Introduction
There’s really no end to the kinds of sounds that beatboxers can make. Every year someone comes up with weird new noises like…
Learning to be a professional/competitive beatboxer is really difficult.
But that’s not what we’re training for here. We’re trying to learn beatboxing for acapella music, which is a very different artform!
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The gold standard which I would suggest we all strive towards is being Kevin Olusola (the PTX beatboxer)!
So then we should ask: what makes a good acapella beatboxer? Let’s take a listen to a bunch of PTX songs to figure out.
There’s a number of pretty important observations I can draw from what KO does.
Interestingly, you don’t need difficult sounds. While KO does use some interesting stuff, the vast majority of what he does revolves around a handful of predictable stuff that sounds like a normal drum set would. In other cases (like Valentine or Royals), the sounds he produces are sometimes quite easy to imitate (ahh, shh, etc).
What you do need, however, is speed and stamina.
More importantly, you need good beatboxing patterns. Notice how in the Daft Punk Medley, Hark the Herald Angels Sing or I Need Your Love, the mood of the songs change a lot when the beat patterns change? Even in the case of Royals and Valentine, the beats still sound great despite not really being drum sounds, because the sounds are well strung together.
And MOST importantly, you need to know how to complement the music.
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Therefore, to teach you to be a good acapella beatboxer, we’ll structure the basic stuff like this:
- Part 1: Basic Sounds
- Part 2: Gotta Go Fast
- Part 3: Gotta Go Far
- Part 4: Basic Beats Patterns
- Part 5: Complementing the Music
(If the URL doesn’t work yet it’s probably because the article isn’t written BUT I’ll get to it soon I promise).
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Have fun and keep making weird noises hehe š
~ Andrew
Approach To Acapella 