BY Austin Luft

Copy Editor

The term, the three pillars of hip hop, refers to the three central aspects of hip hop culture, emceeing, DJ-ing and break dancing.  A fourth is often argued though and this is beatboxing.

A beatboxer, if you don’t know, is a person who uses their mouth to create and replicate sounds like drums and turn tables to create music without a tangible instrument.

A lot of hip hop heads don’t like that beatboxing is often considered one of the pillars, as they see it as being too closely related to emceeing or DJ-ing and group it in with whichever they prefer.

As a beatboxer, I am a little torn on how I feel about this grouping.  I agree with the argument that beatboxing is similar to both skills, but it also implies that beatboxers can rap and run DJ equipment and that DJs and rappers can beatbox.  This is rarely the case.

I have been beatboxing for a little over two years and I have met five other beatboxers along side many “rappers” and more wannabe DJs than I care to count.

By the way, beatboxing is the easiest of all of these things to learn how to do, and it is significantly cheaper than DJ equipment, because it’s free.

You can also practice it anywhere you go and whether you are good or not, people are generally impressed because it’s something they have probably never seen in person before.

I can teach you basic beatboxing right now, all you need to know is the alphabet, and since you’re this far into the article, you’re good.

The letters B, T and K are your building blocks – these are your bass drums, high hats (cymbal) and snare drums respectively.

Try to enunciate the consonant portion of each letter and remove the voice from it so your B sounds like a low pop, your T sounds like a tap and your K sounds like a snap.

Think of the sentence “boots ‘n cats” and say it with all of the vowel sounds removed, you should be beatboxing now (B-T-K-T).

If it doesn’t sound quite right, add an ‘s’ sound to the end of your high hat, this gives you the sound of an open high hat.

You wouldn’t really know it living in the United States, but beatboxing is becoming increasingly more popular, especially in Asia and Europe. It is following in the footsteps of the DJ.

DJs were starting to fall out of popularity as they were outshined by rappers, but the rise of EDM (electronic dance music) gifted them their own genre and largely separated them from hip hop.

I am really excited to see beatboxing follow this trend and start to get the recognition that it should because there are so many things to be done with it that haven’t been tapped into yet.

So, here is my call to action: learn to beatbox because I see it becoming a much bigger deal than it is now in the relatively near future, plus I already taught you how to do it and you can practice it anywhere, no materials required.

A YouTube search will bring up a library of lessons that you can learn everything from or you can just start making sounds until they sound good.

By the way, studies have shown that learning an instrument or a new language can help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, so now you have no excuse.