If you find that the free hip hop beats does not fit the length of your rap/vocal, you can easily edit the length of the instrumantal beats.

Let’s say you want to have a 24 bar rap verse, but the free hip hop beat have only a 8 bar verse. First you need to load the beat into your recording software. In this example I will use cubase. Then you need to find out the tempo of the beat. If the beat had an intro effect that does not start on the downbeat, you need to adjust the beginning of the file so it’s starts at the first downbeat exactly.  You can always move it back again later to include the intro effect.

Let’s find the tempo. To do that you start the beat at bar 1. Loop the first 4 bars by setting left locator at bar 1 and right locator at bar 5. Turn on cycle, so when the locator get to bar 5 it goes back to bar 1. Then it is just a matter of raising or lowering the tempo until you can hear a clean transition when the locator goes back to bar 1.

Once you have the tempo locked, you can use beats and bar grid mode to cut out pieces of the music. Let’s say the verse starts at bar 9 and continues for 8 bars.   Cut at bar 9 and bar 17. If you want a 24 bar verse, you move the rest from bar 17 to start at bar 33, copy the verse section twice at bar 17 to 25 and bar 25 to 33.

Voila, you now have a 24 bars 1st verse..

Happy recording to our instrumental beats