I’m going to give you your first lesson on developing a good rap voice. If you’ve just started rapping or you’re a relative beginner to learning how to rap, this is going to be a great video for you to see the overview of what practices you need to develop in your rap voice, what skills you need, and overall, what long-term direction you’re headed in with your rap delivery.
Additionally, of course, if you’re interested in improving all levels of your rap ability, the best way to do that totally for free is to subscribe to this channel with notifications because we drop weekly videos all about how to read from start to finish, and be sure to pick up our free songwriting course, the top 20 songwriting secrets of full-time rappers, if you’re interested in pursuing a full-time rap career, or even just making a little bit of side money with music that’ll change people’
I’ll put that in the video description box below as the first link.
Now lesson number one when improving your rap voice is that rat’s voice can be improved.
The first thing you need to know is that your rap voice can be improved over time. One of the most common concerns that I see with beginning rappers is that they don’t like the rap voice, or they get very insecure about the rap delivery and think that this is something that’s always going to be that way, no matter what position you’re in, or if you’ve written raps before, and you feel like Yo, I’ve been rapping for a few weeks or a few months or whatever.
My voice is wack.
And I feel like I’m stuck.
This is not the case. You will not be stuck forever.
This is something you can develop. Most often, this will show itself in your insecurities as a beginning rapper in the sense that you’ll feel like you’re either too high pitched or not deep enough or slick enough.
Or maybe you feel like you do not know how to choose the best voice or delivery for the beat that you’re presenting.
And so you often feel like you’re confused as a beginning artist.
Now there are two sides to this. I want to discuss this to dispel this notion that you can’t develop or wherever you are currently as a rapper, that you can’t get better.
Part one is that you can’t improve your rap voice.
Whether it’s a slickness issue or a deepening issue, those are the most common ones. You need to think of it like going to the gym. When you first start going to the gym, you might be like a skinny tweak, or you might be a little, you know, soggy in the midsection, and you think, well, I can never get cut, like the people I see on Instagram or something like that.
But your body already naturally has muscles, right?
So, whether you’re really skinny, whether you’re kind of big, right, you already have muscles on your body, whether or not you can see them, but you need to go to the gym and lift weights consistently so that those muscles can get activated, right.
And there’s no difference between that and rat voice. You need to activate the muscles that are naturally within you, no matter what your voice naturally sounds like.
Similarly, your voice has natural, deep, slick parts that can be developed much like your muscles.
They’re already naturally within you. You just need to activate them to practice. If you want some instant fixes to develop your rap voice to get that deep, natural tone that’s within you, you should visit the video description box below. The second part of this is that your voice might sound better to other people than it does to you naturally.
First of all, just because you don’t enjoy your rap voice doesn’t mean that others won’t, right?
Sometimes, the way that we perceive how we’re being heard is not the same way that other people enjoy it.
Think about it.
Sometimes when you have to wear a piece of clothing, maybe you’re in a rush and you just put the shirt on with a shirt that you think you just wear when you’re going to get something to eat.
And you’re like, this isn’t even my real fresh stuff.
I’m just going out to run some errands or whatever.
And you get a compliment on that very shirt or piece of clothing that you think you are just kind of regular, but somebody thinks it looks really good on you.
I’m sure we’ve all had those experiences where we get a compliment on something that we didn’t expect.
We don’t think it looks good on this.
Your voice is the same way.
Don’t limit yourself to thinking that just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean others want it.
Also, to be honest, liking your rap voice is a skill in itself as well.
Like when I first started the first couple years that I was rapping, I didn’t like my voice just purely because it wasn’t something I was used to hearing in the context of interacting with beats.
But over time, I started to notice things about my voice.
So, confidence is also a skill that you can develop and a skill that you can feel better about over time.
The lesson number two is the difference between rapid delivery and voice. The difference between delivery and voice.
In lesson one, we’ve talked about your rap voice, like the tone, the way you interact with the timbre of your voice, but there’s also delivery, how you choose to emphasize what words you’re saying in your rap.
So, whereas voice tone or rat voice tone has more to do with the sort of feeling that somebody hears from you, Overall, I like the difference between the beat and raspy and high-pitched etc.
Vocal delivery is how you choose to emphasize certain words given the beat, given the tone interacting with the particular instrumental, basically more of a point of emphasis as opposed to feeling or sound.
Now, in order to improve your delivery specifically,
let’s move on to number three.
Lesson number three is that you want to focus on adjusting certain words or individual words within the rap to give it a musical edge.
The easiest way to improve your rat delivery specifically is to focus on what we used to call an English class, of course, stressed and unstressed syllables.
The skill of being able to choose. If I change the way I change a specific word in the chorus, or in the verse, it will have this emotional reaction on the audience.
So, for example, if I have a web bar that just the written words are, My name is Drew with no emphasis whatsoever.
And I started with Yo.
My name is Drew.
That gives the audience a more emotional connection with the word Yo, as if I’m commanding them to listen.
But if I do it with Yo, my name is Drew, a yellow My name is Drew.
Right.
So you see, I’m playing with the word draw, the name Drew, and messing around with the stress there.
That’s a choice in rap delivery, rather than going with yuck, and the ability to choose that is a very important part of rap voice and delivery.
Now, the main overall idea here is that, whereas in most music, you have musical notes, right, you see notes, a melody.
And that’s what keeps the verses etc.
Interesting,
And let’s reuse like an auto tune. We only have our voice.
So what we’re doing is using stress, emphasis, or rap delivery, to keep it interesting by having yo My name is Drew and things like that.
So it gives a musical edge to something that otherwise might be kind of boring or to conversation.
If you’re unfamiliar with words like bars, and you know musicality and things like that, we do have a free how to rap dictionary, which again, I’ll put in the video description box below, where I give you hundreds of words and common definitions for the words that you’re going to need to know in order to be a full-time rapper and improve the likelihood that you’ll learn how to rap the right way.
So our free how to read the dictionary is in the video description box below.
Now, lesson number four is to practice writing in your breaths. Okay, pre-write your breaths, right with consideration of where you’ll need to breed.
When it comes to rap voice.
This is another extremely important trick to becoming an intermediate rapper is your ability to write a song where you’ll need to take a breath in order for your voice to sound really strong and powerful.
Whereas most beginning artists, they often say, Oh, I’m running out of breath, I don’t know how to breathe properly, maybe thinking it’s just their own body or something like that.
As opposed to knowing that the most advanced rappers are pre-writing the places where they want to take a breath, even in the way that the rap is constructed, because their flow and their rhythm are already very advanced, you may not even notice it, because it just sounds like it’s part of the syncopation, etc, the cadence, but it’s actually a tactic for them to be able to continue to have a very resonant, powerful voice by writing in advance whether they need to
So for you as an artist, in order to continue through the verse with a strong voice, I want you to practice and begin when you’re writing your raps by thinking, Okay, over the last five reps, I usually run out of breath here or my voice starts to weaken here.
Maybe it is time to reorganize that verse to find a place where I can take a breath and continue to have a strong rap delivery and rap voice.
And lesson number five is punching in, so what about the times where it sounds like the rapper didn’t take a breath where they just rapped all the way through for like 30 seconds, like in Rap Guy by M & M or something like that.
In that case, what the rapper is doing is recording the first half of whatever the long section is with no bread, and then stopping the recording, and then recording from the end of that first half.
And then just starting there, so that it becomes it sounds like one seamless, long, restless bar that sounds like superhuman.
So what they’ve done there is actually taken two separate recordings and put them together so that it sounds like there’s no breath being taken.
This concept is called punching in.
You might have heard this expression before.
Again, be sure to check the free how to read the dictionary for more on this, but it’s the idea that you can use recording tricks in order to make sure not only that it sounds occasionally like you’re not taking breaths, but that you can get multiple versions of your vocal take and choose the best one, so you don’t need to feel like you have to wrap all the way through the verse.
You can always use recording tricks like punching in order to find the best versions and then splice them together like punching.
So that is today’s video.
Welcome to your first lesson on how to have a great rap voice.
Of course, I’m your host, Drew Marcy, I want to see you in the comments.
What about your rap voice in delivery?
What are you most proud of?
And what do you feel like needs the most work?
Try to read and respond to every single comment.
So I want to see you in the comments.
Be sure to pick up the dictionary and check out the instant rap voice tricks video just below the video description box below.
We’ve got a lot of cool free stuff for you.
I see in the comments.
I appreciate you watching the big homie draw mouth.
