Noce video of the different parts of the beatmaking process. Focus always has great video interview…

props to Crate Kings by Semantik. He’s alway on the ball!

Kinda long vid but nice studio footage!

Them keyboards drawers are sick!

I stumbled on a nice bunch of mixing/production tips from modernbeats’s Hitalk

Here is an excerpt:

Widen Your Drum Beats

November 1, 2008

What’s the difference between a solid drum beat, and a flimsy drum beat? Many times, the difference is the mix. A good drum mix requires an evenly balanced stereo field & soundstage. Many amateur productions have narrow, almost mono, drum mixes. These narrow drum mixes throw off a song’s overall balance where instrument tracks sound too wide in comparison. An effective way to remedy the problem is to apply a few widening tricks to the kick & snare mix:

1) Starting with the kick, create a stereo field by layering the main kick with an secondary background kick. The aim here is to create ambience with the newly added background kick. A surefire method for creating ambience is to route the background kick through a short room reverb (stereo). Below, in Ableton Live, the main kick is sequenced on channel 5, with the background kick on channel 4.

Also, you can route the background kick through a low pass filter which can remove unwanted highs created from the reverb, or - depending on the reverb - you can damp the high frequencies using the reverb settings. In the diagram below, in the settings for channel 4, a high cut filter has been enabled within the reverb to knock out the high frequencies. By triggering the ambient background kick in time with the main kick, you’re able to maintain the original timbre & feel while also widening the kick’s field & depth. Take care, when layering bass drum samples, not to cause frequency conflicts. If the layered kick is out of tune or out of phase with the main kick, you produce a beat that’s flat, or attenuated.

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Most tuts are good but some of their tutorials/tips are a bit obvious but great for beginners. Overall ok site but I am always reluctant to catch phrases like Become a Hit Producer with Hit Talk’s Hit Reports…?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Their drums sounds are on point !!!!!!!!

If you have been following the sample game you must know that the “Nas Is Like” sample used by DJ Premiere has been one of the few sample that remained unknown. The good people at Djpremierblog put a end to all the mystery. Here is the label and sample:

Now there are a couple of stories about this record, like that DJ Premier stole the record from a church or that he found it in a trash can. Yes, when Preem was young he stole records from the church but not this one. He got this record when he bought a whole record store (I think together with Showbiz, don’t shoot me) and when he got home and listen to all those records he wanted to throw away the 6/7/10 inches, but he did listen to this one and rest is history. It’s also a fact that this beat was rejected by Guru first. Enjoy the famous sample once again (cut 4):

http://www.zshare.net/audio/59354356a6291806/

Just like you did, I hated and still hate the backstreet boys but I found over on illmuzik.com a post about this nice instrumental of one of their hit song that can really help a lot of producers(pop, r&b…) to understand how crucial is the producer/songwriter relationship.

Here is the instrumental track:

Here is the completed song:

If you were a producer or singer would you have picked that beat by itself??? I doubt it, I would’nt have! Combined with excellent songwritting(for pop music of course!) this song came alive(bad wordplay)…any thoughts?