Beatowski Releases Boom Bap Essentials (WINNER ANNOUNCED)

Beatowski has announced the release of Boom Bap essentials, a commercial hip hop sample library containing 250 premium boom bap sounds ready for use with NI Maschine 2, Akai MPC series and all WAV compatible sampler instruments.

The library is priced at £15 and available for purchase on Beatowski’s official Bandcamp page. Check out our interview with Beatowski below for more info about the library and enter the giveaway for the chance to win a free copy of the release!

The Interview

BPB: Hi Beatowski, thanks for giving away a copy of your new drum pack to BPB readers. Much appreciated! This is your first commercial drum pack, correct? Can you tell us a bit more about the sound pack and its contents?

Beatowski: Hey, I visit BPB a lot, it’s actually one of my top 5 favorite websites, so I’m more than happy to share it with you guys! This is my first, but hopefully not last, commercial sample pack. It consists of over 230 custom drum samples and 5 different bass tones, compatible with every DAW. Maschine users will have fifteen groups with all the sounds tagged and ready to use. There’s also 60 pre-programmed drum patterns to inspire or give some ideas to producers, also available in MIDI format and 16-bit WAV samples for those using older hardware samplers.

BPB: You’re a hip hop producer and now also a professional sound designer. Which do you prefer – making music or designing new sounds? How important are sound design skills for a hip hop producer?

Beatowski: Well, music production will always be number one of course; then again, I don’t really sample anymore, so every recording session becomes a sound design session too. Sound design skills are important in every genre if you want your tracks to be original. This is specifically true for sample based hip hop – it doesn’t take a lot of talent to loop ten seconds of another song and add some kicks and snares.

BPB: Can you share some of your sound design tips with our readers? What are some of your techniques for making good sounding hip hop samples?

Beatowski: I won’t give any tips like “do this to get that”. The Internet is full of tutorials and videos on how to achieve certain things. My advice would be to misuse tools and experiment more. “What if?” is a good question to ask yourself when designing sounds. I like ‘dirty’ sounding drums – this is when bit crushing, saturation, distortion and similar plugins come in handy. I might pitch some of the drums down a few octaves and layer them with other samples to get more interesting sounds.

BPB: Do you have any favorite music making and sound design tools? Which is the one software tool that you couldn’t live without? Also, do you use any freeware plugins in your studio?

Beatowski: I like Native Instruments products, especially Kontakt and Massive, Waves plugins, some of Maschine’s built-in effects are great too.
It’s hard to pick a single tool, but it would probably be a filter/EQ, considering how often I use these in my projects. I hardly use any freeware instruments, but I really love some free VSTs, like most of Variety of Sound, TDR and TAL stuff among other plugins.

BPB: What are your plans for the rest of 2015? Will we see more Beatowski releases this year?

Beatowski: I have a few ideas regarding sample packs. Want to try something different, maybe melodic kits or loops. There will be more video tutorials coming, too.

BPB: Thanks again for the giveaway and for this interview!

The Giveaway

Beatowski is giving away one free copy of the Boom Bap Essentials sample library to one lucky BPB reader. To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment below. We will announce the winner (picked randomly) on October 18th on this page. Good luck! :)

The random number generator at RANDOM.ORG did its thing and gave us #3 as the result, meaning that Jean Talu is the lucky winner this time around. Congratulations! :)

Thanks to Beatowski for sponsoring the giveaway and thank you all for entering. We’ll launch another cool giveaway in a day or two, so stay tuned and thanks for reading BPB!