Music Discovery
Beats, bars, and culture. Sample-based production from boom bap to lo-fi — the Discogs database has pressings you have never seen in a crate.
Producers traditionally found samples by physically digging through record store crates — hence "crate digging". Online, Discogs is the primary database of records. Tools like CrateDrop connect directly to Discogs and let you hear random records instantly on YouTube, making online digging as fast as flipping physical records.
Funk and soul from the late 1960s–1970s are the most sampled genres in hip hop history. Jazz (especially hard bop and modal jazz) is a close second. Reggae, Latin boogaloo, and psych rock are also heavily sampled across classic and contemporary hip hop.
Boom bap is a style of hip hop production built around sampled breakbeats — drum breaks from 1960s–1970s funk, soul, and jazz records, chopped and looped. The Roland SP-404, MPC, and similar hardware are the production tools most associated with the boom bap style.