Hey, y'all it's Kize. On this channel, I try to learn a new skill in a set amount of time and for this month I'm trying out rapping. I started songwriting about half a year ago and I've written like a spoken word piece before, but as far as rapping experience goes I have none. The goal for this month is to learn about rapping and also hopefully, write a half-decent rap song by the end of the month. I'm not going to be Eminem or Kanye by the end of this month at all. If I have a comfort zone and all the skills that I'm learning are kind of on the fringes here then rapping's out here. But hey trying out new things is what this channel is all about so we'll see what happens. Leggo! This has become a routine thing in all my learning challenges but I like to soak myself into the general landscape of the skill before I actually dive in and I think that stuff is especially important for this skill. Listening to a lot of hip-hop music and also getting acquainted to the history and also how it evolved over time. Hip-hop is both a musical genre and a culture that was born from the New York City Bronx back in the 1970s. It encompasses much more than just hip-hop music or rapping. It's part of a bigger culture that included elements such as emceeing and rapping djing break dancing and graffiti writing. What started as a French subculture has since grown to take many evolved shapes and forms in our modern society and has become ingrained in pop culture. I wasn't super acquainted with hip-hop music so I asked my friends for recs. Songs were kind of all over the place but nevertheless, I took notes on what I was noticing and listened to a whole bunch of songs. Today, I'll be focusing in on probably the most important aspect of rapping, flow. Flow is defined as the rhythm and rhymes of a hip-hop song's lyrics and how they interact. It's how a rapper chooses to place words on top of a beat that makes the song sound good. I was surprised by how much of a similarity there is between drumming and rapping. Drumming, it's basically just a rhythmic pattern that you play over music. Rapping also is just a rhythmic vocal performance that you perform over music. To better explain that let's zoom out. I'd actually done a 30-day drumming video challenge. Here's a rudiment example from that video Rhythm for that rudiment is To change it from drumming to rapping all I would have to do is find words that fit that rhythm pattern. Let me see if I can think of something real quick. I went to the store and I got some milk, there we go. This wall is very red and I like it. You can basically put anything over and as long as it fits that rhythmic pattern that's rapping. Now, let's try to put it over a beat. This wall is very red and I like it. I went to the store and I got some milk. Rapping is basically just substituting drum notes and adding words onto them. Knowing this has helped me understand the concept of flow better but I'm still kind of confused when people say that this or that rapper's flow or this is good flow this is bad flow. The practical aspect of flow kind of confuses me, so I'm just going to pick a song and practice it. I went through and analyzed a lot of songs but here, I'm practicing "Lose Yourself" Love him or hate him, I was personally impressed by Eminen's interesting rhyme schemes and also wordplay. Alright, so day, whatever it is, I've been practicing "Lose Yourself" these past few days. Getting the flow down isn't hard for me but the tone of my voice seems to be the issue here. For instance, Eminem has this more energetic tone whereas for me I feel like my natural tendency its "palms are sweaty, knees weak arms are heavy, there's vomit on a sweater already" I feel like it's just a combination of not being used to this type of performance and also like my natural voice just tends to be more relaxed. To help improve my tone, I underlined words that needed emphasizing and I also did breathing exercises. For this day, I will be focusing on another sub-skill. We're gonna look up some tongue twisters tongue-twisters for rappers. Let's try them. "Red leather" "Red leather?" "Toy boat, toy boat toy boy, toy boy" "You know New York, you need New York, you know you need unique New York" Why is this hard? M~O~ Practicing other people's songs, in the beginning is helpful for me to understand concepts but the real challenge for this month is to write my own original rap song so I was thinking about a topic. This is kind of hard for me because it's gonna be a lot different than a lot of the songs that I'm used to writing. Because of a ton of obvious reasons I feel like I can't rap about topics that are regular subjects that are talked about In rap songs I could either take this like total parody, or I could actually try to rap about something serious. I don't know I feel like going the parody route be taking the easy way out so I was thinking about what kind of serious topic would I feel comfortable rapping about. and then I got to thinking about all the tv shows and also the k-dramas that I watch. I feel like especially in k-dramas there's always the archetype student character who's the rich but very mean character at school, school bully and I thought I really don't like people like that. Maybe I can write something about a bully push them down should probably take out this curse word cause "demonetization" the concept of being a rich bully was getting kind of in the way, it was getting cluttered so I decided to just focus in on the bully aspect. Incoming a few of the lines that I wrote "Mr. Bully, why are you mad? Is because you can't comprehend the fact?" "Your Bahama trip at eight or your pet pig you name drake" "Big ugly loner loser yearning attention" I'm having much more fun with this than I thought I would. Diss lyrics are so fun to write. Okay, I think I'm done with today. If I just leave it as is right now it is just mean poetry, so let's go find ourselves a beat. Next step is to modify what I've written so that the words actually fit on top of the beat. Let's take this line. "Mr. Bully, why are you mad, is it because you can't comprehend the fact?" "Mr. Bully, why are you mad, is it because you can't comprehend the fact?" That doesn't flow over it, it doesn't fit. I changed it up earlier to "Mr. Bully, why you mad? You can't take the fact?" Now it sounds like this. "Mr. Bully, why you mad? You can't take the fact?" After reworking to the best of my abilities, I recorded a rough draft version and reached out to a coach for some feedback. Hey, hi Prophet. How are you, good to see you. Prophet gives online rap lessons and during our lesson, we went over what I did well and also what I could improve on. It's actually amazing for you having just started rapping. You had a good flow, good timing, the lyrics are written really well. The number one thing that I end up teaching is how to rap on the beat but you didn't have that problem. You were already killing it on the beat. For the rest of the lesson, we went over the song and he pointed out places that I could improve. I learned a lot from this lesson. The most important thing is "believability." People think the most important thing is what I'm saying. The most important thing is that I believe what you're saying. When you're recording, don't say your rap to the microphone, say it through the microphone into the ears of the person that's going to hear it. I just finished my lesson. So much good advice. For the final few days, I made the final edits and practiced through the performance of the song. I have to end this challenge a few days earlier because I need some time to mix and master the song. I really wish I had like another lesson. I do feel like I gave my 100%, my all, for the time allotted, so I hope y'all enjoy it. I hope y'all liked Mr. Bully. Still got lots to practice but I did learn a ton this month and it was really fun trying out something totally new. This was another humongous editing project so if you left a like and comment, I would really appreciate it. Let's bring Mr. Clipboard out. If you want to see any of my past learning challenges then go check out my past video here. If you want to keep up to date with whatever I'm learning next, then go ahead and subscribe below. Thanks for watching. Bye. Mr. Bully why are you mad Mic check one two three let's go