Lay down your drum track. Drums are the backbone of any hip-hop instrumental, so take your time gathering quality kick drum, hi-hat, and snare samples. Once you have your sounds saved, import them into your DAW’s step sequencer. Drum beats alone cannot be copyrighted, so feel free to recreate drum patterns from your favorite records if you are having trouble developing your own ideas.
Create a bass line. Bass sounds vary from traditional sounding instruments to distortion heavy synthesizers, so experiment with what works best for your sound and then add it to your step sequencer. Use the instrumentation window in your DAW to create a simple, yet catchy bass line. It should reinforce the down beat of your drums, but add some notes on the off beats to make it rhythmically interesting.
Add a lead and chorus melody. There are no hard and fast rules to melodies and experimentation with various instruments and sound samples is widely practiced by producers. Add pianos, guitars, synthesizers, vocal hits, and any other sounds you would like in your track. The catchiest melody you create should function as your hook and be used for the chorus section of the track.
Arrange your basic song structure. Once you have the basic step sequencer patterns of your song composed, you may begin arranging them in your DAW’s song composition window. A typical hip-hop song will feature a 16 bar verse and an eight bar chorus. These may be repeated to your liking and a breakdown or outro may be added to keep the listener interested.
Add fills, effects, and additional samples. While it is important to keep your track simple if it will be downloaded to have vocals added later, you do not want it to become repetitive. Placing snare rolls, cymbal splashes, and sample hits every eight bars will keep your listener interested. You may also remove certain instruments for a number of bars to add variety in the verses.
Master your track. Use plug-ins for equalization, compression, audio maximization, and stereo imaging to add clarity to your instruments and create a level mix. When the overall sound is to your liking, mix the track down to an “.MP3” or “.WAV” format.
Upload your track to the Internet. There are many websites on the Internet that allow you to host your track for free, such as SounClick.com, SoundCloud.com and MySpace.com. Find one that suits your needs and follow the website’s procedure to make your track available for download.