Hiphop Studio - a real toy!

Yesterday, I was panning around the Software section of an electronics media store when I came across the Hiphop Studio 6 edition rom eJay being sold at 5 euros - i rewinded the sight a bit and said to myself, "Iz u kidding??!"...and so I brought the box home to lay back kill the rest of the weekend in front of the laptop, creating some hiphop music while having fun.

I must admit I am thrilled with what a layman with an ear for music can come up with, toying around with such inexpensive software -- let alone what possibilites professional software bring (Sony's Soundforge for instance) ...but that's deviating....and so, with my 90 first minutes that I spent on the software, I came off creating this "1st Beat" of mine. This is based on the "Create a beat in 5 minutes" tutorial but I made the beat more sparse and removed some of the vocal samples and added more percussion, bass and SFX samples instead...

And then today, having the whole evening to spare, I went about creating another beat using just bass samples....There are 5000+ samples with legal clearance that come with the software and the bass samples are quite large in number. The result of playing around for another 90 minutes is this creation called "Bass Dive" (pronounced Base Dive for the uninitiated..., a play on the word Bass intended here with Dive...i think you catch the drift.) Whle I started out creating a beat that can be looped for a hiphop record, it became more of a song, at least to think of it in my terms, and had a lot of fun making it! I used over 25 different samples, each running 2-4 seconds (mostly 2) to piece together this got-a-kick-out-of experiement.

There was one nagging sample that the Studio refused to seamlessly gel with the followup sample and so I had to mend this in Wavepad after exporting the song to wav from the Studio. But the hasty editing (it would take way too much time otherwise) is still apparent -- you will hear an unexpected glitches (3 times in the first half, six times in all, as I duplicated most of the song to form the second half) and then you know what I'm talking about.

Hope to bake enough songs to make my very own album ;-)