How to tackle a hip hop mix, from individual instruments to designing a perfectly balanced record that shines. Read carefully until the end of this article to get an idea of how to mix Hip Hop, including the beat, the vocals and bass.
The Beat
Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first things you’ll want to nail down is the kit: your kick snare, hi hats, and other central percussion. If you come from an EDM background in particular, there are some deeply ingrained habits you’ll need to break; let’s get into it.
The basic approach to the core drum kit in EDM, especially heavier genres like dubstep, is to make them “larger than life”: kicks that span the entire frequency spectrum and have an extremely present high end, snare with a meaty bottom that hit you in the chest, splashy hats that fill the background, etc. By contrast, hip hop drums are much tighter, more controlled. There will always be minor differences, but there are a few specifics that tend to hold true for different drums. Try out Beatmaker GLORY if you want a real-time look at this (and if you want to have a great hip hop / trap sound right out of the gate)!
For example, kicks: generally, you’ll find that the transient is very short, the body doesn’t stretch down to the lowest of the low bass frequencies, and the high frequencies don’t get a ton of emphasis. Often they trigger with every bass note, forming the classic “trap bass” sound, which rounds out this sound even further.
Snares are also extremely short. The transient is sharp, you generally won’t find any sort of tail or release, and the EQ settings are nearly the opposite of EDM snares. Instead of a heavy body, clean high end and some splashiness, hip hop drums have very little of their fundamental frequency, feel a little rolled off in the high end, and have a boost around 2kHz – 3kHz (Many Men (Wish Death) by 50 Cent is a great example). This provides a harsh smack and is a huge component of the genre’s sound as a whole. Save those high frequencies for the closed hi hats and keep them short, throw in some open hi hats here and there, and you’ll be able to get the essentials down!
Vocals
If you don’t listen carefully, it’s easy to miss a lot of the subtle processing that hip hop vocals get (except for tuning, of course!). For example, listen to some of Eminem’s older songs like Without Me and you’ll hear a lot of vocal doubling; this can be done either on the production side (recording multiple takes and layering them together) or the mixing side (using a vocal doubling plugin).
In more modern hip hop, though not as much with older songs, you’ll also find a high shelf EQ is boosting the upper frequencies, adding a bit of “air.” While this often occurs in EDM as well, it’s worth noting that there’s less competition in the high end in hip hop, so this makes the vocals shine through even more than they would otherwise.
Arguably though, the most important aspect of vocal mixing is the leveling — if the vocals aren’t at the forefront of the mix, listeners will struggle to hear the lyrics and things will feel off. This is predominantly because hip hop is a heavily vocal-dominated genre, which is less true even for rock, EDM and other genres. Make sure the average volume is high enough, and don’t be afraid to use several compressors each series to gradually make the level more consistent. Each of the compressors should only have a few decibels of gain reduction so that the dynamics are preserved, and the cumulative effect is powerful — Slate Digital has a range of analog-modeled compressors that work seamlessly in conjunction if you want to recreate this effect.
Bass
Before approaching mixing, listen carefully to the contour of each bass note: typically they’re not sustained but have a very long release, making hip hop bass lines quite dynamic. We alluded to this earlier, but this is part of the reason that bass and kick hits often occur simultaneously — to give the bass extra punch and give the kick a stronger bottom end. If this is the case in the mix you’re working on, consider grouping the kick and bass together and slapping a compressor on both, playing with the attack and release until you’re happy with the result! ………
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