This beat tape follows a traditional arrangement, intended to be ready-made beats. However, in this stage the beats stay sort of raw, because the intention is to add another instrument or two to respond to how the song feels after the vocals are recorded. Often there will be a need for extra sounds in the bridge areas, or to add a new drum loop where the beat originally just drops out. That all depends on how the vocalist interprets the parts spontaneously. A part that I thought should breakdown may just need to change and not lose so much energy, but those elements will depend on what a vocalist sees in these beats in their current state. I don't like to resort to audio trickery in the raw beats. I want sturdy beats that are simple and can push the envelope in broad daylight, but even in these early stages there may be some phaser, reverb, delay, distortion, or auto-panning. I just want you to see all the moving parts, and I want to more muscular instruments to be nestled high in the mix to further emphasize where the spine is with each beat.
This beat tape is called Trap Keeper, because it was designed as a response to a challenge from Bryan Baker, who asked if I could make some beats that would be my answer to the trap music you hear on the radio. I basically just got shameless with the 16th beat rattlesnake percussion style common in West Memphis and East Atlanta. Often I am defying things that the average person does not know a trap beat should be. Such as the tempo. Most beats in this genre are designed to be rapped on in single or double time. East coast rap, such as Wu Tang, is often 95BPM, which you have to be insane like Busta Rhymes to rap at double that tempo. However, trap is set at the maximum intended speed for rapping like Lord Infamous, and it can be chopped and screwed easily because there is a lot of room for dramatically slowing it down. In my examples, I aim to take the glossy polish of modern trap, and present it in a way that has a more stripped-down and somewhat analoge feel to it, all built while laying in bed with the MPCLIVE and trying to picture the ideal vibe of a beat made for driving. In the process I fused the backbeat of east coast traditions, with the 16th beat of southern traditions, in order to show that these two combine to form something closer to drum-n-bass. I also wanted to in a small way return UK drill, and east Atlanta trap back to some of their roots that no one wants to admit came from the techno and electro scenes that set the stage for beat-makers of today.
The next beat tape in the series is "New Release of Old Ghosts." Trap Keeper focuses heavily on drum patterns, and treating that arrangement section like a length of track for a stunt driver. Old Ghosts responds to this by focusing very heavily on melody and mood, and deprioritizing any sort of stunts or overt complexity on the percussion patterns. So, in summary, Trap Keep is a drum-pattern-focused beat tape that is arranged in traditional 16bar verses with eight and four bar breakdowns to build hooks into, intended to be ready to have vocals laid on them, with room to add more of the sorts of sounds that come in and out after a vocalist records their part. Most of the beats you will hear in this series are also prepared with the intention of leaving a little space for more instruments, to varrying degrees.