Create Better Music, One Plugin at a Time
How to Make ’90s Hip Hop & R&B Beats with Roland JV-1080 There’s something unmistakable about the sound of ’90s Hip Hop and R&B. Warm keys. Digital bells. Lush strings. Smooth basslines. Atmospheric pads. Punchy drums. Chopped samples. And chord progressions that could carry an entire record before the vocals even entered. The Roland JV-1080 … Read more
How to Make Hip Hop & R&B Beats in Pro Tools Artist Pro Tools may be best known for recording, vocal editing, and mixing, but it can also be a surprisingly capable DAW for making complete Hip Hop and R&B beats. With MIDI sequencing, virtual instruments, drum programming, audio editing, automation, Elastic Audio, and a … Read more
When you’re making Hip Hop and R&B regularly, one of the biggest challenges isn’t finding more sounds. It’s finding sounds that make your beats feel different. You can only start so many beats with the same piano, electric piano, bell, guitar, or analog synth before your productions begin traveling down familiar roads. That’s where Excite … Read more
How to Make Hip Hop & R&B Beats with Minimal Audio Current 2.0 Minimal Audio Current 2.0 may look like a synthesizer built primarily for electronic sound design, but there’s a lot here for Hip Hop and R&B producers. Its combination of wavetable synthesis, granular processing, sampling, an additive sub engine, modulation, MIDI effects, and … Read more
Lo-fi production isn’t really about making your music sound bad. It’s about making it sound imperfect in the right ways. Warm keys, slightly degraded textures, subtle movement, washed-out ambience, dusty drums, and chords that feel like they could have been sampled from an old record are all part of the aesthetic. That’s exactly where LANDR … Read more
Electric piano and R&B were practically made for each other. From the warm chords of classic ’70s soul to ’90s R&B, Neo-Soul, Trap Soul, and modern alternative R&B, the electric piano remains one of the easiest ways to give a production warmth, emotion, and sophistication. That makes AAS Lounge Lizard EP-5 particularly interesting for R&B … Read more
Reverb can completely change the emotion of a Hip Hop or R&B mix. Use too little, and your vocals, keys, drums, and melodies can feel dry and disconnected. Use too much, and suddenly everything sounds distant, muddy, and washed out. The trick is creating depth without sacrificing clarity. That’s exactly where the Universal Audio EMT … Read more
Modern beat production often comes down to finding sounds that are inspiring enough to start an idea but flexible enough to shape into something uniquely yours. That’s one of the areas where u-he Hive 2 really shines. Hive 2 combines wavetable synthesis, traditional subtractive synthesis, powerful modulation, sequencing, unison, filters, and effects inside a synth … Read more
How to Make Beats with u-he Repro: A Complete Guide for Hip Hop & R&B Producers Some synthesizers are designed to give you thousands of sounds as quickly as possible. Others are designed to make you want to play, tweak, experiment, and create. u-he Repro falls firmly into the second category. With Repro-1 handling monophonic … Read more
Cherry Audio Ensoniq ESQ-1 brings the distinctive sound of one of the 1980s’ most influential hybrid synthesizers into a modern production workflow. By combining digital oscillators with modeled analog filtering, the ESQ-1 can produce warm pads, glassy keys, gritty basses, metallic bells, evolving textures, and cinematic sequences. Those characteristics make it useful for much more … Read more