What You Should Know Before You Buy A Beat

1
What You Should Know Before You Buy A Beat
2
There are some rappers out there who may buy a
beat or backing track, take that to the studio,
and want to record vocals over it. 
They find producers or composers who have built a
library of different beats that can be purchased,
and select a number of tracks they want to write
raps for.
If you are going to a studio and mix engineer to
record your vocals, and mix your tracks you will
want to give them the best quality audio to work
with.
Here are a few simple things you can look out
for as an artist when you buy a beat
3
 Mp3s are considered a compressed data, or
lossy format where a lot of the frequency
information of the original recording has been
thrown away in order to make a smaller file size. 
Always, get WAV (or .wav)  audio files not Mp3s 
The .wav format is most likely the original
format that the music was recorded in, and
includes the full range of frequency information.
4
Minimum file quality you should get is 44.1 kHz
 sample rate, and 16 bit depth.  
Ask for the sample rate and bit depth of the file
 It would be much better to get a 24 bit depth
file or above, and if you can get a sample rate
of 48 kbps or above, all the better. 
The higher your sample rate, and bit depth, the
higher the quality of the file.
5
 If at all possible ask to purchase the
stems of the track from the producer.  This
means an individual track for each instrument, or
a single track for each group of instruments.
For example, separate kick and snare tracks, and
then the rest of the drums in stereo, individual
tracks for synths, guitars, and bass, ect. 
This will give your mix engineer the most
flexibility to make your final mix sound the way
you want it to, and place your vocals well in the
overall mix.
6
 If you cannot get stems of all the individual
instruments and you are forced to buy a stereo
track, at least get an unmastered version of the
music. 
What this means is that the overall volume of the
track will be quieter than a commercially
released song, and it will not have gone through
the massive amount of compression that is applied
to a finished master. 
Dont be fooled by a loud mix.  If the song has
already been mastered, has a max peak of 0.0db
and is already super compressed, it will be
really difficult to fit your new vocal tracks in,
and make them sound natural.  
7
www.mubzbeats.com
www.soundcloud.com/MubzBeats
London, United Kingdom