This is a piano video tutorial on how to play Lollipop by Lil Wayne. It shows you each part step by step. I hope you find this useful.

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.

This is a piano video tutorial on how to play the strings on Scott Storch’s Lean Back – Fat Joe. It shows you the correct way using the pitch bend wheel. I hope you find this useful.

Here’s another video by Warbeats on how to do it using Fruity Loops Studio.

This is a piano video tutorial on how to play 50 Cent & the Game – How we do. I hope you find this useful.

Mr. P from the forums has posted a great tutorial on how to play “Make It Rain” produced by Scott Storch. Check out the thread here: http://hiphop-producer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=69

Here are the notes of Make it rain.

Tempo is 74,645

First The Intro

Low Strings

Low Strings Variation

Chorus Horns

Chorus Horns Variation

If this helps you, please go on Youtube and give this video a good rating! Thanks.

If you want to learn how to make beats, check out How to Make a Hip Hop Beat in 30 min.

Sheet music and piano roll (click to enlarge)

Intro

Main beat

If you liked this guide and want to see more, you can request a song you want to see the notes for.

Another dope video on Youtube showing you how to play Forgot About Dre on piano by ItzDiPzBaby, but again does not show you the notes. I’ve laid out the notes for you all both in sheet music notation and piano roll notation. Enjoy!

Sheet music and piano roll notation (click to enlarge)

Strings

Bass

That funky synth instrument

There are several clips on Youtube of people playing Still Dre by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre on the piano. People keep commenting that they want the notes for the song. Well, hiphop-producer.com brings you the notes both in music literate and non-music literate notation. Above is the Youtube video by haze206 we’re referencing.

Once you get this down, also check out How to Make a Hip Hop Beat in 30 min

Piano sheet music notation for the music literate

Piano roll notation for the non-music literate

Hope this helps!

Approx. completion time: 20 min, excluding downloading & installation.

Difficulty: 2/10

What You’ll Need

Audacity
A freeware audio recording and editing tool that actually is pretty good for it being free. We’ll use this to record. Audacity is great for first starters. It has all the basic functionality that the expensive professional software like Adobe Audition has. Complete songs can be recorded, edited, and mastered using Audacity. Click the image to download.

Microphone
Any old microphone that can plug into your 1/8 inch jack in your computer will work. Cheap $10 computer microphones will be just fine if you are just playing around with this. If you have a karaoke mic, those are usually 1/4 inch plugs. You can find 1/4 inch to 1/8 inch adapters at a store like radioshack for around $3.

Headphones
The more insulated the headphones, the better. Headphones are used during recording so that you can hear the beat when you record yourself. Insulated headphones will let you hear it and not leak music into the microphone.

A Beat to Record Over
In case you don’t have one, here’s a beat I produced back in the day. Right-click the link and choose and Save As.

Let’s Get Started

Loading the beat

1. Open Audacity
2. Go to File > Open and select the beat you’ll be using from your computer.

Setting Up The Preferences

1. Go to Edit > Preferences, and select the Audio I/O tab, which is the first tab.
2. If you have your microphone set up right, you shouldn’t have to touch anything under Recording.
3. Make sure “Play other tracks while recording new one” and “Do not modify audio device settings” are checked.
4. Uncheck “Hardware playthrough” and “Software playthrough” so that you don’t hear yourself as you are recording. This is just my personal preference as I feel it is somewhat distracting.

Recording Over The Beat

1. Use the selection tool (indicated by the red circle) to click where you want to begin recording. Once you find the spot, pull it back about 10 seconds to give yourself enough time to jump in and for the noise reduction effect I’ll explain later.
2. Put on your headphones, and click the red record button.
3. You should hear the music play. Make sure the volume in the headphones is not so loud that it bleeds through and into the microphone. It is very important that you make no noise in the period where you wait to jump in and sing.
4. Look at the microphone input volume indicated by the green circle. Adjust it so that it is at a level that is not too soft and not too loud.
5. How far you stand from the microphone depends on the type. If it is something like a karaoke mic (not a computer mic) you want to get really close, about 3 inches. Computer mics tend to be pretty sensitive and you should test different distances with yours.
6. Record 10 seconds of silence at the beginning of your vocal track.
7. When you are done recording, press the Stop button.

Checking The Recording

The wave that you record should not so loud that it creates clipping or distortion. The image below shows a wave with clipping. It looks like a wave that was too big to fit in the window. If yours looks like this, turn down the mic volume and record again.

Below is a recording that was too soft. Turn up the mic volume and try again.

If it looks like the image below, then that’s good enough to work with. If it sounds quiet compared to the background beat, that’s okay, we will normalize it later.

Noise Removal

Remember when I told you to leave around 10 seconds of silence at the beginning of the vocal track? We will use that sample of silence as our noise profile for noise reduction.

1. Zoom into the silent portion and select a big chunk of it.
2. Click solo on the track you just recorded to hear only that track. Put your headphones on and turn your volume up. Listen to the silent portion. Unless your microphone and sound card are so supremely great, you should hear slight background noise. You may notice that the beginning of the noise is slightly different and then fades down into a consistent hiss. Select at least a good 3 seconds of the same hiss sound. The more of it the better.
3. Go to Effect > Noise Removal, and click Get Noise Profile.
4. Select the portion with the actual vocals.
5. Go to Effect > Noise Removal.
6. Now you can choose how much noise reduction to apply. More is not always better! Try moving the slider to the right and click preview. The hiss may be gone, but you also might sound more metallic. The setting to use varies for each person so play around with different settings until you find the right balance. This is a pretty neat tool for a free program.

Compression
Usually a vocal recording is not perfect. Some parts are louder than others and really stick out while some parts are too quiet. The compressor tool helps even it out by bringing down the volume on the too loud parts. This is the trickiest part of the tutorial because it may take a few attempts at trial and error to get it right.

1. First we have to find the dB levels of the loudest and quietest part of the vocal recording.
2. Float the meter toolbar so we can get a better reading of dB level. Go to View > Float Meter Toolbar.
3. Resize the meter toolbar big enough that you can see more granular markings of volume level.
4. Find the loudest point in your recording and select the peak. You may have to zoom in for this.
5. Now play that part in a loop by pressing Shift + Spacebar at the same time.
6. Look at your volume meter and write down what the maximum volume is.
7. Now find the quietest peak, not quietest spot in your recording and write what its maximum volume is. This means the quietest desirable sound, so breathing noise doesn’t count.
8. Now drag and select the entire vocal track.
9. Go to Effect > Compressor.
10. The most important setting is Threshold, which is the volume level at which the compressor kicks in and quiets down the too loud parts. Your threshold should be between the dB of the loudest and quietest parts of your track (which you wrote down earlier). If the difference is -7dB vs -14dB, then your threshold would be 11dB. If the difference is wide like -7dB and -25dB, lean towards a quieter threshold like -20dB.
11. Leave Ratio at 2:1 and Attack at .2 secs which work for most vocal recordings.
12. Check “Normalize to 0dB after compressing”. This will raise the overall volume on the track.
13. You can use Preview to see the effect on the first few seconds of the track, but it really helps to click OK and apply the effect to see a more overall view.
14. After you apply the effect, your track should visually look more evened out. Listen to it to make sure you are satisfied. If not, try a different threshold.

There is no exact formula for doing this, and it may take a lot of trial and error to get it down to sounding good.

That’s it for compression and now we just have to adjust the volume between the tracks. If the vocal track sounds too loud after normalizing to 0db, try using Effect > Normalize, which will set the maximum level at -3dB. If the vocals sound too quiet, try using Effect > Amplify to increase the volume, but beware of clipping/distortion.

Saving as mp3
Now you are ready to save this song. First, you need to install the LAME mp3 encoder. Instructions are here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3

To save as mp3, go to File > Export as MP3 and save your first recording.

I hope this tutorial wasn’t too rough or hard to follow, and that it was very helpful especially for beginners who want to get started in music production.

I would love to hear any questions and comments. Please leave them below.

If you have any general questions as to how to get started in production, try posting your question in the Getting Started forum.

By the end of this tutorial you will have covered:

• Sample chopping
• Drum pattern programming
• Basic audio editing

Approx. completion time: 30 min, excluding downloading & installation.

Difficulty: 2/10

Software we’ll be using

Audacity
A freeware audio recording and editing tool that actually is pretty good for it being free. We’ll be using its audio editing capability to chop up drum samples. Audacity is great for first starters. It has all the basic functionality that the expensive professional software like Adobe Audition has. Complete songs can be recorded, edited, and mastered using Audacity. Click the image to download.

Fruity Loops Studio 7 Demo
If you make beats on your PC, this is one of the best and most popular programs. Just to let you know what else is out there, there’s a big debate between Propellerhead’s Reason vs. Fruity Loops among computer producers, but I won’t go into that here. Fruity Loops demo has full functionality except that you can’t save, but you can export as WAV or mp3, which is what we’ll do. Click the image to download.

How Beats Are Put Together, A Quick Summary
A beat is made up of drums, bass, chopped samples, and synthesized or real instruments. We are only dealing with drums in this tutorial. The drum sounds can be obtained by purchasing or downloading free drum kits which contain individual sound files of each type of drum (kick, snare, hi-hat, etc.), chopping up break beats to isolate individual drums, or by recording your own drums. We will be cutting some drums out of a break beat.

Cutting the drum samples
We will use this sample drum loop which comes from ccmixter.org, which hosts a huge collection of free sounds. Right click and download the sample to your hard drive. Open the file in Audacity. (A word of caution: Audacity has a tendency to crash, so always save frequently.)

We are interested in taking the kick, snare, and hi-hat from this sample. Listen the sample, and you can hear several instances of each of these drums. One of the major challenges is finding clean sounds. Luckily, this sample has very little background noise like hiss and static. The best sounds to take are the ones that are most isolated.

Kick drum

All the kick drums are highlighted in green. If you listen to the first two, you can definitely hear the hi-hat on top of the kick. The third and fourth ones also have hi-hats, but it is less apparent in the fourth one, so we’ll use this one.

Selecting the sample

We will have to zoom in to get a good selection. First, select the area around the fourth kick (i.e. a little before it, and a little after it). Then click the button indicated by the red circle. Start your selection at the very beginning of where the sound wave forms and end it at the very beginning of the next sound wave.

Once you have this selected, go to File > Export Selection As WAV… and name it kick.wav. It is a good practice to create a folder for every beat you make to stay organized, so create a folder called “Beat 1” and save kick.wav in this folder.

Snare and hi-hat

Do the same for the snare and hi-hat indicated below in green and name them snare.wav and hihat.wav.

Loading the drum samples
Now we are going to load the drum samples we just made into Fruity Loops.

1. Open Fruity Loops.
2. Go to File > New
3. You should see the default view, which has the default drum kit. We are going to replace these drums with our drum sounds. Click the Kick drum button circled in green and click the load sample icon circled in Red. Browse for your kick.wav and click open. To hear the sample, you can click the waveform at the bottom.
4. Do the same for hihat and snare.
5. You can go ahead and right click and delete clap, which we will not be using.

Inputting the drum pattern
Understanding the layout

The default view for Fruity Loops is a drum sequencer. What you see in front of you is 1 measure of 4 beats, and it is divided into 16 steps.

Understanding the process

A song is made up of drum patterns. We will create 3 drum patterns (intro, main, bridge) that will make up the song. (Note: this is just an example. Not all songs need to have all these pieces. This just demonstrates the use of patterns.)

Intro drum pattern

We’ll keep the intro simple and program it with just a kick and snare. First we have to set the tempo (speed of the track). Click and drag the tempo down to 96. Generally, hip hop tracks tend to be between 90 to 100 beats per minute. Click in the pattern you see below. If you make a mistake, right-click to unclick a mistake. Notice that this is pattern number 1, and the play mode is pattern.

Main drum pattern

Now we move onto pattern number 2. Click in the pattern number box (right next to tempo) and drag it up one step. You should see your drum patterns become blank. Copy the drum pattern you see below.

Hip hop beats generally always have a snare or clap on every 2 and 4 beat, a kick on the 1 and 3 beat, and hihats on every 2 steps.

Click the play button to listen to the beat. The hihats sound a little too loud, so click the volume knob next to hihat and turn it down to 65%. Look right below File, Edit, etc. to see the actual % volume level.

Bridge drum pattern

Click the pattern number box (right next to tempo) and drag it up one step so that it is 3. Copy this drum pattern.

Programming the song
Now that we have 3 patterns to work with, we can program the song. Click the “View Playlist” button indicated by the red circle. To make it snap to bars, click the “Snap to grid” button and select Bar. Use the pencil and copy in the pattern below. Switch the play mode to song and click play to listen. This is the basic layout of our song.

Exporting (saving) the song as a sound file
Now we will export this song into a file that can be played in an audio player. Go to File > Export > Wav file. Songs are almost always exported as Wav rather than mp3 because of higher quality. Save the song as beat1.wav inside the folder with kick.wav, snare.wav, hihat.wav.

Final touches in Audacity
Open beat1.wav in Audacity. There are a ton of things you can do in here. Just check out the Effects menu, but only a few are logical.

Normalize
Normalize with make the track its maximum loudness without distortion. Select the whole song by pressing ctrl + A (cmd + A on mac). Then go to Effect > Normalize and click OK.

Fade out
A very common feature to end a lot of songs. Select the last 10 seconds or so and go to Effect > Fade Out.

A Note About Equalization (EQ)
For a simple beat like this, you would not need to use the EQ to do something like bump the kick drum. Just turn up the volume on the kick in Fruity Loops. If something can be done more easily in Fruity, then do it there. EQ is useful for a more complete track with instruments, vocals, etc.

So that’s it. Now you are ready to save this song. First, you need to install the LAME mp3 encoder. Instructions are here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&item=lame-mp3

To save as mp3, go to File > Export as MP3 and save your song.

Now that you can produce a hip hop beat, try recording vocals over your beat with this 20 min tutorial.

Questions? Comments? Please leave them below.

If you have any general questions as to how to get started in production, try posting your question in the Getting Started forum.