How To Record Rap
Welcome to HowToRecordRap.com!
Before I tell you anything else, I'd like to thank you very much for visiting the website! You're about to read great information, which will help you become better at recording Rap Vocals & improve your skills as a "bedroom engineer"!
I go by the name of ShyneBeats, I'm an industry-certified audio engineer. I have recorded & mixed music for MTV, BET, America's Next Top Model, Nascar & many more. Over the years I had the opportunity to work with many Artists worldwide & collect information and experience about recording rap vocals. What you're going to learn on this website will help you make your Rap Songs sound like the ones you hear in the radio every day! The great thing about this: You won't have to pay an engineer to do it for you (or help you with it) and you can do use these techniques everywhere, in every studio and even in your bedroom!
Here are some good reasons why you really should take advantage of this website:
It's absolutely FREE.
Learn techniques by an Industry professional.
Receive FREE stuff in your inbox.
FREE BEAT on the bottom of the page !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, let's start!
#1. Before you can start recording a Rap Song of course you need to download the right beats first! Especially in rap music, the beat plays a major role when it comes to recording. Why? Well, nowadays there are many producers on the internet & most of them deliver pure TRASH! Most of the Internet Producers & Beatmakers don't have any kind of experience in the music industry, so they think that everything that sounds good is automatically industry ready. That's wrong of course.
The Producers' job is to leave some space for the artist to record his own vocals. Because it's the final song which matters at the end of the day.
I took the time to do some research for you & picked 5 of the best Producers on the industry. You can listen & buy the beats you like in the beat player below.
How to Buy Beats
| 1. Click the checkboxes next the the songs you want to order. | 2. Click the Buy Now button at the bottom right hand side of the beat player. | 3. You will be redirected to PayPal for payment. | 4. Once payment has been made, you will instantly receive the download links to your PayPal email address. |
Software
#2. Now that you have the right beat(s) you will need a good program to record over it. The most used software in the music industry are Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Nuendo, Ableton Live, FL Studio & Acid Pro. These programs are not for free though, so you would have to purchase it.
But there are FREE ones too! Audacity would be a great program to start with. It's free & very easy to use. If you don't like Audacity you can always download a demo version of FL Studio. It will let you record & export your final song. The only restriction is that you can't save your projects to edit them later. So you would have to do it all without closing the application.
Microphones
#3. The most essential part of the whole recording process is the recording itself. To achieve a good recording quality you will need a good microphone. Most of you guys reading do already have microphones, I'm pretty sure of that. The ones that I would recommend are Blue Bottle, NEUMANN M149, NEUMANN TLM102, which is a little bit cheaper than the ones listen before & still has a good recording quality.
Always make sure that your microphones are placed well, so that you don't loose any of the quality. You can google "microphone placement". Those sites in the results will professionally explain you how room acoustics work & how you get your mic into the right position.
I would also recommend to always plug the mic in a pre-amp before the signal reaches the computer. It will let you set your volume & other parameters right. REMEMBER: This will make a huge difference!
Editing
#4. So once you're done with recording, a very important & essetial part is editing the vocal audio files! There is actually no rule for editing, JUST MAKE IT SOUND GOOD! Make sure you always remove the noise you don't want in the mix by using a De-Noiser & De-Esser. These will make great effects to your voice & will clean it up.
Learn how to use Equalizers & Compressors. Usually these 2 devices decided wether your song is hot or not, because they make the greatest effect of all other plugins. There are many ways to use EQ's & Compressors. I'd recommend you Google these 2 devices & learn their features. I can't tell you anything about EQ's & Compressors on this website, because every single device (or plugin) has it's own character & effect to it. So you always want to learn a bit about them before you use them!
Final Mixdown
#5. The final step is to listen to the whole record again. Once you feel it's perfect & you think it sounds exactly how it's supposed to do, bounce it as a WAV, AIFF or MP3 file. That will merge all audio together & you'll be able to share your Rap Song with the world. Put it on Twitter, Facebook & MySpace. If you want to make some money use Tunecore to upload your music on iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, etc.
I hope you enjoyed reading all this stuff. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me info@howtorecordrap.com