Studio Notes #003 | Breaking The Rules

There's a lot of "rules" to making music. If you go on Youtube there's plenty of people telling you exactly how things are supposed to be done. 

It's odd. 

Music is creative, organic, and expression. It's art. There's no real rules. Guidelines, themes, concepts, maybe even general best practices. But not rules.

Trap is a whole sub genre of hiphop that was made by breaking the rules. Trap hi hat rolls aren't something that is done by a drummer. 

DAWs at the time didn't even support it. You couldn't just paint in all those hi hat. The grid didn't "zoom in" that far and give you that option. Trap producers had to double the space to get more space to fill in the hi hat. And doubled the BPM to make up for it. A clever workaround to a system that was built around current rules.

It's a "rule" to get your drums to sound human like. But trap is literally the opposite. Trap hi hats are about as robotic as you can get. 

===

I was updating the blog on beat making and one of the things I said there was not to overcrowd beats with too many sounds. Keep it sparse for the rapper. 

That's generally the rule.

But, what if you're making a beat tape solely meant for consumers to listen to. Pure instrumentals. Not making it for rappers. Then you may want more sounds in there. 

===

In both cases above it comes down to how you want to make the music and not following the rules.

In the trap case, producers wanted the robotic hi hat rolls. And boy were they right because Trap took off. 

In the beat tape case producers want to show case sounds. It fits the context of a producer making instrumentals for their audience and not rappers. 

===

All i'm saying is do what you want and there are no real "rules" to this. Make beats, have fun. 

Product Updates

A couple updates in the works:

Mighty Drum Machine

First is put out the first video of the beta of Mighty Drum Machine. You can sign up to keep up to date. 

Mighty Delay

Looking to add a bit more visual interest to the app. One direction is adding a morphing blog beneath the knob. The idea is to represent the organic, but also controlled, nature of Delay signals.

Next Up

Expect more on Mighty Drum Machine in the following weeks. 

-Cole