How to Use Live Bass in Hip Hop Beat Making

Adding live bass, guitars, horns or piano when producing hip hop beats will help make your beats stand out from the thousands of other rap beat producers competing for attention and market dollars.

Live Bass in Hip Hop Beat Making - Choosing an Instrument

Especially important to having a unique beat that conveys a lot of emotion is your bass hook. If you, the producer, have enough money to hire a live bass player when making your beat, all the better. But for the amateur home beat maker, this is out of reach.

Consider buying a cheap electric bass and learning the basics of this instrument for use in your beats. Check for electric basses at your local pawn shops or pick up a Fender Squier new. When buying cheap electric basses, never buy online.

The quality control on cheap electric instruments is just not there, and you want to make sure you get an instrument with no dead spots and a nice, even tone for use when beat making.

Even on mainstream hip hop radio, the beats and hooks that stand out the most make use of live instruments. Depending on your producing style, a properly mixed and filtered live bass will nearly always carry more emotion than a MIDI or VST bass line, whether it be one of the hundreds of free virtual bass instruments on the market or from an expensive virtual instrument pack.

Live Bass in Hip Hop Beat Making - The Recording Process

You do not need a bass amp in today's home recording studio environment to get a full, clear live electric bass tone for your beat. Plug directly into a USB or FireWire audio interface, and let your computer do the rest.

If you, the hip hop producer, do not have a nice pair of studio monitors--the M-Audio BX5 line is a great place to start--your home studio is begging you to invest.

As you are making the basic drum track for your beat, play along on the bass as your track is running in REASON, FL Studio or your favorite digital audio workstation software. Try some ideas, and use your producer's ear to see what works and what doesn't.

Generally speaking you want your beat's live bass line to always drop on the "1" or down beat, at least every other measure. This will cue your MC that the measure is rolling over. Keep your live bass line simple; it might sound great to have a tricky funk bass line over your beat but once you start adding the final layers things may well get too busy.

When producing the beat's final layers, hard pan the bass to one channel and boost the highs all the way up. You won't leave your beat's bass line mixed this way, of course, but you want to hear every nuance of your line as you build the hits to accentuate your beat.

Doing your final mix, centralize the bass line, boost the low way up and cut the mid. A live electric bass can muddy your beat if you don't treat it right. Finish it off with a little reverb, with just a tiny amount of time between voices.

Producing hip hop beats with live bass is a great way to build your beat making chops, as a producer and musician. Try to learn the instrument yourself rather than hire someone, and your production skills as a whole will increase, too.