Spacey as Venus.
I have a dissenting opinion.
I don't think "hard" really describes any of Neptunes' beats. Not even the ones with Clipse rapping about hustling. Maybe Superthug. But not hard. Always seemed like ride around play it in the projects during summer time hip hop.
They have produced a number of hits, no doubt.
But I never fancied their production style as much. What do you expect? I always fancied Wu-Tang, Mobb Deep, New York hip hop kind of beats the most.
To me, the Neptunes drums all sound like they came out of a Korg Triton or Korg O1/w. Some of them sound like Pharell banging a 5 gallon bucket with chop sticks.
I mean come on, they jacked the drums and synths straight out of the triton. Listen.
I remember I had an old school ASR-10 because of my Rza Havoc influence.
My friends around the time copped the more expensive newer yamaha motifs or korg tritons.
I actually like the yamaha motif better than triton. I dare say the motif sounds more realistic for instruments. Triton more synthy and glassy if that's the right adjective for it?
And to me the Neptunes beats all sound a lot alike. They begin to sound repetitive and you can hear some of their recycled drums in simplistic arrays with fast decays.
Get yourself a Korg Triton or 01/w and you'll have lots of those neptunes drums. Or just get the sample packs for Kontakt.
That Strato-Chime preset in the korg triton is how neptunes made lots of those synthy lead sounds.
So to me their beats are just someone high with a korg triton. There's not much crate digging or sampling and the stuff I like that makes more soulful hip hop sounding beats.
And i'm not hating. They have lots of fun, dancey, summer time production and some of their other catchy stuff what great for Clipse and Nore. But not a versatile sound and don't belong in a short list of best hip hop producers.
that was an informative vid
I see the Neptunes' versality in the different soundscapes they come up with for their rnb versus their rap beats. their rap beats (for lack of a better word) do have a recognizable sound but actually that's a good selling point for me. I really enjoy their music. one thing I would like to add is that while all of these sounds are available on a Triton it still takes a musician to pick what would work in a song, kind of like sampling choices
as a non musician and a person who can't read music annotation I'm always happy when someone breaks down instruments etc to me so thanks for that explanation
Plus, who gives a shit. You can say the same thing about most popular producers.
Co-signOriginally Posted by Sense-A
But how is that different to Large Professor, DJ Premier, RZA etc?
They all reused a lot of sounds and instruments. All the technical reasons why you don't like the neptunes are irrelevant, because you can make the same argument about every other hip hop producer, or musician generally tbh. Everybody has a 'thing' that they do.
And then it also becomes a semantic argument about the word 'hard'. Who cares, you either like the music or you don't.
If we are going to pick on Neptunes, we might as well pick on every other hip hop or r and b producer, as they all have recycled drum sounds and melodies at some point.
And yeah, they jack stuff from their keyboards. I remember in the early 2000's there were rumors Casio was suing Swizz for stealing one of their preset rhythms
It is just part of the process.. You have to re-use at some point.
Last edited by David Daniel Davis; 06-21-2020 at 10:00 AM.
true, at the most you can say one beat maker uses more instruments and/or more techniques than another but basically each still has their signature sound (Large Pro and Primo are definitely good examples, I'd add Swizz Beatz, Snowgoonz as other examples, just to mention producers whose work I'm NOT always a fan of), which is often based on FEW instruments or techniques
I would think most producers are proud of recognisability (is that a word?), as in 'I have my own style' and it's probably easier for them to market themselves that way to lyricists and labels
you could argue it is a challenge to diversify within your signature sound and make full albums that have a trademark sound but where each song still is its own beast (I'm leaving lyrics out of the picture here)
maybe others would argue the greater challenge would be for producers to go for extremely different soundscapes from one song or project to another. but tbh no hiphop producers like that come to mind right away
I was one of those people that used to shit on Magoo back in the day. Hip Hop heads did not realize how good we had it back then and how much worse things were about to become. I would gladly listen to Magoo or even Nelly over the trash that rules the airwaves now..
I think more people felt that way about The Neptunes during the early 00s because they were everywhere.
In that Chad Hugo interview, the interviewer said that one year their productions made up 30% of the songs on the radio, which is nuts. Anything that gets popular really fast like that has a guaranteed backlash around the corner.
That is tough. RZA was pretty versatile for example, but has an identifiable sound palette with the Stax samples, diminished guitar chords, Carlos Bess drum loops.
I think producers are driven by melody often too. El-P actually has done a good job of moving his beats in different directions. He used to make something like experimental 90s boom bap, and gradually has moved more into 808 driven, electronic beats but theres things he still does melodically that sound like his early records.
I think it's really tough to reinvent yourself completely as a producer because it has so much to do with the way you hear music. I think everybody has their own idea of what they like about the same bit of music. It's like if you asked random producers to make beats in other producers signature styles, I bet they'd still sound like themselves.
that would be a very interesting experiment ; I'd love to see that happen
I hear you on RZA and El-P
Yeah it would be really interesting. Like what would the Neptunes attempt at boom bap sound like? I guarantee you any 90s producer couldn't make a trap beat to save their life.
There's examples where a producer has said years later that they were trying to copy another producer on certain songs, but annoyingly I can't remember any examples.
I was just being honest about my opinion. I like a neptunes beat on occasion. I'm not hatin'. I just prefer the crate diggin beat break sampling and beats. It's just preference and doesn't have to become a debate here. We all like Wu-Tang and even then we don't agree on which Wu-Tang songs we like.
I don't think the earlier samplers from the early 90s had huge banks of presets like the Korg Triton (1999) and what has come after. But, arguably, the Akai S1000 or Roland 1080 (Rza says he used the 1080) are full of presets on Roms. The ASR-10 can even load those old Akai S1000 sample banks. I think Rza used a Nord D-Drum on liquid swords so he was using nord drums. He progressed to a Kurzweil k2500 for Wu Tang Forever which has many sample banks. The cool thing about the Kurzweil K2500 was that it could read Rza's old floppy disks from the ASR-10.
And you're right. The Triton doesn't make the beat for you. Hand me a Triton and i will NOT be able to create hits like Neptunes. Also, Neptunes came out with beats before the Triton was even released. And they have gone on record with having used an ASR-10 just like DJ Mathematiks and Rza and the Wu Elements.
The Neptunes came with a simplistic production style with preset drums and triton sounds that didn't require samples and lots of crate diggin. And there's nothing wrong with that. The result is what counts.
But the release of these large superbanks of sounds and drums (computers were just becoming capable of this at the turn of the millennium) it ended up changing hip hop. One reason is that clearing samples became more and more difficult. Why not utilize royalty free sample banks? That's part of what you're getting with expensive $3,000 Korg Tritons when they came out. Now people buy samplepacks. Samples from records are harder to clear for mainstream commercial record releases. And now getting samples cleared might still mean you're not allowed to publicly perform the song or film a music video or other strings attached.
There are lots of accusations of producers jacking drum hits from other hip hop producers. Kanye West was accused of this by a producer back in the day. Now you can just buy or download sample packs that jacked your favorite hip hop producer. I even found a "Wu-Tang Producer Kit" I downloaded from somewhere.
I'm convinced that DJ Premier and Rza sampled much of their own stuff, including the drums, and didn't use many presets. Rza has obscure samples and we know that from the Wu Samples Threads. He was a crate digger. We find a bunch of old records and songs because Rza was crate diggin. There's over 20 chapters of the Wu-Tang Sampled Chamber you can download. There's DJ Premier samplogy sets too.
Also, back in the 90's, purchasing those sample sets was expensive. They came on floppy disk and from there I bet they were often copied and passed around. Lots of hip hop producers in the early 90's probably didn't have the factory disk sets and were sampling grandpa's records instead.
The SP-1200 only has like 10 seconds of sample time anyways. And maxing ram on the samplers in the early 90's was super expensive. Now you pay $20-$30 to max the ram in a sampler. Back then it cost $300+ for a ram chip. So you made hip hop on a budget and you didn't have as much sample time. You had short breaks. No huge libraries of samples because there wasn't enough ram to even load a huge library.
The time when these huge sample libraries on samplers like the Triton came out, hip hop changed. For better or worse. But most would agree the golden age is foregone. Like I said in another thread, building your own drum kits in a sampler is a lot of hard work. Especially when you try to have velocity change the sound or apply after touch settings or have different envelopes depending on how hard a pad is hit or have layers of slight variations of drum hits depending on modulation or velocity. Now you're getting heavy into programming.
Also, even though I am somewhat dismissive of beats that seemingly came entirely out of a Korg Triton, there's no denying Pharell is a musician. I think I read that he was a band member in high school. He played real drums. I think he can play a piano. He's a real musician. With or without a korg triton. Not all producers are.
This debate is pretty interesting to me tbh.
Hip Hop production, music in general has changed massively since the 90s. I mean I can't even imagine trying to figure out one of those old samplers given how easy to use the modern equipment is.
I'm not a huge fan of what's going on with the Hip Hop production scene now. It's amazing to me that there's such a huge movement of producers making type beats. Rather than carve out their own identity, young beatmakers are actively trying to sound like Wu-Tang or Travis Scott etc. It makes for a pretty generic music scene.
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