), and you would really have to try it in a bigger context, like a couple of bars, or you need to combine it with something like a lead so you can better perceive the offset?
i am interested in these techniques because groove etc is very important to a song, but it gets hard to do when you cannot hear the difference and i might be doing something wrong, listening to it in the wrong way or something.
i can only agree with the rest of your story, both because i do not know very much about hiphop, and simply because you’re making sense.
Speaking of groove, probably the grooviest sound I’ve heard so far is a V Twin engine idling and warming up… the timing and all that bass.
I am, using renoise to make hiphop that is.
i’ve tried so many times, but only make fake hip hop
I make fake music.
I’m mostly into fake hip hop. Sometimes I try to keep it semi-real, you know’m sayin’?
Check it man. Fo’ real.
Thank you, you had some really nice ones as well mate.
Cool thread,
I make real hip hop for real mcs 
and renoise is still the core of my setup…
I’m also wondering why not more hip hop producers switch to renoise…
Check Bit1 on soundcloud, too!
peace dan
http://soundcloud.com/dtunez/charmingly-ghetto-the-essence-prod-dtunez/
@rho if you’re talking about “sculpting” the attack of a drum hit, you generally want to offset less than a line. To be honest, renoise isn’t quite ideal for this kind of trick because the offsets are positive, rather than centered on the beat going negative and positive. The difference can be pretty subtle if you’re not used to listening for it, but basically it’s the difference between “tack”, “thack”, and “thhwack” As I said, there aren’t any hard and fast rules, but I tend to put the elements with slower attacks (like the clap or bass drum) behind the beat and elements with faster attacks (snares and cymbals) a little after the beat. This is less of a “groove” technique than a sound design technique.
I’m not really a beatmaker guru, so if anyone else wants to chime in feel free…
~r
I always play/record my drums live (usually one or two 64 patterns at the time) so the “swing” is always a little bit different depending on how the rest of the beat sounds. As for percussion and ghost snares and similar I more often then not record those in one take on the whole song, which means they come in slightly different throughout. That’s just how I do it, as mentioned… there are no rules. When I started out it was all drumloops and after a few years the patented rza-lazy-snare (which I still love btw hehe) made an entry. I just find it easier to play it live to get the right groove instead of building a beat after some midi-swingfile or whatever. Nothing wrong with that tho (although I will say it is a bit lazy 
)
Hey guys,
I just had the idea that it might be nice to do some stuff together. Learn from each other, collaborate, etc. Me for instance, I always have serious troubles getting the mix right. I don’t know why, but it always sounds so weak and amateurish. It’s easy with Renoise, since we just could send around self-contained xrns files.
Anyway, I make a start by sharing this little beat I just played around with. Nothing serious so far. But feel free to either add something to it, if you like the starting point, or whatever.
I would also enjoy looking into how you do things, so post some more xrns if you want.
cause they’re too gangsta to learn hex.
though seriously, renoise is arguably the most superior sequencer of now.
Clearly there are some people, as evidenced by this thread.
If you think about the subculture that finds its way into tracking, there are a lot of hacker/programmer-types, which makes sense. You’re comfortable with text interfaces and know how to make use of keyboard shortcuts, etc. Artists in the hiphop world tend not to have grown up with hacker friends or parents who are computer programmers, but they may have seen their heroes banging out beats on mpc’s and 808s. It takes a while for ideas and tools to overcome these sorts of barriers to adoption. It’s not unfeasible, but each extra adoption step will filter out another chunk of people. Obviously there are tons of exceptions - trackers who grew up without access to a computer and hiphop producers and MCs who like to code…
i only listen to unreal hip hop 
some sugestions to you all : digable planets, Guru, beastie boys, ithaka.