Key Links For Hip-Hop Sites:
Hip hop music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hip-Hop Music Videos - AOL Music
HipHopGalaxy.com : hip hop and rap music, news, lyrics, mp3 ...
HipHopBlogz : Hip-Hop Blog Directory
ill doctrine: a hip-hop video blog

Hip Hop Beats - The drum beat is another core element of hip hop production. Its speed & complexity establishes the pace and impact of the recording. While some beats are sampled, others are created by drum machines such as the Roland TR-808 and the Alesis SR-16. Others are a hybrid of the two aforementioned options, sampled parts of drum beats that are arranged in original patterns altogether. Another popular beat machine used in hip-hop is the  Ensoniq ASR-10. This synthesizer provides beats, used by the The Neptunes and the MPC 2000.

Since the percussive element of hip hop music is the very punctuation of its sound, the sounds a producer chooses to represent the percussion are important. Some producers have drum kits all their own, such as Dr. Dre, Timbaland, DJ Paul & Juicy J, Swizz Beatz and Neptunes. Some drum sounds remain as historical elements of hip hop lore used in modern hip hop to lend a more credible and mature sound to the recording.

A sequencer or a sequencing device or module is used invariably with instruments. One of the most popular sequencers in old-school hip hop was the Akai MPC60, whose successors MPC2000, MPC2500, MPC3000, and MPC4000,MPC1000, have been important in modern hip hop production. Since a sequencer triggers instruments instead of simply playing back music, it is used in more sophisticated production environments than the basic "two turntables and a microphone" configuration that most live hip hop is produced with. A sampler is used to play back samples that will not be interpolated as a media. Most sequencers, like the aforementioned Akai MPC products, are also samplers. Among standalone samplers there are the ShaBoo 3000 S-series samplers, the Roland S-series samplers, and others.

Purely instrumental hip hop tracks were not popular throughout the 1980s, but producers have made and released hip hop beats without MCs since hip hop's inception. The release of DJ Shadow's debut album Endtroducing... in 1996 saw the beginnings of a rise in instrumental hip hop. Relying mainly on a combination of sampled funk, hip hop and film score, DJ Shadow chose to describe his music as "cinematic hip hop", and he has influenced countless producers and musicians from many genres ever since. In recent years, artists such as RJD2, J Dilla, Pete Rock, MF Doom, Danny!, Madlib, and Blockhead have garnered critical acclaim with a number of instrumental hip hop albums.

Instrumental hip hop has yet to be fully recognized as a genre unto itself, and is often lumped in with trip hop, downtempo, electronica, or industrial music. This may in part be because it is so hard to classify, as when a hip hop beat is separated from rapping and varied enough to hold a listener's attention by itself, it can go off in many musical directions.

Instrumental hip hop is sometimes confused with instrumental funk songs as hip hop originated from funk in the first place.