A hip hop beat is a few parts locked tight: drums with a hard backbeat and some swing, a sample or a played loop for the mood and the chords, and a bass or an 808 that follows the kick. Here is what each part does and how they sit together.
Works in any DAW, with any sampler or synth. Nothing here needs a particular plugin.
A hip hop beat is built from three things: drums, a sample or musical loop, and a bassline. The drums carry the groove, the loop carries the mood and most of the harmony, and the bass ties the low end to the kick. A lot of the craft is leaving space around those parts rather than adding more.
The same three parts show up across the styles, at different speeds and with a different attitude. The main branches are boom-bap, trap, lo-fi and drill.
| Style | Tempo | Feel |
|---|---|---|
| Boom-bap | around 85 to 95 BPM | A chopped sample loop over a hard, swung backbeat |
| Lo-fi | around 70 to 90 BPM | A soft, slow boom-bap under tape and vinyl wear |
| Trap | around 130 to 150 BPM | Felt in half time, with fast hi-hat rolls and an 808 sub |
| Drill | around 138 to 145 BPM | A trap kit with a sliding 808 and a darker mood |
Boom-bap and lo-fi are slow, usually somewhere around 80 to 95 BPM, with lo-fi often at the slower end, and you hear every drum hit at that speed. Trap and drill are written faster, around 130 to 150 BPM, but the main snare lands about half as often, so the beat is felt in half time. That is why a fast trap track still feels slow and heavy. These are rough ranges, not rules, and plenty of good beats sit outside them.
Start with a kick, a snare or clap on beats 2 and 4, and a line of hi-hats, then swing it so the groove leans instead of marching in a straight line. The drums are where the head-nod comes from, so they are worth getting right before anything else.
Kick on beat 1, usually with a second, syncopated kick near the snare; a snare or clap on beats 2 and 4; hi-hats filling the gaps. That backbeat, snare on 2 and 4, is the spine of most hip hop drums, boom-bap and trap alike. In trap it is often felt in half time, with the main snare or clap landing once a bar around beat 3, which is what makes the tempo feel slow even at 140 BPM.
In boom-bap the hats are fairly steady, soft eighths or sixteenths with a little swing. In trap the hats do much more: fast rolls, the odd triplet and stutter, and clear changes in volume, which is a big part of the trap signature. Vary how hard each hat hits so the line breathes instead of buzzing.
Swing, or shuffle, is what gives hip hop its nod. Push the offbeats slightly late so they land behind the grid; a swing setting somewhere around 54 to 62 percent is a common starting point. A beat quantized dead to the grid tends to sound stiff, so let the kit lean back a touch while you keep one element, usually the kick, steady as an anchor.
Loop just the drums for a minute and go do something else. If your head starts moving on its own, the groove is there. If it does not, the fix is in the kick, the snare and the swing, not in piling more layers on top.
Take a short loop, a few seconds of a chord phrase, a break, or something you played yourself, and chop it, pitch it and filter it until it locks to your drums. For a lot of hip hop this loop is the melody, the chords and the mood all at once.
Slice the loop into pieces and replay them in a new order, or trigger only the slices you want, so the phrase becomes your arrangement rather than a straight lift. Chopping on the beat is also how you lock the sample to the drums.
Move the loop up or down. Pitching down darkens and thickens it, which is a classic move; pitching up brightens it and can shift it into a new key so it fits the rest of the track.
A low-pass filter rolls the top off so the loop sits under the drums; a high-pass trims the bottom so it stays out of the way of the bass and the kick. This is how you get a busy loop to share space with everything else. Ageing a chopped loop with tape and vinyl wear is the whole basis of lo-fi, which has its own walkthrough in how to make a lo-fi beat.
A sample is someone else's recording. Using a record you do not have permission to use is copyright infringement, and it does not matter how much you chop or pitch it. So work from material you are allowed to use: your own recordings, royalty-free or properly licensed sample packs, or a loop you play in yourself. Plenty of strong beats are built entirely from played parts and cleared sounds.
Keep it simple and lock it to the kick. In boom-bap the bass mostly plays the root of each chord in the loop; in trap and drill the 808 is the bass, a long sub tone that doubles as the low end of the kick.
Usually one note per chord, the root, low and round, with maybe a short walk up into the next chord. The one rule that matters is to stay out of the kick's way in the low end, or the two fight and the bottom of the mix turns to mud.
An 808 is the long, tuned sub tone you get by stretching out a kick sample, and in trap and drill it is the bass. Tune it to the key of the track. Because it is so low and so long it will clash with a separate kick, so either let the 808 be the kick, or keep them apart in time with a little sidechain so they do not pile up. In drill the 808 often slides between notes, which is a big part of that sound.
For how to actually write the notes, shape the tone and sit the low end in the mix, see how to make a bassline. Then leave space. A hip hop beat is defined as much by the gaps as by the parts, so once the drums nod, the loop sits and the bass locks, resist the urge to keep adding.
SILT is a generative tape-loop instrument. Drop your own sample or loop in, or play a phrase, and it gives it the dusty, wobbling, worn character that a lot of hip hop leans on, the tape and vinyl wear that makes a clean loop sound like an old record. It runs in the browser, or as an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX and a standalone.
It works on your own material, so the character comes from a loop you are allowed to use. It does not program your drums or write your bass; it makes the aged, moving loop layer that the rest of the beat sits on.
Free to hear in the browser, no signup. Everything above still works by hand in any DAW, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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