What Is Boom Bap? The Drums, the Samples and the Era

Boom bap is a drum pattern before it is a genre. The name is onomatopoeia: boom is the kick, bap is the snare, and those two syllables describe the loop that sat under most East Coast hip hop from the late eighties into the early nineties. It is not a region, a mood or a single tempo. It is a way of building a beat, and you can hear it in something recorded last month as clearly as in a record from 1993.

What is harder to explain is why the style keeps coming back while so many of its contemporaries now sound like a period piece.

The name is the drum pattern

The word came out of the beat itself. T La Rock used it in 1984, off script, to describe the kick and the snare of his record "It's Yours", and the phrase survived because nobody had found a better way to say it. A heavy kick on the strong beats, a snappy snare on the backbeat, and the space between them doing the work.

A decade later the style took the phrase as a flag. KRS-One titled an album Return of the Boom Bap in 1993, and a piece of slang turned into the name of a category.

Where the sound comes from

Boom bap grew in the north east of the United States during the golden age of hip hop, and it borrowed from everywhere. Marley Marl is usually named as the first producer to make sampling the engine of the style, pulling drums from records that already had the right weight. Then the machines arrived and made the process repeatable: the Akai MPC and the E-mu SP-1200 are in nearly every photograph of the era. Their pads let a producer hit a sample by hand, so timing and velocity moved with the fingers instead of snapping to a grid.

That detail is the style in one sentence. A perfectly quantised loop sounds like a machine, and a loop with a small human error in it sounds like a record.

What a boom bap beat is made of

Strip a classic beat of the era down and there are three or four elements: drums, a bassline, a chopped sample and, often, a scratch. The drums sit in front of everything. The sample is a short piece of an older record, jazz, soul or funk, replayed as a loop and filtered so it does not fight the drums. The bass follows the harmony of the sample rather than the kick.

• Drums: a hard kick on the downbeats, an acoustic snare on the backbeat, hats and percussion for movement.
• Sample: two or four bars, cut and rearranged, with the low end sometimes removed so the kick has room.
• Swing: the off beats land a fraction late, either programmed into the sampler or played by hand.
• Space: silence between the hits. KRS-One described the vibe as using the fewest instruments to make the most rhythmic sound.

The producers who built it

Four names come up in every conversation about the style: DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Buckwild and Diamond D. Around them sits a run of records by Gang Starr, A Tribe Called Quest, Mobb Deep, Nas, Big L and Wu-Tang Clan, most of them built on the same few rules. What separates one from another is rarely the drum kit. It is what the producer chose to sample and how much of the original he left audible.

Boom bap vs trap

Trap replaced it as the default sound of rap, and the two are easy to tell apart even if you have never opened a DAW. Trap puts the low end into a single tuned 808 and hands the rhythm to the hi hats. Boom bap keeps the drums acoustic, lets a snare crack, and gives the melody to a sample. Trap is built to hit in a club; boom bap is built to leave the middle of the frequency range free for a voice.

A trap beat fills the bar. A boom bap beat leaves holes on purpose, and the rapper writes into them.

How it sounds today

The style never disappeared, it just stopped being the default. J. Cole, Griselda, Redman and Lloyd Banks have all released projects with the same drum logic, and in the UK a whole line of rappers records over it. The reason is practical: the pattern is cheap to make, hard to make well, and it puts the voice first.

The Woods is a good place to hear it. The drums sit forward, the sample is dark and the whole thing leaves room in the middle, which is what this style is for. It lives with the rest of the style on the boom bap type beats page, and the full catalogue is on instrumentals, licensed the same way as everything else on the site. If you plan to release a song over a beat like this one, the rules for what a licence allows are in the licence terms.

FAQ

What does boom bap mean?

It is a sound word for a drum pattern: boom for the kick drum and bap for the snare. T La Rock used it in 1984 as a way of describing the beat of a record, and it became the name of the style a decade later.

What BPM is boom bap?

There is no official number. The classic records sit in a midtempo pocket that lets a rapper land a full bar without rushing, and modern producers work either side of it. Because the snare placement carries the feel, the number in the DAW says less about a boom bap beat than the swing does.

Is boom bap still being made?

Yes, and by artists far outside New York. It survived as an underground sound through the years when trap was the mainstream default, and it comes back every time a rapper wants a beat that stays out of the way of the lyrics.