In the 1970s, an underground urban movement known as “hip hop” began to develop in the South Bronx in New York City. It focused on MCing over “break-beats”, house parties and neighbourhood block party events, held outdoors.
STRUCTURE
This is a typical structure of a hip hop song:
Verse (8-16 bars) Chorus (8 bars) Verse (8-16 bars) Chorus (8 bars) Break (2-8 bars) Verse or Chorus (8-16 bars) then ends in a fade out. This structure, called the arrangement, of course, is not written in stone. It can be modified to suit the piece at hand. Here is an example:
HARMONY
Hip hop uses a variety of major and minor chords. They will often have minor chords and a repeating pattern. As in the above video.
Instrumental hip hop is hip hop music without vocals.
here is a prime example .
INSTRUMENTATION
Basically Synthesizers, Microphones, Samplers, Drum Machines, And DAWs. Live instruments are not very common in Hip-Hop. In the beginnings of Hip-Hop, most production was carried out by Drum Machines or digital samplers. Public enemy brought in Breaks combined with a Drum Machine, and the use of MIDI Keyboards.
RHYTHM
The main beat in hip hop is made around the ‘break-beat’. There are lots of variations on this classic beat. Here is an example:
Melody
Hip hop melodies are rapped. The MCer raps over the top of the break beat, samples, scratching and keyboards. Sometimes the keyboards play the melody.
Harmony
Normally hip hop uses minor scales and chords. They also use really difficult chords as in this video
Music technology in hip hop
Hip hop uses samplers in the music. They also use turntables and scratch the vinyl to add an effect. Modern hip hop uses DAW technology to create interesting textures and sounds that are centred around the classic break-beat groove. These days DAW technology is used to create nice effects.
Sources of information
wikipedia -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop
youtube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKkUCwxRWAM
hip hop websites -https://genius.com/discussions/66393-The-5-elements-of-hip-hop
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~dbb27/hhintro.html
My Hip Hop Piece
this is my piece . I tried out lots of ideas to create my piece. I tried lots of different instruments and ended up with this piece. I like my piano melody. I think it works well.
this is my caribbean steel drums. I didn’t like the sound of these so i took them off.
here is my audio file.
artic noise lead.
here ive steinway grand piano
here I’ve used a harpsichord.
here i’ve used steinway grand piano again .
here i’ve used a classical boutique 808
here is boutique 909 .
here I have samples of scratching and have used all these instruments because they are used for the genre .
Here is my piece
I have used samplers in my piece my piece and used loops this comes from music technology this has helped me , to build my piece to make it how good it is now .
without samples my piece would not have the good sound it has now so music technology has a big impact .
this is a review about my hip hop piece .
Strengths of my piece
My piece has met the brief because i have lots of tracks and it is the right length. My piece sounds like hip hop because it has a hip hop groove. I have used instruments that sound like hip hop. I have used patterns and these are used in hip hop music. I also used sampled sounds and this is a feature of hip hop. The scratching sounds work well.
weakness: is that it is not catchy enough as a beat mould have more density to my piece that would of been more eq on most of my instruments .
what could of been better : my structure could of been more on point and used only hip hop instruments so that’s what I could have done.