Music production e-learning specialists Samplecraze have announced the launch of their latest eBook package: Mixing Hip Hop — The Definitive Guide for Producers.
Designed for producers of all levels, as well as artists who want to up the quality of their self-produced tunes, highly-respected author Eddie Bazil takes you through the ups and downs of a real-word hip hop project, revealing a host of industry tips, tricks and techniques along the way, and all the time explaining the why as well as the how. Everything’s focused on meeting the needs of classic hip hop productions, but is equally relevant to other urban, dance and pop genres, and for anyone interested in music production generally.
Like Samplecraze’s recent highly acclaimed e-learning package Mix Bus Strategies [reviewed SOS May 2018], Mixing Hip Hop takes the form of a hands-on, example-rich PDF eBook that’s backed up with dozens of meticulously-crafted audio and video examples — over 220 pages are packed with insightful screenshots, 26 video tutorials and 300 uncompressed, high-quality audio files.
Everything’s neatly organised by chapter — follow Mixing Hip Hop's richly illustrated step-by-step examples, and Eddie directs your attention to the videos and audio file that are relevant to what you’re reading. Around half of the videos are specific to the track Eddie’s working on, while the other half focus on general production techniques — so there's something for everyone.
The 24-bit 44.1kHz WAV files include the before and after multitracks and stereo mixes, so you can import everything into your own DAW and put Eddie’s techniques into practice. This is a great way of learning. Beginning with the raw multitracks, Eddie assesses the pros and cons of the recordings, and explores strategies to tackle any problem areas — everything from noise reduction to replacing or enhancing dodgy recordings. He kicks on from there to create a basic ‘faders and pan’ mix, before creating a more detailed mix that delivers on the brief from the artist.
Finally, it’s time to sprinkle the gold dust — Eddie demonstrates how a mix engineer can take things much, much further when they have free rein to stray beyond the artist's brief. He explores everything from creative use of effects, triggering new sounds via MIDI that’s been extracted from the audio parts, to sophisticated processing and routing strategies that can be used to apply a truly professional sheen to the mix. The end result is truly impressive!
The whole package — eBook, videos and audio — is available now at www.samplecraze.com for £24.99 (about $32). The 1.4GB download occupies 4.8GB of hard drive space.
For a limited time, SOS readers can get an extra 20% saving if they enter the code HIPHOPFIVE at the checkout.
