This is a piano video tutorial on how to play Stronger by Kanye West/Daft Punk. It’s a little grainy, but does a pretty decent job at showing you the keys. I hope you find this useful.

The hiphop-producer.com forum just got relaunched and now has a store offering hip hop drum kit downloads. Downloading these kits does not require cash. You trade forum points for the drum kits. Go here to sign up for the forum.

You earn 1 forum point for each post you make. Each drum kit costs 10 forum points. Currently the store has the following drum kits:

• Dr. Dre
• Scott Storch
• Timbaland
• Swizz Beatz
• Just Blaze
• Kanye West
• G-Unit
• Lil Jon
• Neptunes
• Mobb Deep
• Cash Money
• Tony B

Also, if you want free sounds now, check out 10 Resources For Free Sounds

UPDATE: It looks like lots of forum members have posted great collections of drum kits for download.

Mac OS X Hints posted this article about the “Perfect” Itunes Equalizer Setting.

Open the equalizer, and from the pop-up menu, select “Make Preset.” Call it “Perfect,” because it is, and set the following levels, from left to right (skip the Preamp section):

db +3, +6, +9, +7, +6, +5, +7, +9, +11, +8 db

Okay, he acknowledges that there’s no such thing as a “perfect” setting, but that this is the best one he has found. It doesn’t say what type of music this works for though.

In regards to hip hop, it’s pretty decent for some songs and unbearable for songs like Jay-z’s Show Me What You Got where the horns are just blaring in your ears if you have headphones on. It’s better than flat for most songs, but just be aware that there’s no such thing as a preset you can just turn on that works for every song. Each song, genre, speaker set up is different and must be worked with differently.

• Free Sound Project – Huge collaborative database of user uploaded Creative Commons licensed sounds. They emphasize sounds only and not complete songs. Geared towards music.
• Find Sounds.com – Search engine for all kinds of sounds, not just music related sounds.
• Sound Snap.com – “Online sound library and community for sound designers and producers.” Houses all types of sounds with music loops and music samples being their largest categories.
• ccMixter – A site focused on remixing and sharing. Huge collection of samples and user created songs.
• Sample Swap.org – Forum with over 4.6 gigs of drum loops, melodic loops, instruments, vocals, and remix tracks.
• Flashkit.com – Site geared towards Adobe Flash developers, but also has a great collection of sounds that can be downloaded in .wav, .mp3, or flashtrak format.
• Synthmania Famous Sounds – Interesting compilation of loops and instruments used in popular songs. Includes loops like James Brown’s overly sampled funky drummer and 808 drums. Great for chopping up.
• Historical Speeches – Pretty big archive of speeches in mp3 format. Great place for finding quotes in sound format.
• Synthzone.com – Huge list of links to site with drum and rhythm loops for download.
• Elektron-users.com – Electronic music site with a download section containing samples and loops.