This One Sample Started a Soulful Rap Beat

I picked a dusty soulful sample from the Vinyl Treats sample pack. If you want to make a soulful rap beat you should pick this one up. You can download it for free. All you have to do is enter your email and you get the download link sent straight to your email. If you want a dope vinyl sample pack then this is for you.

Truth be told I've sampled this sample twice already but never on camera. So I hope you enjoy it!

I chopped the sample into 1/8th notes. The BPM was 140 but I wanted to keep the same pitch but turn up the BPM. If you chop a sample like this it keeps everything in time and you preserve the original pitch.

After that I picked my drums. I used the Cymatics Drill Kicks and Rimshots. It's a very basic drum pattern meant to be carried by the hi hat groove and the natural dopeness of the sample.

Messed up on the hi hats a few times but managed to get them right with a little tweaking. After this I went to the bass.

I first tried to use BooBass because I used it on the previous beatmaking video but I soon realized it wouldn't work this time. The change of bass to a square wave inside of Omnisphere did the trick. All I had to do is filter out the hi end and duck it at 100hz for the kick to shine.

For the sample I used the Waves SSL EV2 and chose my own preset WGB Sample. It has a 6:1 ratio, 0 threshold and a longer release. For the drums its got to be the Waves dbx-160 compressor. If you want your drums to knock I suggest picking this one up. After filtering the bass I added RBass to bring out more sub and compressed the signal.

It was necessary this time to add a sidechain for the sample and bass so I routed them to a new bus. I picked the Fruity Peak controller on the kick and linked it to the bus. Messed with a few settings and it was sounding great. Next I applied some parallel compression to the drums and bass to glue them together.

For the master bus I put the Fruity parametric eq 2 and just rolled off 20hz and 20khz. Next the Waves SSL Compressor using the One preset and clicking off the analog button. The L1+ Limiter came after that and I chose a -0.1 out ceiling and chose the auto release feature. Then I loaded up the meter and I always keep my beats around -12 to -8 db. This one sat great at -11 so I left it there.

Bam! Another beat done!

If you mess with this sample and beat tutorial I highly suggest you download the Vinyl Treats sample pack. It's got 8 soulful, vintage samples that you can use to create those grimey beats. It's for free all you have to do is enter your email and you will receive the download link. Thanks!