Learn About Sean "LiveWire" Smith

Rather than giving you the history of hip hop, b-boys, graffiti, breakdancing, and its relation to hip hop culture, I've decided to teach you how to make beats. This is not exactly a tutorial portion, but rather a reference kind of thing. What do I mean? Well, umm... This is kind of a starting point, you know, before you start making beats. And no, I don't mean making a new document... If you can't do that yet, read the MANUAL first. Genius.

Ok, so the first thing I would like to touch on is style. As a newbie, you have no clue about what style really means in hip hop. If you do have an idea on it, good for you. Pat yourself on the back and hope your idea and my idea are similar. Otherwise, you may just find yourself feeling stupid. Anyway, you've all probably heard people talk about Just Blaze's "style", Swiss Beatz's "style", or The Neptunes' "style". Well, style is basically your way of making music. Everyone has a different style. If you don't have your own style, your bound to fail at your goal of supremacy in the hip hop world and face ridicule for biting off of someone else's style. Tough luck. As a newbie, you have no style. If you do, congratulate yourself again. You've just succeeded in making me wrong. As I was saying, all sucessful beat makers have a style. Dre makes mostly dark beats consisting of strings, you know, violins, cellos, violas, all that nonsense. Kanye West uses a lot of vocal samples in most of his beats. Timbaland makes upbeat beats with a good amount of bass. If you don't yet have a style, mimick your favorite. And NO, your favorite doesn't have to be Lil' Jon or something JUST because it sells. It's gotta be your personal favorite, something that your own imagination can can actually build on. If your into DJ Premier, go for it. If you like Jermaine Dupri, then go ahead and do his style. I'd tell you who my favorite is, but thats not really your business. Besides, he's underground right now.

Picked a style? Good. Now on to the application of your new picked style. Obviously you can't just remake their beats. Sure, you learn just how hard it is to mimick a beat that someone spent days, weeks, or months on, but you don't learn much of anything else. I recommend studying that person's beats. Look at all of your favorite's by that person. Study them. How? Just listen to what sticks out most, what samples are used most, how their arranged, and things like that. Let it stick with you and beatbox or make beats in your head that correspond to the style you wish to follow. Now, as a newbie, that's incredibly hard to do. But when you start getting into music production more, you'll learn to notice the little things that you never would have noticed. It's all a part of learning. Experience comes with time. The more you do it the better you get at it.

Newbies never know just how inexperienced they are. You can tell a newbie that they do not know what they are talkin about, or that they need to practice, but its rare that they REALLY listen. They learn how much they didn't listen when they do become good. When you hear a newbie ask a question where they mistook producer vernacular for something else, it's kind of funny, but at least drop the sarcasm and tell them what it really means. As for you newbies, read this: Experience comes with time. And experience is jus what it says, you have to experience different things and try out new methods, sounds, and other things. I had made about two hundred beats before I felt I was good enough to no longer consider myself a newbie. And then, when you get to that point, look at your old beats and listen to the difference between then and now. There will, hopefully, be a big difference and as time goes by, that gap should continue to grow. And eventually, you will be ABLE to exactly mimmick the style of your "role-model producer," but by then you should have established a style of your own to the point that you don't wish to mimick that producer's style. THAT is when you truly understand style. Before then, you cannot get me to believe that you understand the real meaning of style, not by a long-shot.

Now, just so that those of you out there understand, I'm going to clear up some of the basics. First of all, you need a program with a sequencer. A sequencer is a way to insert sounds into a beat, and then arrange them in whatever order you want. FruityLoops has one. Reason has one, and I don't see any reason why hardware wouldn't have one also. Sequencers should have channels, where you can insert different sounds into different channels. A step sequencer allows you to insert a sound into a channel, then modify its pattern just by activating certain steps. A "piano roll" allows you to select the notes to be played. Please take note that changing the note does not only change the pitch, but the speed also. So, I suggest you learn ways around it. To find sounds, check your program's manual. I know that Reason has a SoundBank, which you simply select the channel to insert the sound into, and then browse the SoundBank in order to find the sound you're looking for. FruityLoops has a built-in browser that works in basically the same way as Reason's, but I've found it simpler to click and drag the sounds into a channel in the sequencer.