Sampling is an art form that I can never see myself stop doing. It is the essence of HipHop and the foundation of the sound. Having said that, what if you want to make your own music? I know this question is out there because I see a lot of beatmakers getting in financial trouble because of not getting samples cleared. As a result, there are many of you who would rather skip the headache of even worrying about sampling. There are two alternatives: 1. Only use royalty free sound packs or 2. You want to make your own music. Let’s talk about the latter of the two.
Make Your Own Music
When I say make your own music, i’m basically talking about starting from scratch. This means all the sounds are played by you. This includes chords, melodies, bass lines, drums, ect. No breakbeats or samples from whatever audio source you have count in this situation. A beat without samples should be the result from the work you did alone unless you collab with someone else. But the question is, what if I can’t play an instrument or don’t know how to play keys?
This is why it’s so important to seek out resources that can help in this area. Even though it helps tremendously, it is NOT a requirement to be a musician to make your own music. There are tons of youtube videos showing tips and tutorials on how to play chords and scales. What I like to do is type in a question in the search box. For example, you could type “how do you play jazz chords on a guitar”. I personally wouldn’t consider myself to be a guitar player but because I have seen videos, I can play some chords well enough to create a beat if I want to. What’s even better is the fact that I didn’t have to sample anyone to create the beat. Even if you don’t have a keyboard or any other live instrument you can create your own music using chords and melodies with a 16 Pad drum machine. Here’s a link to a video playlist of how to play hip hop chords with just 16 Pads.
HIPHOP CHORDS SERIES
I hope this article has helped in someway and to get you to think about how to make your own music. I’m not saying stop sampling by any means because I still do it for the love of it. This is just another way of adding to your skill level because at the end of the day we all want to excel in our beatmaking right? Peace!