Beatbox

Beatbox(Raptorz) Sounds. From an early age, sounds have always fascinated me. I was always on the lookout for new ways to make new sounds. It came as no surprise that I started using my mouth to make noises in secondary school. I stopped for a while because there was this girl that I liked and I thought that noisemaking wouldn’t exactly land me a lot of girls. After getting rejected, I started making noises again. But since I had stopped for a lengthy period of time, I lost most of my skills. By then, I was in Form 4. I learnt from a friend of mine that this noisemaking was called beatboxing. It is one of the elements of hip-hop. In beatboxing, a person copies the sounds of a drum machine and almost any other instrument by just using his mouth. I still remember that my very first sound was called the techno bass. Before that, I copied the sound of a beating heart. That annoyed the heck out of almost all my teachers as a heart would randomly start beating in class.

After getting introduced to a Malaysian beatboxer named Shawn Lee, I started copying him. Learning how to beatbox took a long time and since Malacca didn’t have any beatbox classes, I used Youtube as my only source of information. One of the lessons I learnt was that every beatboxer has his or her own unique style. How one beatboxer sounds might not be the same as another beatboxer. Next, a Frenchman going by the stage name of Eklips caught my attention. I tried my best to copy at least a few sounds from him. That succeeded partially. For the next four months, I played and replayed his videos on an almost daily basis. Homework took second place as my first priority was to learn as much as possible. Bear in mind that this was all still basic beats and rhythms.

The next inspiration came from a guy in the UK called Dave Crowe. His style of beatboxing focuses on dubstep music, which uses the throat bass as a basic beat. Dave’s style completely blew my mind and my throat as well. Practicing the throat bass resulted in my voice being raspy for almost a week. Dumping dubstep, I started mixing up different styles just to see what I would wind up with. By then, I had run out of videos to see. Months passed and suddenly, more videos popped up like mushrooms.

Beatboxing is all about practice and constant learning. Even now, three years later, I still am learning new things about beatboxing all the time. Even the best needs to keep his skills sharp. Nowadays, my friends all think that beatboxing is just simply making inhuman noises with the mouth. But it is more than just plain noisemaking, it is an art form which almost no one appreciates. Well known beatboxers include Tom Thum, Vahtang, Reeps One and Isato to name a few. In Malaysia, the beatbox scene is not very huge, and most people only know Shawn Lee as Asia’s No 1. I really hope that young people will take up this as a hobby or even a career. It is literally the best instrument ever. And the best part of it is it is free. Why spend hundreds of even thousands of Ringgit to buy instruments like drums, guitars, or even trumpets when you can have the best instrument in the world – the human mouth.