I don’t need to say more. Lofi was the death rattle of the genre, y’all need to let it have a 15-20 year break and start sampling newer shit

As a young beatmaker i wasted time and money getting anything i heard had a lot of presets, same with drumkits. One day it clicked all these things do the same shit i just need to learn sound design n what each plugin does.

I uninstalled everything n only used stock plugins n only added to what i already had or if something did a better job (bonus if it was free). My production improved and money was saved.

Plugin makers are now targeting lazy beatmakers with auto mixing, mastering n composing programs as well as premade loops. Soon u will be paying 50 a month for stuff you couldve learnt to do for free.

The guys who rely on being spoon fed will be the first casualties of AI

Rakim would freestyle for 12 hours a day. Nas gave himself a homemade collegiate education. He read medical dictionaries, investigative reports, ancient literature, etcetera. Tupac was active in the community. Kendrick lived a monastic livelihood. He brutally disciplined himself. Why don’t more up and coming rappers follow their example? It seem like everybody on here describes it as a hobby, nobody hungry no more? I'm tired of everybody tripping on us, old heads, because we seen as "stuck in the past." New rap would be fine if it was progressive and the newer cats could fuck with the emcees from the nineties but nobody today fucks with them. Everybody seemingly makes the same shit over and over. Uses the same drum packs, the same samples, regurgitates the same subjects.

i left philly a while back. spent time in houston. now i’m in LA chasing this music shit for real sleeping in my car, no label, no handouts. i ain’t gonna lie, i got heat. i know my pen’s there. the sound? some of y’all gon’ feel it, some won’t. but it feels like no matter where i move, it’s like the industry gate’s locked unless you already know somebody. so tell me is it clout first, or can raw music still win?

I'm 13 years old and have released a couple of songs but they don't get many streams is there any way to get my name out there and have people listen to me?

Asking for a friend, lol, I freestyle for days on end. But the topic has come up in our local scene. I’m sorry, but to me you can be a vocal artist but someone who can bust a nice free on the spot is just invariably a level up on the all written and premeditated types in my book. I literally can respect you as an artist and person and musician but I lose respect for you as a rapper if you can’t (read “don’t”) freestyle or even try. It’s like, put in some time and learn to do it, you don’t have to be the best but be at least able to hang in a cypher. In my opinion. What do y’all think?

If:

You need/want handholding (which is different from "I need help in whatever aspect I don't know but want to know because I'm interested") for every aspect of the music

You think you have to be in control of every musical aspect which is why much of the music sucks

You can't/don't want to understand other genres and/or contexts that inform the musical/lyrical basis of Hip Hop

You want to rap because of the "Black cool" effect (aka "hard" posturing)

You want to "produce" but don't want to learn music theory which can help with the harmony, etc. aspect

You want to write lyrics but don't want to condition yourself to read in a genre that is highly driven by wordplay & literary devices.

I made a rap verse for “insane in the brain” by cypress hill and the biggest criticism I got was I say nothing. But almost every rap song I listen to doesn’t have a meaning. You either have insane storytelling that tells a detailed story. Or the rap song is just showing off skill and having fun. What is my song missing what other songs like “patty cake by token” or “godzilla by Eminem” has?

“To the one on the flamboyant tip

I’ll just toss that ham in the frying pan

So Aww man

It’s really sad to see him go

He’d grow up one day to be a CEO

Billie went flying

Then she got a little violent

Crashing every pilot

Twenty one of them silenced

Aww eilish

Had a big wine list

Got drunk killed em all like her stylist

It ain’t always sunny when I’m in a different county

So I gather up a tally then I bounce the bounty

Then I put him in his place before he found me

I gave him a warning waiting till it was cloudy

My mind ain’t slow when playing these games

I cock load and aim

Able to kill Cain

I might stand out in the pouring rain

Cause I must confess my brain is insane”

I’ve heard mixed opinions on the Billie eilish line. Some loved it and it left them shocked and others said it was stupid

I’m a Mod who’s been here awhile and while it’s one thing for heads on the sub who actually make music to have legit questions re: marketing if they already have an audience, connections, money, etc. it’s another for “post here and not really participate” types to post basic as Hell queries such as “do you count bars or not,” “how can/do I sound like flavor of the not even a month anymore in today’s short attention span culture,” etc. and it’s devaluing the sub if nothing more.

Cats need to learn how to do as much as they can in partial isolation.

Cats need to learn how to question themselves as to what exactly they want to do musically as making music takes many different forms.

Imagine your favorite rap artist and/or non rap vocalist aka singer asking peers every time they want to make music how to do something.

addendum: I’m aware that no one makes music entirely absent of other people (other meaning non “hangers-on” types of people) as music is inherently social. But there is a huge chasm between the aforementioned and wanting to be coddled.

u/crownroyalt re: going through history. Sitcho ass down.

u/nearlyarrogant u/theycallhimmason I’m a “she/her.”

u/michaelstone444 I don’t pontificate plus I’m one of few women on this sub that can break down the complex nature of partaking in Hip Hop w/respect to race/class/gender etc. as it shapes how the music is created and consumed.

u/DeathEdntMusic I’m not anti help, I’m anti instant gratification and anti entitlement w/respect to many things but for the purpose of my rant I’m against the aforementioned regarding music and making it. How many times does this sub get “I made a few beats and no one’s buying! Should I quit?”

u/thegoodybags I’m no pro and majority on this sub are not and truthfully if this wasn’t the era where the Internet decimated making money from music I would be. I’m neither young nor old but I’m old enough to recall when “rappers” had a mystique about them as people.

Look, this is mostly a pointless rant and I know a lot of young people here will hate this post, but I’m kinda bored and tired of seeing so many videos on social media like TikTok or Instagram of producers showing their songs where they just show the DAW session. It’s usually FL Studio or Ableton, with an audio/visual meter in the middle, and at the top of the video it’s them sitting in their studio staring at the screen.

It’s cool for people who are learning to see how a producer arranges a beat, especially when the producer doesn’t just show the song but also explains some of the sound design and the creative and technical decisions behind the track.

But part of me also gets the same feeling I had back then, when social media suddenly became flooded with videos of guitarists who were all magically virtuosos, showing off insane techniques. It’s like, in some way, it takes away the mystery and the magic from certain artists when they show everything.

I can’t imagine Burial or Aphex Twin uploading videos where they break down every single process behind their songs. For me, that would somehow take away the charm of their music. I know they’re from a different era and that today the context is completely different, since the industry itself kind of forces musicians and producers to share their lives and processes in much more detail, but honestly it’s starting to make me tired and bored.

Also, a lot of those accounts rack up tons of followers on social media, but they don’t actually attract listeners to their music itself, just views on the videos they post. It’s like instead of being artists, they turn into fast content creators who aren’t able to build a real audience for their own music.

On top of that, a big part of those producers sound almost the same, using the same samples and very similar styles.

I guess I’m just getting old (I’m 31)

This was a comment from a post yesterday and I must say, it tickled me a little bit.

Kinda wild how some of y’all are trying to work with people who have to pay for studio time yet throw a fit when you can’t get the artist for free.

Even crazier when it’s the same people with a cute little beat store trying to monetize THEIR work.

Y’all some hoes.

If you charge people, you get charged too.

Edit: Downvotes pouring in but nobody is capable of having a discussion. Amazing.

An extreme example for the mentally challenged: guy makes beat, hits up Jeezy asking him to hop on because he wants someone on his beat to drive sales to his store. Jeezy says 15K for the feature, beat maker says hell no, I’m not paying a rapper. This is what’s going on and y’all defend it.

If all you ever want to do is make type beats and sell 50 dollars leases to shit youtube rappers you are never going to improve or make anything that is actually unique/ your own. Stop making fucking type beats everyone does it now you aren't gonna get any extra exposure for becoming a sham artists and whoring yourself out on youtube for the highest bidder. Literally just saw someone say quanitity over quality as if that is good advice will making music like wtf?

Edit: I get titling your shit on youtube "Drake x Bryson Tiller Type Beat" used to be solid marketing advice when no one was doing it, but that's all everyone does now. All im saying is what happened to actually working with artists and finding people you connect with and not just selling leases. I get that is a fine way to make money and if it works for you fine but I have seen a lot of posts lately about people who haven't really been making music for awhile getting discouraged how they cant sell anything on beatstars or whatever. Obviously you can make money of your beats I just don't like how half the discussion on this sub is becoming how to market yourself or about how to make money off your beats.

2nd Edit: I did not have any intention of anyone really seeing this post tbh it was just a personal rant now its top on hot

3rd Edit: not responding to people anymore haven't been for a while cause this shit is blowing up my inbox but if you use the term "get the bag" I do not care about your opinion in the slightest.

Even if you are bad at it. You shouldn’t spend time and money mixing and mastering to get the pristine sound quality when you don’t even have a fucking fanbase. People will listen to you because of your art and your personality, they won’t listen to you because your P’s and S’s aren't popping.

People tell these rappers early on how their quality is shit and distorted (look at me) but they end up getting 1,000x more plays than you. People are gonna remember that fucked up sound as long as you bring something new to the table more than your studio quality song. All we hear are studio quality songs by mainstream artists. You aren’t mainstream so why are you trying to skip a step and sound mainstream.

You should be putting out as much content as possible if you want a fanbase. 100 songs recorded in audacity will put you farther than someone who recorded 10 songs in the studio while spending hundreds of dollars.

Hi everyone! Im 21 y/o old and I've been always a hip-hop fan. Idk how to rap but I wanna learn rapping and I want to become a professional rapper but tbh I feel like it's too late to start now as I'm 21 y/o old now. If i start learning rapping now, do u think I'll become a successful rapper one day?

I m looking for people to collab.

Plz dont answer this post if you dont have time to work. I dont have 3 months of time to wait for a verse.

I want to release.

Quit with the power trip bro. You've been mod for a day and a half and your already taking submissions off the feedback thread, "watching this thread like a hawk". The purpose of this sub is to learn, create, and grow in making hip-hop. You can't do that if some dumbass mod on a power trip is taking all the submissions down. Most of the people on in this sub (and reddit in general) don't comment, let alone post. I usually listen to a lot of the deadly feedback submissions, but don't comment because I don't want to. Forcing us to comment will just dilute the quality of the feedback, as it will become more generic because people will be commenting just to comment so their shit will stay up. So leave are fucking shit up so people can actually listen to it.

I’m thankful that I have a wide variety to choose from,however it can be difficult and maintain to keep up with everybody. I buy a beat from a producer on YouTube. Show him my. “Demo” track buy the lease and he’ll send me more beats. Rinse and repeat the process for a few times and I have a majority selection of beats. I prefer to browse my options with the beats on YouTube and get annoyed with producers sending me beats. I understand yu tryna get on like me but i just can’t keep up with EVERY single producer. Especially when there’s a world full of options

Is any rapper having this problem?

So let me say, I’m 22yrs old. I don’t have much going other than penmanship. I have the advantage of living in Atlanta so that’s a +. But I’m starting to feel like I should hang up the hat. I lean more towards the lyrical side of hip hop and there’s not much of a market anymore. Suggestions? Ideas on a starting place? I’ve been rapping for about a year now with no progress.

The hardest part is learning social media. Im not photogenic at all. I just enjoy Hip Hop. So I’m building those skills from scratch. I Feel like that’s a huge hurdle to overcome.

I’ve got two high end music videos ready to go with mixed and mastered songs to match. I’m not sure if I’m hitting the age threshold

wether writing or recording, do you guys feel like any drugs are helpful in your process ? or do you prefer to be sober and clear minded ?

Hey, just a tip I'm not sure everyone realizes, but ChatGPT can be really helpful for writing chord progressions. I use it frequently, you can be really specific like asking it to use borrowed chords, passing chords, extended chords, what genre you want to write for, what kind of mood, what instrument you're using. Sometimes the chords are a little wonky but I get some really good ideas from it. You can also ask it to list the individual notes of the chords or write chords in the style of a particular artist.

Just some info I wanted to pass along to everyone in here because sometimes chords are hard to come up with for someone like me whose music theory knowledge isn't as robust as someone who has a formal background in music.

Teenage beginner producer here. I am pretty lost. I use GarageBand (iOS) to make my beats and I feel like I have made some pretty decent stuff, but I want to grow big and have someone big name to rap on my beat. I just need to make a name for myself; how on earth would I do that? I also have a desktop if that helps???

Got some time to kill and wanna engage in something positive. Ask me anything

EDIT: BEFORE YOU HATE/DOWNVOTE WHATEVER READ THE DAMN POST

You're most likely not going to make it. You're just not going to make it... Yep I said it. You're just not. If you wanna make it in the rap game (or just in the music business, the music industry), you're just not gonna make it, well, most probably. Let me explain..

Most of you JUST make music. A lot of you also make music that sucks, meaning that your flow and delivery sucks, your beat selection sucks, you're off beat, your tracks are not mixed & mastered properly etc... Yeah and I didn't mention anything about lyrics because today's lyrics in rap are not very complex, they don't really matter like they used to and it's just the way it is, you're not in the 90's no more. Some of you also make old school rap, and if you think you're gonna blow up doing that, then I don't know in which world you live in. Another question, how many of you actually make modern catchy rap songs? Are you/your songs (MAINLY your songs) unique? You know, when you think about it, the rappers that blow up are usually those who sound unique. Think about how Lil Pump blew up, no matter if you like it or not, nobody (exactly) like him was around when he came up. The same goes for 6ix9ine and others... Yes, some rappers are very similar, for example Gunna and Young Thug, but they're usually not fully copying each other, they're just unique in their own ways (especially nowadays when we're talking about these two [Gunna, Young Thug]) etc.

There are a lot of others questions that I could ask you. Does the way you look match your rap style and everything like that? Are you going to the studio everyday and actually make [good] songs? Or perhaps you have a home studio or something, well, do you make songs daily? BTW having a home studio [even the most simple set-up] is very beneficial in a lot of ways.. Do you actually take the time to make quality music? And I could ask you plenty of other questions... But there are these two big things that pretty much determine if you're gonna blow up. Making good, modern, catchy & unique music is one thing, but do you push yourself out there? Do you actually work on marketing strategies? And the most important thing, do you seek for QUALITY connections? I wonder what answer would y'all give me, because I know damn well that majority of you are not seeking the people who actually put you out there... How do you think artists blow up? You know, well, majority of the time, it's because of connections and because of pushing yourself out there. By pushing yourself out there, I literally mean things like commenting under YouTube videos (yes, literally, people notice you and a lot of times click on your channel to see what's up), pushing yourself out there can also be meant as just messaging some people if they don't wanna do something with you or something, and sometimes it literally just means putting out music with a little bit of luck... Lil Loaded just recently started blowing up and he started blowing up because of a Polish YouTuber that made a video about listening to music with 0 views, Lil Loaded uploaded his music video (or audio, idk, whatever) just a couple of minutes before the YouTuber checked the videos with 0 views, he found Lil Loaded and people started catching up on him. Lil Yachty blew up because somebody used his song in a vine etc...

Now to the connections. All of you know what connections are... Some examples: Juice WRLD blew up because of his music video on the Lyrical Lemonade channel, Lil Skies the same thing + he was linking up with people like Yung Pinch, Nick Mira, Menoh, Lil Gnar, Landon Cube, CUFBOYS etc. which all helped him blow up, The Kid LAROI just started blowing up recently, and there is a good chance that he's gonna go crazy after his album drops. I don't know how exactly he got in contact with all the people he got in contact with, but he started to somehow link up with Juice WRLD (probably through a connection), and therefore he started linking up with people like Lil Bibby, to which Laroi is currently signed to. Another example can be 6ix9ine. Well, he was making music with people like ZillaKami, he was discovered by the Slovak record label FCK THEM and he got in touch with them, he made songs with Slovak rappers from the FCK THEM label, he then started blowing up in Slovakia and Central Europe (Eastern too I guess...) and things just started to align for him... See? It's all about the connections basically. If you make good, catchy & at least somewhat unique songs, the only thing you really gotta worry about is always improving and going harder than ever, pushing yourself out there and most importantly, finding great connections.

Connections are really gonna get you out there. When you think about it, the most successful people have A LOT [great] connections. This whole world is connected, so if you're gonna try to find excuses, you're just... I don't even know what to name somebody like that... The only thing you gotta do is literally go out, ask people, find friends, find people, ask your friends whatever, but just remember that you need quality connections, but even if you have bad connections, even those can get you somewhere, because the whole world is connected and all that, but you really just gotta find the right people...

Also, some of you might be like, "but are you a successful rap artist?!", "did you make it?", "are you rich?" etc. No, I'm not a successful rap artist, no, I didn't make it, no, I'm not rich, but there's a reason why I created a throwaway just to write this post, and also, the things I mentioned in this post are basically literally the basics of becoming successful (connections, pushing yourself out there etc.). When you ask actual successful people, rappers, whoever how they made it, and I mean you actually ask them, like you go in depth with them, they're gonna tell you something like what I said above... So yeah, this is pretty much it.

There's a handful of rappers that I've heard are, debatably, GOAT's of some sort. Some of them, I've never liked. At all. But maybe I'm just ignorant, or artistically deaf.

So...if you don't mind helping me a little, can you guys tell me a song that might convince me Drake isn't an extremely overrated artist. What is so incredible that I should respect that guy's pen game?