How I Made a 90s 12 Bit Boom Bap Beat with the free Vinyl Treats Sample Pack

I picked a funky soulful sample from the Vinyl Treats Vol 2 sample pack. If you want to make 90s boom bap beats you should definitely pick this sample pack 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.

I decided to speed up the sample 4 semitones and just straight up loop it. If I was on my MPC Live II I probably would have done some finer chopping but since this is a demonstration looping is fine.

I picked a nice punchy kick from Cymatics. The Drill kit is a go-to for me. Despite the name the kicks are versatile for pretty much any rap music. I made my basic pattern and then started messing with the timing and velocities to give it some more bounce.

Then I loaded up a DJ Premier type snare from the Cooking Soul Lo Bap Vol 3 kit. It really filled up the frequency where it needed it. A cool trick to use on your snares is you can select your snare pattern in the piano roll and just inch it forward a little bit. It gives it a more human feel and helps with the bounce which is crucial in boom bap beats.

I started adding a jingle bell but changed my mind and selected a hi hat instead. The hi hat came from the Cooking Soul kit as well. Another trick for that boom bap bounce is take the quantization off and use your midi keyboard to make them a little off grid. If you make mistakes its fine because it's not meant to be perfect but if you mess up too bad you can always move them where you need to move them.

After that I added an open hi hat and a shaker just as a bonus.

I got a basic structure for my beat going. 8 bar hook followed by a 16 bar verse. Then I started gain staging. What I find works best for me is keeping the sample at around -9db, the kick at -6db and have everything follow that. Of course you need to trust your ear and make sure it's sounding right but this formula has never failed me. It gives you plenty of headroom for the mix.

If you listen to these old classics you will typically always find that they don't usually use their own bass. They pick a dope sample that has a dope bassline already and they filter that part out and process it so it knocks. That's a favorite trick of mine as well. 

All you have to do is make a track in your DAW, link the sample to that track, take an EQ and roll off everything above 100hz. Then you can process it the way you like. RBass from Waves is perfect for this. Next I put on a compressor and make sure it blended into the mix and BAM a dope bassline!

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.

To really bring this to life and make it a true 90s type beat I put on the TAL Bitcrusher. It's for free online and it sounds good. My only problem with it is that it's pretty small but other than that it works great.

One thing to note is that I put the bitcrusher on every individual track. Why? Because when you go and render the trackouts that bitcrusher will be on the individual tracks. If you just put it on the master bus the master will have the bitcrusher effects but the other tracks will not.

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 Vol 1+2 sample pack. It's got 13 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!