How to become a beat box musician
Beat boxing is a form of vocal percussion that involves the art of creating drum rhythms, musical sounds using your mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. It can also include singing, vocal imitation of turnbism, and imitation of horns, strings, and other musical instruments. Beat boxing is associated with hip-hop culture, which is one of its elements. The term "beat boxing" is sometimes used to refer to vocal percussion in General. Beat boxing is also a recognized sport.
- Zhenya, what started this hobby? Where, when and how did you learn about Beat boxing?
-My passion for sounds began long before I learned that there is such a unique genre of art as beat box. One day I came up with the idea of playing all the musical instruments in a recording program with my own voice. This program is now on the Internet under the name "Hip-Hop Ejay". The whole point of the program is that it allows you to create different musical directions, whether it's hip-hop, jazz or reggae. At that time, I was about 10 years old; I already went to music school and learned different components of the melody. I was interested in creating different music, selecting missing sounds, putting samples in one track to find inconsistencies, working on filtering sounds, and searching for different plugins on theme sites.
At the time when all this started to develop, I spent a lot of time creating music, and I had an idea of how the instruments sounded. Then, when I went to the pool, I tried to pronounce these sounds with my voice.
I had a clear "Pum-Pum-Pf-Pum-Pum-Pf" rhythmic structure in my head, so I started trying to do something similar to a beat box. Some time passed, and my friend and I began to actively engage in break dancing. I learned about the existence of the beat box genre. "Look, he makes music with his voice", I was very impressed with "I don't believe my ears", "he really makes every instrument with his voice", and until at the last moment I was convinced that it was playing a soundtrack or a substrate. It is obvious that in Russia everything developed much slower than in Europe! And the Internet played a significant role in the further popularization of such genres as break dancing and beat box.
- Do you have many like-minded people?
-Every year there are more and more of them. Now we work with different musicians, for example, the combination of harmonica and beat box or beat box and piano is a unique nature of sound. That's why I'm working on a jazz project. The borders of this art form are not visible. The beat box is very diverse and versatile.
- What set of qualities should someone who claims to be a professional beat boxer have?
-First of all, a person must have a sense of rhythm, discipline, openness, a positive perception of the world, hard work, creativity, the ability to improvise, perseverance.
- What is your beat box direction?
-The beat box is so diverse that it is very difficult to give a specific answer to the question. It's like asking an artist what color you like to paint. I like my own style, which I work on every day, and my unique sounds that I combine.
The beat box changes every year with new musical fashion trends such as «dup step drum n bass». But the classic beat box is always versatile and interesting for the listener. Recently, I have been paying more and more attention to jazz songs and dance music. I also really like the music of Haspel in combination with the beat box. Now we are working with a jazz vocalist, making a joint program.
- Every creative person has talismans, signs of good luck. Do you have something like this?
-Yes, everyone has these things. It's great that it helps people. Of course, I have the same thing.
- Tell us about the most exciting projects that you have participated in?
- The project "intuition" is a very interesting project, which was attended by 15 people from different genres of art. The audience had to determine which genre the participants belonged to. I liked this event very much, as I met many interesting people who I had never even heard of before. These acquaintances were very useful to me.
- The Olympic Games in South Korea were definitely the culmination of the outgoing year. This is a great experience that tempers us to new discoveries and achievements. Daily performances with musicians from different directions and familiarity with South Korean culture impressed me, because this is a wonderful country where very kind and open people live.
I was also captivated by the performance at «the Voice Percussion live music festival» in London in 2019, along with a jazz band and vocalists. This was, of course, an unforgettable event that will remain in my memory for a long time.
I love live music, and working with beat boxing gives me a lot of positive energy.
