Making Beats. Joseph G. Schloss
first of which is a socioeconomic concern that runs across the spectrum of human activity: one does not invest a substantial amount of money in a pursuit until one is certain that one is serious about it. For instance, Stradivarius violins are beyond the price range of most violinists; even if one could afford it, one would not buy a Stradivarius for a beginning violin student. Similarly, even if they can afford it, few producers purchase state-of-the-art equipment until they are in a position to exploit it to the fullest. As a result, many producers develop their talents on outdated equipment, which is less expensive to purchase and in many cases simpler to operate.
The second factor is a sense that, on a pedagogical level, the most practical educational approach is to recapitulate the form’s musical evolution to ensure that each important technique is mastered before moving on to the next one. This approach has a compelling internal logic, if only due to the fact that more complex technologies and techniques tend to develop out of simpler ones, rather than vice versa. Finally, there is a broader belief that an individual working through hip-hop history can develop a deeper understanding of the more abstract philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the form.9
For many producers, the educational process began with a single tape deck and the creation of so-called pause tapes: “Basically, it’s an early form of sampling, in the most ghetto form possible. What you do is you play a record, and then you pause [the tape], and you play the break, pause it, bring it back, play the break, pause it … ’til you have like a continuous loop. And then I’d take another tape and rap over that, put like scratchin’ and shit on it. So I started doing it that way” (Samson S. 1999). At some point, many—though not all—acquire a second turn table and a mixer and begin to learn about deejaying. Most producers see learning to deejay and learning to produce as being part of the same process; none of my consultants made a distinction unless I specifically asked them to. Most began by experimenting on their own, and it was only later, after they had achieved some proficiency, that they met other like-minded individuals and began to share information. This pattern has led to certain idiosyncrasies becoming formalized in hip-hop practice:
Mr. Supreme: Just learned on my own, really…. And another funny thing is that nobody taught me and when I brought that $24 mixer and I came home, I plugged up the turntables. I didn’t know, but I plugged ’em in backwards. And to me that was right, ’cause I didn’t know. I just naturally thought number one would be on the right side, two would be on the left side … That’s how I plugged ’em in and that’s how I taught myself. And now a lot of deejays say, “Yeah, you’re weird. You go backwards.”
Joe: Oh, so you still have to do it that way.
Mr. Supreme: Yeah, to this day! That’s how I learned. I can’t go the real way. And that’s called a “hamster.” A lot of deejays are called “hamsters,” that go backwards … I don’t know who came up with that name or why. (Mr. Supreme 1998a).
In fact, many mixers are now outfitted with a “hamster switch” that automatically reverses the controls so that a backwards deejay can use another deejay’s setup without unplugging the turntables to reverse them. So many individual deejays made the same mistake when figuring out how to deejay that their approach, backwards deejaying, is now an accepted practice in the community. This pattern, individual experimentation retroactively legitimized by a professional peer group, can been seen at many points in the development of hip-hop (and, in fact, in most forms of music).
For most, the development of deejaying proficiency was followed by the acquisition of an inexpensive keyboard instrument with a rudimentary sampling function. At this point, the music is powered by youthful enthusiasm, creativity, and a generally high-school-aged peer group that didn’t have very high expectations in the first place. Hieroglyphics producer Domino describes his origins as a producer:
I had a partner named Jason at the time. Basically, I was their MC, and we were producing together…. I bought this little keyboard, and basically you would push the button and whatever you put into it would be what it sampled. Like, I started off by saying, “I’m dope! I’m dope! I—I—I’m dope! I’m dope!” Didn’t have enough insight to do anything with it. Well, he sampled the beat. We used to just like have a continuously drum break and tape it on a tape. And then have another tape player and then record from that tape to another tape player, and add stuff off the sampler—the new things that we had sampled. So by the time you’re done, you got like a fifth generation copy…. That was the initial way that we sampled. That’s how we had the different tracks was by dub, tape to tape. (Domino 1998)
DJ Topspin describes a similar process, which soon evolved into an impossibly byzantine home “studio”:
I got a Casio keyboard, a sampling one … for Christmas…. I thought that was interesting when I first got it. I was like, “Oh, you can sample your voice,” and I’d just do that forever and ever…. You couldn’t really do too much with it, until I looked at the back of it, and there was a input. So you could do something other than your voice. So I went to Radio Shack…. I got the thing hooked up…. It had the input, and I plugged into the Yorx [stereo] … and sampled little bits of stuff. And then I took my Walkman … and would sample pieces from a song.
I mean, it was … like with a little Y-jack, like you have two headphone female jacks, and it would be one going into the sampler, one coming out of the Walkman, and vice versa. This big spider-web concoction. But you could end up playing the Walkman, while hearing you triggering the sampler…. The machine was so limited, you could only do like halfs or thirds [of a loop] sometimes, you couldn’t get a whole. You’d have to overdub all those pieces. So you’ll have like a six-, seven-generation beat. [But] people I was runnin’ around with were like “Yeah, that’s the shit, man!” (DJ Topspin 1999)
Notice that both Domino and DJ Topspin specifically point out how their low expectations facilitated their early development. Both reflect with some amusement that their efforts were acceptable by the standards of their peers.
As they become more emotionally and financially invested in their work, most producers acquire increasingly professional equipment to facilitate it. This raises the issue again of sample-based hip-hop as a non-performative genre. Abstract and aesthetic concerns aside, there is a practical issue here: the hip-hop musician’s instrument, the sampler, is a piece of studio equipment. This simple fact totally obliterates conventional distinctions between performing (or practicing) and recording. Everything that is done with a sampler is, by definition, recorded. Moreover, the output of the sampler is almost always transferred to a conventional medium, such as digital audiotape or CD. At the most basic level, the hip-hop producer’s “instrument” (sampler/sequencer, mixer, and recording device) is a rudimentary home studio.
Virtually all sample-based hip-hop producers do the majority of their work in such home studios. As Theberge notes, this is typical of contemporary electronic music: “In genres of music that rely heavily on electronically generated sounds, a great deal of pre-production sequencing in the home studio (no matter how modest the quality of the synthesizer set-up) became possible. You could then simply carry the work on diskette to a more professional facility where ‘finishing’ work could be performed in a reasonably short amount of time” (Theberge 1997: 232).
For many non–hip-hop electronic musicians, the use of a home studio is a matter of convenience and expense rather than of socialization. They tend to make their studio spaces as distinct from their domestic pursuits as possible:
Often ignored … is the manner in which the domestic space has been transformed into a production environment. Musicians’ magazines often use cliches such as the arrival of the “information age” and Alvin Toffler’s (1980) notion of the “electronic Cottage” to explain the existence of the home studio. It seems to me that there is something else quite striking about this particular manifestation of contemporary music-making that is very different from previous uses of music technology in the home; that is, the degree to which the home studio is an isolated form of activity, separate from family life in almost every way.
The home studio is, above all, a private space. Studios tend to be located in bedrooms, dens, or basement rec rooms, far from the main traffic of everyday life…. The home studio is thus, by