Aspiring music producers entering the world of hip-hop production for the first time will sometimes assume that creating punchy drum patterns is easy. After all, listening to certain hip-hop tracks, an untrained ear might think the same.
So, what’s the secret to crafting drum patterns in modern digital audio workstations (DAWs) that evoke the work of hip-hop giants like Dr. Dre, the Beastie Boys, 2Pac, Coolio, Snoop Dogg, and US3? It’s both simple and complex: you need to replicate, in today’s digital workspace, the steps that these old-school icons took using analog and early digital equipment.
Of course, perfectly mimicking the approach of each hip-hop legend is a challenge— it’s also not necessarily the goal here. Instead, the aim is to create a close, yet convincing emulation of the drum production techniques that were common in the ‘90s. Today, we’ll explore one such approach.
Historically, the drum sections in hip-hop began with the sampling of breaks and rhythms from funk, and in one famous case, a rock song by Led Zeppelin. Literally thousands of tracks have been built on just a few samples: from the 1960s funk group The Winstons’ track “Amen Brother”; the 1970s song “Impeach the President” by The Honey Drippers; the iconic drum solo from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer,” among others.
When the first affordable drum machines appeared in the early 1980s, a new wave of hip-hop drums emerged—electronic ones. Luckily, today, there are dozens of free and paid plugins and sample packs featuring those exact sounds.
Capturing the funky spirit that has fueled hip-hop grooves for decades, however, is much harder to achieve in modern DAWs without sampling. And that raises a reasonable question: why “without” sampling?
Grabbing a vinyl record with funky drums, finding a couple of breaks, sampling them, and turning them into a hip-hop beat is not really a viable option. Or rather, it’s an option—but one that can lead to major legal and financial issues if you release a track with an uncleared sample.
To work around this problem, you can do the following: mimic drum pattern sampling in your DAW by first creating those patterns from scratch. It may sound odd, but this is one of those “trust us, it works” situations.
Additionally, this approach enables you to be independent of the tempos and rhythmic patterns of drum cycles produced by others and grants you full creative freedom.
Traditional hip-hop recordings used drum samples from vinyls released by funk bands. For our experiment here, we should look for a source of funky drum samples, preferably under the Creative Commons license.
We could start with, for example, the very high quality Couch Kit Vol. 1 package by a creator who goes by the name Orion. This includes 88 loops and 56 single hit samples of kick drums, snares, and hats. And of course, what interests us most are the one-shots because ideally, we want to create rhythms how we want at whatever tempo we want.
Speaking of audio sources, let's also remember that early pioneers of the genre recorded drum breaks directly from vinyl records. And often, vinyl noise such as dust hissing and scratching sounds would end up in the samples.
These sounds can be found under the free Creative Commons Zero license on the website Freesound.org. Whether or not to mix these noises into our own rhythms is a matter of personal taste. If we want to achieve an authentic old-school drum feel, then adding them might be appropriate.
Another thing. Before making their way onto vinyl, the drums of funk groups went through several stages of processing and were recorded onto magnetic tape. So, for our purposes, we’re going to need a tape saturation plugin, too.
Next, affordable samplers that rappers began loading with short segments of drum tracks starting in the mid-1980s operated with bit depths ranging from 12 to 16. Therefore, to achieve an authentic sound, we should use some kind of bitcrusher plugin.
(We’re going to need bus compression and room reverb at a couple of stages, too, but we'll discuss that later.)
Initially, this seemed like a flaw in hip-hop recordings, but it turned out to be the very essence of its charm and the recognizable groove of the genre.
We should also note that in most cases, drum tracks were re-recorded from the sampler onto magnetic tape. Often, this was done through an analog console mixer, so we’re also going to need a mixing console channel emulation plugin in our workflow to add a specific “console drive.”
Okay. We’re written a lot here. Let’s do a quick review. Here’s a brief outline of the production process for hip-hop drums:
1. Selection of high-quality individual samples of acoustic drums in a "funk" style.
2. Selection of vinyl noise samples.
3. Creating custom drum patterns in DAW using selected samples and quantization with swing.
4. Processing drum bus with compressor and tape saturator (magnetic tape emulator).
5. Optional: Mixing in drum bus noise and vinyl scratches.
6. Applying a bitcrusher-type plugin to the drum bus.
7. Adding reverb to the drum mix.
8. Sampling (rendering) the drum prototype into a separate audio file.
9. Placing the result on an audio track in the project and chopping the overall pattern into fragments.
10. Creating the sequence of fragments according to the intended vibe of the song, cutting them into smaller bits and assembling them into drum breaks.
11. Using fade out (volume reduction to zero) at the end of each segment (sample) to cut off the reverb tails.
12. Treating the final drum track with equalizers and another delicate compression.
13. Applying an analog console emulator plugin to the drum track.
Phew. Take a breath. Okay? Good. Now let's break down some of these steps further.
A key characteristic of funk drums is swing. This involves shifting notes relative to a strict meter, which typically consists of four quarter notes. Swing somewhat resembles syncopation in the "shuffle" style, but in funk it's less abrupt and less pronounced.
Swing originated in jazz. To put it simply, it creates a slight "mismatch" with the musical piece's time signature where certain sixteenth notes (often every second and fourth) are played with a slight delay.
In DAWs, there is a corresponding type of quantization to create swing. The amount of swing is usually set in percentages. To create a sense of a funky pattern, adding 20-35% swing when quantizing is required.
For this, we will create a drum bus in our DAW project. Then, for each one-shot sample, we'll create a separate sample track and route their audio outputs to the drum bus.
After writing several parts for a future hip-hop track (say, 16 bars), quantizing with swing, leveling volume, and panning hi-hats and cymbals, apply group compression with fairly aggressive settings. This will make the drums bigger (as long as you don't forget about compensating for volume loss during compression) and "glue" them together, making them sound more cohesive.
Next, as mentioned earlier, apply a tape machine emulator or tape saturation to the drum bus.
Optional step: within the drum bus, you can create an audio track with looped vinyl noise. Keep its volume in the overall mix very low to avoid giving the impression of heavily scratched vinyl. We only want to subtly add a vintage vibe without simulating an old gramophone.
To achieve the feeling of a 12-16 bit sampler, we can apply a Bitcrusher-type plugin to the drum bus. Be gentle with this step. We're just hinting at a lo-fi aesthetic in our sound without interfering too harshly.
Next, on the send channel, mix in some reverb to the drum bus. The best choice here might be virtual room reflections in a "rehearsal room" style. A reasonable level of this reverb will also evoke the era of live recordings by funk bands.
At this point, we will have a "track" of drums from a fictional funk band that we will "sample," just like real hip-hop artists.
Now, we need to create a sound source for our simulation sampling. The drum track we created earlier should be rendered, saved in a separate file, and placed on an audio track in the DAW project. The drum bus is now redundant and we can disable it. We can always return to it if we want to make another fragment of the "source" drums.
The next step is chopping. Let's slice the drum audio track into one-bar fragments. Then, from multiple bars, cut shorter pieces lasting 1 or 2 beats. Assemble these into drum breaks.
Place the resulting groove fragments and breaks on the audio track from which they were extracted in the order that feels right according to the dramatic intention of your future song. This order can be changed later, chopped more finely, have its effects reversed, and on and on.
An important detail – lower the volume of each fragment (even micro bits for breaks) to zero over a short duration at the end – consistent with the song's tempo.
If necessary, we can treat the resulting "sampler" drum track with an equalizer and add a little more compression for greater aggression and a feeling of large "thickness" in the drum part.
One last step. As a finishing touch, pass the drum track through an emulator of an analog console channel. This is needed to create the impression of recording drums from a sampler output through an analog desk. In the settings of the special plugin (channel strip), we only need to add a little console drive (saturation). You can try one of the existing free plugins, such as CHANNEV by Analog Obsession.
What we’ve described here, this idea of "virtual sampling," is one of the fastest ways to obtain a sound very similar to that of authentic hip-hop drums.
The main advantages of this method are pretty obvious: a high level of creative freedom and full legal security since you’re not using drum patterns from other artists. And those are two pretty valuable things for beginner artists.
