Aspiring rappers: Remember that being able to spit is only one aspect of your craft. You need to be able to make songs. You can lay down chorus-less, 1,000,000 bar verses and those bars can be hot and clever…but the only thing you’ll ever get out of that is niggas acknowledging that you can flow. If that’s all you’re after, then cool, but if you’re trying to reach the widest audience possible, then you need to work on your song game. You need a hook; you need less, more-focused bars. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go all-in on a track every now and then with a trillion bars of fire for no reason. But that’s not all you should be doing. You should drop one of those AFTER you drop a few songs, just to remind people that you can do it. Use those bars for ciphers and throwaway tracks. Drop them here and there, but don’t make them your whole repertoire. And no, I’m not a professional, but I long ago surpassed the “he can spit” acknowledgement. Once you get that, the question is…so what else can you do? Well…I can make a song. I’m not saying it’s a very good song, but I can definitely put something together, and I consider that a skill of mines. For those of you that would like to go beyond just hearing that you got a nice flow, try making some actual songs. Practice making them first by learning how to count your bars. Most rap beats have a 4/4 rhythm and your bars are too. Because it’s such a regular and widely used time signature, you will eventually start to know instinctively when you hit 16 bars of verse. If you are completely unsure, just find an instrumental where the beat noticeably changes between the verse and chorus part. You will be able to lay down 16 bars perfectly in the verse section. Once you got your bar counting right, start making choruses. Make them often, even if you don’t have bars to go with them yet. Well…maybe I went too far into it. The point is, write songs. You can even break up those long, long verses into songs of their own. Just find where you hit the 16 bar mark and insert a chorus, repeat. Once you know how to do that, THEN you can start breaking the rules and doing other shit.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 08:32:21 +0000
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