Hottest Flips: Warm Rhodes, Modern Soul, Piano Loops & House Acapellas

A wavy piano loop from German keyboardist BASTi leads Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko through “Trending,” who is backed by a beat by longtime collaborator Mauro.

"I thought the texture and melody of Shuko’s ‘Gone Till November’ were beautiful. The song was already at the exact tempo I needed and the first 8 bars looped perfectly. My first thought was to add drill drums to it because of the 140 BPM tempo. My friend Gabo Lugo then added the bass, which I chopped up and rearranged. I also used the last section only eliminating the last bar so the song ended on the upbeat.

I just pitched the sample down one semitone and quantized it just a little bit, to maintain the human feel of the song. After that I used the same 8-bar loop pitched up an octave in a couple of sections to add contrast. For the outro, I just pitched it down without quantizing. Finally, I had the random idea of turning that last section into a Bolero: a Latin American genre from the 19th century that originated in Cuba. So I just layered guitar, bongos, and a couple of other elements over that section."—Mauro

Berlin-based producer Superlover (formerly known as M_Ferri) told us he was amazed to find classic house vibes by prolific New York DJ/producer Victor Simonelli on Tracklib. A club-ready acapella with disco claps was exactly the sonic flavor he was looking for.

"My go-to DAW is Ableton so I created twelve MIDI tracks with Ableton’s Simpler plugin in order to write a disco/house drum groove. Since many recordings from the 1970s era lack a bit of sub-bass, I created two more MIDI tracks and used an F9 bass guitar and Xfer Records’ Serum plugin to write some sub-bass notes making sure my song would sound big on modern club speakers as well.

I drag-and-dropped the two Tracklib samples into Ableton and did a quick arrangement, filtering the disco sample and the vocal sample on and off in a classic French house style. No rocket science; plain and simple but effective! A classic Superlover style. I then applied some pumping effects with the free plugin Simple Side and gave both samples more grit and character with XLN Audio’s RC-20 Retro color plugin."—Superlover

St. Louis-based drum and bass producer Winslow picked a piece of rare 60s soul for “Thinking Of You” featuring New York emcee T.R.A.C. Full-circle digging right here, as there are also songs and multitracks available on Tracklib by Hospital Records, the London-based label Winslow is part of.

"After figuring out a loop from the chorus of the tune, I started laying some drums under that to see how it would gel. Because of the tempo of drum and bass, everything has to be really tight or it could easily become a mess of sounds… I did a lot of chopping and slight time-stretching by hand—well, mouse—and tweaked until I got a good groove going. It took a lot of toying to get everything in sync with the drums.

Also, the original tune drifts in pitch a lot so to match the notes of the bassline to that drift, the sub constantly drifts upward in pitch. (...) The halftime ‘boom bap’ intro section has a pretty loose timing while the rest is really tight and precise to groove with the rapidly swung drums."—Winslow

For his debut album, UK beatmaker Jamie.Stew just had to cook up a track with a classic laid-back boom bap sound. After all, it’s artists like Jay Dee, A Tribe Called Quest, Hieroglyphics, and Black Moon he cites as big inspirations with all-time favorite beats like ATCQ’s “Stressed Out” (produced by The Ummah) and Black Moon's’ “Just Us” (produced by Da Beatminerz).

"I knew to achieve [that sound], I’d need the classic warm Rhodes sample, so I searched for Keys in the Soul genre. Once Dexter Wansel’s track played, I knew I’d found what I was looking for.

Dexter played his track at 92 BPM. Any Dilla head knows that 93 BPM is uptempo enough to keep it moving but also slow enough to make a laid-back bop. 92 BPM? Close enough. The keys provided the body of the track. You could hear where the snare needed to sit right away. After that, I used the hats to steady the tempo and the kick to play with the bounce.

I recorded myself on guitar to add the stabs which signified where the chorus would be and sent the beat to Verbz. Once he’d laid the verse I had more ideas to play with. I structured the track and added a breakdown. Next, I called on some of my producer friends Fr1th and Jake Elliott to help lay the bassline and lead organ-sounding lines over the chorus."—Jamie.Stew

Music and video producer Andrew Huang invited four producers to flip the same sample: “You Don’t Know What You’re Doing” by Philly Groove’s Sound Experience. Rachel K Collier breaks down her production process in Andrew Huang's YouTube video shown above.

"The first thing I did, was separate the vocals and instrumental with Acapella Extractor. Then, in Ableton Live session view I had a lot of fun chopping the—what I thought—coolest phrases of the track.

After that, I ran the vocals through Max for Live's Buffer Shuffler and got some other funky things before it was time to reharmonize the elements. With the Microcosm, I started running the whole instrumental through the glitch section on this panel. With a little bit of OVox, I made a pretty cool pad from the vocal of the track.

I decided that the slow-moving bassline wasn't quite right for the funkiness of the vocal chops. I started to add some drums, I played around for ages in session view, and experimented with structures, breakdowns, and B-sections. I spent absolutely AGES on retiming the sample!”—Rachel K Collier

Leading Brazilian hip-hop producer Papatinho has shown before how to make magic with Tracklib samples flipping songs by blues icon Koko Taylor and Black Blood & The Chocolate Pickles. This time, he took on a piece of modern soul for influential Brazilian emcee Black Alien.

"Black Alien is a legendary artist and one of the best lyrical rappers in Brazil. He was working on a love song with deep rhymes. This sample had the perfect vibe, so I started making the beat while he was writing.

Chopping and pitching are some of the things I like most when it comes to beatmaking. So I did just that for ‘Fica Até Umas Hora.’ I’ve pitched and chopped the samples with my drums and percussion sounds while playing live on the MPC. After that, to finish the beat completely I added some keys and bass on top, and it was a wrap!"—Papatinho

By sampling an acapella taken from music by New York house DJ Victor Simonelli, DJs/producers Marten Hørger and BIJOU turn a classic house sound into a modern-day banger. The fact “I Know” found its way into numerous Spotify editorial playlists—also with praise by the likes of Oliver Heldens, Calvin Harris, Don Diablo, and Martin Garrix—shows they were onto something with their sample selection…

"The vocal gave me ‘that certain feeling’ straight away when I heard it. I love this classic house sound—that’s the kind of stuff I’ve been hunting down on Tracklib! I played the Solution vocal to Bijou, who I wrote the track with. We both agreed that it had the right vibe. Harmonically the vocal didn’t do yet what we wanted it to do, so we Melodyne’d it to make the sample work. We also altered the sequence. Apart from that, we didn’t have to do that much as it sounded great as it was."—Marten Hørger