Hello, fellas. I've been tasked with producing some young and unknown rap artist in my hometown. This is the third request this year, so I'd better get serious about it. So far, I've recorded and mixed them with my gut feeling (which is rock music oriented), but now I'd love for you to give a hint on the best mixes around in rap, hip-hop style. BTW, they bring their YouTube downloads of license-free backing tracks, which have a kind of generic sound. I'd like to learn about loudness levels, reverbs and delays, the T-Pain vocal effect and its use, etc. how low the bass and kick go, and so on. I have a general-listener's idea, but if you could post a video for me to check, pointing me in the direction of what to look into when listening, I'd really appreciate it.

 

Hey man. So you have a few things on the sister site like Matthew Weiss stuff ( mixing HH bundle and other things), you have Echo Sound Works who has made a lot on things on sampling/resampling, ovo, trap, some low end class. Get confy with 808, 909 and samples. !llmind makes cool vids about his own prods, it's pretty interesting and he makes good beats.
All together I find we are much less organised than in EDM and all that in terms of transmitting techniques and such, maybe not as much ressources but you can find a few, but it's good to reference tracks. There are a lot of sub genres in rap music right now and technics used vary widely from one to the others, some sub genres are defined entirely by those choices and technics (not every rap prods use massively triplets, fortunately).
What you reference depends on which way you want to go.

 

Thank you very much. I'll check the hints you're sharing. I really appreciate it.

 

Cool, I hope it helps. It's cool that you have opportunities and you expand man.
Oh and by echo sound works I meant the adsr tutorials.
Also there are many tutorials out there, more or less good, on the 808 matter. It has to do with the low end being so important in hip hop, it's been like this since the 90s (we own that to Dre) way before trap and ovo, low end was and still is front and center. The 808 has always been used in hip hop in this optic. It's a nice sounding sub, easy to tweak and have fun with. Knowing how to treat an 808 will make you very confy with subs in general (and an 808 is just a sine, you don't have to use sample or the original gear to make dope subs), so knowing how to handle that is a good thing. On this matter there is a good tutorial which is called 808 Science or something similar, it was on AZ. It gives you a lot of technics to treat it, show you how to do those, how to make your own 808, etc, etc. Also includes samples of the 808 and there are three beats demonstrations (how to produce like this dude, this dude or this one). I don't know if it's still on the sister site but this one could be of use for you.