Every music producer wants to know the answer to this important question. You see, that in 2020 Rap/Hip-Hop game evolved into many different genres such as Trap, Club Rap, Pop Rap, Mumble Rap, Drill Music and, already classic, “SoundCloud Rap”. But what defines each of these genres?
Tempo
First of all Trap music is not fast at all. At the beginning of the Hip-Hop era tempos of the beats were from 85-110 BPM. Nowadays Trap beats are from 100-160, but drums are slowed down to 50-80 BPM. So basically we have our rappers such as 21 Savage or Gucci Mane rap slow.
Musical Composition
The game changed with digital era of music when software sequencers come out. Now people can make their music anywhere, even in their bedroom. Now when you have a software where you can create perfect melody and perfect drums, you actually don’t need those old vinyl recordings to sample anything. People like Lil Jon were making beats with only 2-3 musical components, Clap, HiHats, 808 Kicks. 6 tracks for songs that sells multiplatinum. Let’s make some piano melody that suppose to sound like Trap and analyze it.
Scale is G# Minor, BPM (Tempo) is 130. As you can see it’s not that much to it. First of all you might noticed that the whole melody is played with only 5 notes. These notes are G, G#, A#, C,C#. As you can see we play around “Half-step relationships” which means going up 1 semitone or going down 1 semitone. In our melody we have 2 Half-step relationships: G-G# and C-C#. Also you can notice that melody kinda played around our 7th Chord in G# Minor scale. That 7th Chord is G diminished and musicians describe sound of that chord as “evolving into something”. Most of the time the 1st bar of a Trap melody sounds like a question and the 2nd bar sounds like an answer to that question. Let’s finish our beat.
“808” is the MOST important part of your Trap beat. My 808 pattern just follows the same notes as the melody. 808 should be simple and strong, sometimes adding a compressor plugin makes your 808 sound better because tail of it becomes louder and more straight.
Sometimes you want that punch in your track, sometimes you not. Kick just follows 808 pattern.
Simple snare pattern on every 3rd beat. Sometimes Clap is used also, but snares sound more mean.
Hihats dictate pace of your beat, sometimes you want gaps, sometimes you want rolls. In this example I wanted as much energy as it can be.
Final touch is the Open hat pattern. Simple hits on 2nd beat. Adds movement to your beat.
Sounds simple, but there’s many songs on SoundCloud and Spotify that have 300k+ streams and use beats like this one.
Production Cheats 