Make Beats for Rap Music With Software

The first time I had a chance to go to a professional recording studio, I was 19 years old. This was 1994 and I was working with a young producer writing songs for a local r&b group who was trying to get a record deal.
The control room was freezing cold and filled with, what I now know was, tens of thousands of dollars worth of audio gear. Years later when I started producing beats for an independent label overseas, we started our studio with a few thousand bucks. Admittedly, our set up didn't sound as good as the pro studio I first worked in, but in the hands of the right engineer we managed to get broadcast quality songs out.
Fast forward to today and I do the majority of my production work on software that I got over five years for a couple hundred bucks. The beauty of the particular software I bought is that I get free updates for life. As long as the company is around I don't have to worry about my software becoming obsolete. With older hardware it can be a nightmare trying to get spare parts or upgrades or add ons.

So to recap, the professional studio I worked in at 19 was easily tens of thousands of dollars, my first studio set up I got 5 years later cost about one tenth that much. The software I bought 5 years after my project studio cost me about one tenth as much as the project studio.

To be fair, there are somethings that I could have done at the pro studio that I could not dream of doing with just my laptop and some software. But I am making rap beats, not recording a live band. After I make the beats, I can always pass them along to a good engineer to mix and master them. Or, if and major artists wants to use it, I can always translate the idea into a bigger production.

For the purely creative part of making beats I don't need much more than my computer and some inspiration. It took me a while to embrace the idea of using software to make beats. Sometimes it feels like cheating. But when I think about the thousands of dollars I have saved over the past five years, I get over it.

In reality, most of the tools that have been used to create hip hop music for the past two decades have been software driven. All the sequencers, digital samplers, keyboards and drum machines used in the classic hip hop of the 1980's and 1990's are basically computers running specialized software.

More than any other genre of music, technology drives hip hop. First, DJ's manually looped records with rigged up sound systems. Mixers evolved to include cross-faders and effects to make the DJ's life easier. When hip hop was recorded, samplers, sequencers, and drum machines evolved to emulate the action of the DJ. Now the software that made it possible to automate the performance of the DJ has been lifted from the gear and installed on my laptop