Recently I have been trying to make beats on Garage band and have discovered that it is a lot harder than I had assumed it would be. At first I assumed that it would be easy, just find a drum loop that I liked and then add a bass line or some instrumental touches. So far my beats sound like bad Automator imitation. Writting rock music is so much easier, at least for me. Well I'll keep on trying and maybe I'll figure it out eventually

I used that MTV music generator for PS2 and made a 2 minute song that sounded pretty decent, but it's all premade so that really doesn't answer your question.

I'd love to have a ton of equipment (drum pads, keyboards, etc) and just fool around with them for a few hours.

I messed around with Frootyloops for a bit, but never really completed anything..

I've made a couple of beats that I think are pretty decent but they all seem really repitative to me. I know that almost all beats in Hip hop are repitative but it still feels unnatural after only making rock/alt. music for so long.

I've used fruityloops, and made some beats, nothing spectacular. I'd love to learn Cubase and mix crap.

i used to use reason mixed with protools

and i agree, it's much harder to make hip hop beat than to string togegther a couple of chords and write a song. I used to make that argument all the time when people made the dumb "it's just sampling" argument about why rock is better than rap.

but i would suggest using Reason, it's really intuative.

more people should post in this thread.

=tech-illiterate

I own a Roland Fantom and play around with it a few times a week, and I agree that making hip-hop beats is harder than one might think.

You know, if you listen to Lil' Jon or Scott Storch's music and think that stuff sounds simple and easy, you really need to try it yourself to understand and appreciate their ability to write good, professional music. You'll realize very quickly that making hip-hop beats goes beyond throwing a few drum samples in a sequencer and pressing play.

I mess around with my Micron Alesis fairly often and struggle to really make anything worthwhile. My thoughts are it is tough to make beats, but I'm also pretty talentless in the music dept. Regardless, it's always fun.