How To Be A Rapper

To be a rapper you simply need to know how to rap.  Rapping is when you sing songs in a Cat In The Hat type form.  Rappers are musicians, artists, and singers just like all other musical artists it’s just a different take on music.  If you want to get started being a rapper you need to first have you a rap.  A rapper is not complete without a rap song to sing.  There has never been a rapper without a rap song.  To get a rap song you can either write the rap song yourself or have someone else to write one for you.  If you are somewhat familiar with how to rhyme then you should have little problems writing your own raps.  But if you have tried to write rap songs and you can’t get them to sound right or rhyme then it would probably be better if you have someone write your raps for you or you can pay someone to write your raps for you.  Once you have a written rap, preferably a 3 verse rap song, then it’s time to move on to the next process.

The next process is to learn the rap song that you have either written or purchased.  In order to be a good rapper it is better if you can remember things really easily.  You will need to read the rap many times over and over and try and rap the song out loud to yourself or anyone who you can get to listen to it to see how good it sounds.  While you are rapping the song try and commit as much of it to memory as possible until you are comfortable saying the rap song without the paper.  For some well seasoned rappers this will be fairly easy to do after about 3-5 times saying the rap.  But for newbies this make take a few days to learn the whole song by memory and eliminate the need to read from the paper the rap is written on.  You need to memorize the song for several reasons.  One reason you need to memorize the song is so that when you are delivering or rapping it then it will sound fluent and unrehearsed.  If you wrote your own rap song then the unrehearsed fluent part will happen almost immediately because you will remember the words of the rap song as you brainstorm the ideas that you wrote in your raps.  Another reason to memorize the rap is so that no one can tell if someone wrote the song for you.  You need to make the song appear to be your own work because it is often frowned upon in the rap game if you do not write your own raps.  Especially if you are rapping about places you never been or things that you have never done before.  Rap is all about keeping it real and this could make or break your rap career.  A final reason you would want to learn the song in your memory is so that if for some reason you are put on the spot to rap then you can rap your song right off of the dome.  Meaning off the top of your head or your memory.  Who knows you may be somewhere where and A&R or some other record label executive is and they may want to hear some of your material and offer you a deal.  Well the last thing you want to do is pull this tattered piece of paper out of your pocket with your chicken scratch edited raps on it.  They will laugh you right out of your dreams of becoming a rap super star.

Now that you have a rap and you have memorized it, it’s time to find a beat.  If you are familiar with a drum machine and or a keyboard then you can make your own beats.  If not then you can find someone to produce a beat for your or your can get a popular instrumental beat online from your favorite song and use that.  What you need to do is play the beat over and over.  Each time you listen to it try and rap your rap song to it.  You will know immediately if your rap song is not right for that beat.  Assuming that the beat is a good enough or perfect fit then you want to develop your flow.  Your flow is the way that you say your rap to match the pattern of the beat.  Try listening to the beat pattern and saying your rap so that it almost mimics the pattern of the beat.  This is called riding the beat.  It will take you many times of practicing the song over the beat to get it just right.  All you have to do is remember to ride the beat and don’t lose the tempo.  If the beat is fast then rap fast.  If the beat is slow then rap slow.  If the beat is laid back then take your time with your delivery.  In other words let the beat or track or instrumental tell you what to do with the rap song.

Now after all of that practice and hard work and you have now successfully completed your first rap song it is time for phase 2 of your plan of Rap World domination.  The funnest part of rapping to me is the recording part.  That is where you go into a studio, either profession or a home studio, and record the rap vocals that you have worked so hard to learn.  In this instance it is beneficial to have your song memorized already because it will cut down on the time it takes you in the studio.  Pre-production is what I call the process of learning the rap song and applying it to the beat with the intent of recording the song.  Unless you or one of your friends or family have your own home studio then you will need to use a professional studio to record your song.  The studio time is usually purchased in blocks of hours.  This can end up being a  substantial amount of money just to record one song if it takes you a while perfect the song while your are in the booth at the studio.  But since we did the preproduction already then this should be a non-issue.  When you go to the studio it is best to have your instrumental (beat) tracked down.  Tracked down mean that every instrument and sound used to make up the beat is on a separate recorded track.  Studios need this so that when they are recording you they can adjust the levels of an individual instrument that may have been recorded originally too loud or too soft to that your voice is not drowned out by it or appears louder than the beat.  This process is a balancing act when trying to be a rapper, to get the whole completed song engineered right. At this point you should be in the booth with the headphones on your ears and the mic right in front of you and you are ready to go.  If you are in your own home studio recording yourself you can start the music to playing when you are ready.  If you are in a professional studio then cue the engineer that you are ready.  When the beat begins to play you can now recite your vocals that you have rehearsed to perfection and record the song that you worked to hard on.  At this point you have successfully gone from a nobody to a rapper.

After you have recorded your first song then you will need to repeat this process over and over for a minimum of 20 songs.  The best 4or 5 of the songs that you have recorded can be used to shop for a record deal.  This small collection of songs is called a demo.  They should be your best songs highlighting all of your rap skills and style.  If you have more of an entrepreneurial mind set you can skip the process of shopping for a deal all together.  You can start your own independent record label and release your own music.  The next thing you will want to do is find any and all places your can find where you can perform.  Have friends and family listen to your songs and tell you which one they like the best.  What ever the best song is you need to make that you first single.  Perform the song at an open mic, at talent shows, or book your own show at a club and invite friends and family to the shows.  After your first show you will have a few fans that you can pass out fliers to for your next show.  This can become lucrative in itself because once your build a buzz you can rent out clubs on popular nights or not so popular night and split either the cover charge at the door or the split the sales from the bar.  This is a deal that you will have to work out with the club owners.  They will usually do this deal on a slow night because it can help generate more income on a day that would normally get little to none.  After a few shows your name will be known in the rap circles around town and people will start to respect you as a rapper.  You will start to gain a loyal fan base of people who will go to just about any event that you are performing at.  This is called your core audience.  You core audience will be the people who buy the bulk of your music no matter what because they trust you will deliver a great product.  After you have gained a local success, you have gone beyond wanting to know how to be a rapper and then it’s time for you to set your sites on finding a way to open up shows for big named stars who are booking concerts in your area.  By this point you will have made enough connections with enough people in the industry that you should have no problem booking an opening for a show.  This is a paying gig and allows you to go from performing in front of a few hundred people to performing in front of a few thousand people.  This is a step down from being a regional rap star.  After a few of these events then you are now known and have personally met and made connections with some of the biggest rap stars around.  You need to network with as many of them as you come in contact with because one song with a major rap star can take your career 10 times further than 100 rap songs with a few local artists.  With the money you have started to make you need to re-up (spend it) by reinvesting it into your rap career.  That is in the form of paying a big name artist a fee to do a verse on one of your songs.  A lot of times if you leave a good impression with the big name rapper, out of respect he will give you a discounted fee for the verse.  He might want to help your career and accept a fraction of what he would normally charge for a rap verse.  This one verse with the hottest rapper out at the time can cattapult your career once the song leaks out to fans.  Not only will your core local and regional audience take to the song, but the rap star’s audience will hear the song as well.  This takes your name from local and regional to national and even international.  And with the speed of the internet your new song can be listened to around the world in a matter hours.  At this point you are no longer some locally known rapper you are coming into your own.  You will have to build more connections and reach out to the hottest artist around at this point to align yourself with them to help keep your star rising.  And before long you will be that rap super star that helps out the new guy who is wondering how to be a rapper.

Rap Song Chorus Or Hook Bars

The average rap song chorus or hook has 8 bars.  These 8 bars consists of 4 pairs of rhyming lines.  The hook should be the summary of the entire song when you write a rap.  Meaning that you should build you song around the hook.  A chorus for a rap song must be catchy.  Normally there is an underlying part of the chorus that is constantly repeated.  The purpose of this is to make the hook memorable so that when you hear these words you know instantly what the song is.  A chorus must be easy to remember and easy to learn.  It needs to be catchy in a way that makes your listeners have it stuck in their head a while after the has ended.  Think about a song that you have heard that you could not get out of you mind and you found yourself saying it without even realizing it.  Use that song as an example of what to model your chorus after.  Break the chorus down.  What is it about the song that makes you remember it.   What structure do they use with the hook?  is the title of the song repeated frequently in the hook?

Now use the things that you have learned from analyzing the chorus.   Think of the memorable aspects of it and apply the same strategy to writing your chorus.  Remember the chorus is 8 bars long.  Here is an example of a memorable hook from Juvenile “Back That Ass Up”.

Notice how he used the words of the title of the song over and over in the chorus to convey the message.  Repeating this one line over and over makes the song easily remembered.  With most hit rap song on the radio you will see this same pattern in the chorus.  Practice this technique and get your hook or chorus to be perfect.

Posted on February 7, 2010 at 5:58 pm by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
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Write A Rap

WRITE A RAP

This is the only place online to show you the right way of how to write a rap song. Rap songs have been my passion for over 20 years. I am able to write a 3 verse rap song at 16 bars and with a hook in about 20 minutes. I’ve been teaching up and coming rappers how rap songs are written and how they can even write rhymes that they can use as ghostwriting raps to get paid a lot of money for.  I can do the same for you if you follow this simple guide to write a rap.

What Steps To Take To Write A Rap?

1. Finds a good beat that you like and can easily groove to and feel like it will be easy for you to brainstorm and write a rap to.

2. Next you need to come up with a subject to write your rap about. With a good subject it makes the process a lot easier when it comes to writing your rap song.

3. After the subject is selected then you can use your subject to write the hook for you rap.  A rap hook will usually be about 8 bars.  It will will convey a summary of what your subject is about and all of your verses can be written off of ideas that you get from the hook.  This will also help you to keep your verses on subject.

4. After you have a good hook that you think is very catchy then you need to to write your rap verse.  A rap verse is 16 bars.  That equals out to 8 pairs of rhyming lines.  Let each verse build off of the other one.  When you are done you should have at this point a hook and 3 verses.

5. Next you will need to write your intro.  I skipped this part as the first part because some songs don’t have the intro and most songs that have an intro will have the hook at the beginning of the song as the intro.  That why I said it is important to have a hook first because the hook usually sets the tone for all of the other parts of the song including the outro. There will be times when a hook is not what the song is built around.  Many times when you get writer’s block or you get a subject in your mind you may end up writing a verse and maybe use a piece of one of the verses as a hook or inspiration for a hook.

6.  Now is the final part of writing a rap.  You need to come up with an outro.  Most outros will have the hook repeated twice as the outro.  Where some people like to extend the instrumental and talk over the outro like the 2pac song “Picture Me Rolling.”  At this point you can add anything of relevance to the song in the outro that you couldn’t add to the verses.

7.  Now you can start to arrange your song the way it will be when it’s completed.  On a separate page of your notebook or you document if you are using a computer you should start arrange your song.  First put your intro.  The intro should be 8 bars.  Next will be your first verse.  The first verse is 16 bars.  Then comes your first hook.  The first hook will be 8 bars.  Then is your second verse.  That is going to be 16 bars.  Then your second hook.  The second hook is going to be 8 bars as well.  The third verse will follow at 16 bars along with you third hook of 8 bars.  Then lastly your outro will follow the third hook at anywhere from 16 bars to 32 or longer as needed.

Now you have a completed song with an intro, 3 verses, a hook and an outro.  You should rap out the song in the finished format over and over again.  Each time you say it you should edit the rap song lyrics until you have the exactly the way you want it.

To get the best results with you rap song you should memorize the words so that you can have it in your mind in cash you need to record it or spit a verse for someone.

Posted on February 6, 2010 at 7:50 pm by admin · Permalink · One Comment
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