Written by What does it mean to tailor your style to the rap beat that you have chosen? It first starts with the selection of the rap beat. You have to get a beat that you can work worth and really flourish on. You don’t want to be stuck with a rap beat that you can’t really get off on, otherwise the song you eventually produce will be at best an admirable stretch for you and at worst a poor song that does nothing for your career. So the first step is in choosing the beat. But this article is about what happens after you have chosen a beat, so we are assuming you already have that down. Once you have gotten the beat what you do from there to tailor your flow to the beat comes in three steps. Step one is to get as familiar with the beat as you can. It’s not unheard of for rappers to listen incessantly to a rap beat they are going to rap over. They play it in their headphones and just listen to it until the cadence and rhythm become like part of their bones. In this way their heartbeat has almost aligned itself to the rhythm of the beat. You also have to listen for the variations in the rap beat itself. A lot of rap beats have specific sections designed for the chorus, or sections that purposefully slow down or speed up. As a rapper, you have to learn these sections and tailor you lyrics to them. Establish variations in your own freestyle, you might even think of rapping about something different here to really help to break these sections off from the rest of the song. Due care in this area will create a final product that sounds well produced. And production is so much more than what the producer does after the lyrics are laid. The rapper, especially the up and coming rapper, has to think about how to produce his own lyrics for the rap beat so that the two meld perfectly. The second step in producing a perfect rap song is to take the song from the planning stage to the experimentation stage. Here’s where you can try out what you’ve learned while you were listening to the beat and planning. At this point you should experiment with different versions of a flow and different speeds. You might find that spitting an entirely different flow from another track over certain sections of the rap beat you have chosen works perfectly. Whatever you do here don’t be afraid to push the limits of your ability and make sure you record what you have done so that you can play it back later and have something to go from. The final step is to lay down the track how you think it should be. After listening to the beat over and over again and then experimenting with different flows and styles on the beat you should be ready to put a track together. Remember that even at this point nothing is set in stone. You can always listen to the song you have produced and then change it up. The point is that you learn to produce songs to rap beats with a certain method in mind and this should make it easier to produce the perfect rap song.
