Rap Instrumentals With Hooks
When making a rap song, musicians focus almost exclusively on the beat. There is a good reason for this; the beat is the most noticeable, and therefore the most crucial, aspect of the song. Almost as important, but often overlooked (especially by beginning musicians) is the rap instrumentals with hooks in a song. Rap instrumentals with hooks turns a simple beat into a melody, and is what grabs listeners' attention. This article will explain what rap instrumentals with hooks are, why your song needs one, and how to make a good one.
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What Is an Instrumental Hook?
If you've listened to enough rap and hip hop songs on the radio, you've probably noticed that many of them (not all, but most) follow a set formula. First, the beat starts. Shortly after that, there are a few bars of melody. Then the lyrics begin. The instrumental part at the very beginning of the song, before the lyrics kick in, is called the hook.
Why Does My Song Need a Hook?
To understand why your song needs a hook, you need to accept two facts. First, to your audience (who are most likely drivers listening with half an ear to their car's radio), most beats some more or less the same. A good beat alone will not grab your audience's attention. Second, a beat alone (no matter how good) is not a complete song-it is just one of many element in a piece of music. Music needs to have melody.
The instrumental hook at the beginning of a song is when the melody first comes into play over your beat line. This is when, in the listener's mind, beat turns into music. When the lyrics start, music turns into song.
The melody in the instrumental hook is what the audience can latch onto, remember, and sing to themselves. It's what makes a song catchy, what makes it stick in the listeners' memory. And this, of course, is what makes a song into a hit. If you can establish your song's melody early on with a strong instrumental hook, you increase the chances of your song becoming a hit.
How Do I Make a Good Instrumental Hook?
There are a million different way to do it, but here's the basic formula for a beginning hip hop musician.
First, lay down and perfect your beat line, then loop it.
Second, play out the melody. Most music making software has a keyboard for this very reason. You can use any instrument or sound sample. The keyboard will turn that sound into notes, and the notes into a musical melody.
Third, after a few bars of the beat line, lay the instrumental melody down over it. Make sure the hook contains the core melody. As a rule of thumb, make your instrumental hook last half as long as your verses. For example, if your verse is sixteen bars, make your instrumental hook eight bars.
Fourth, make sure the first eight bars (the hook) of instrumentals is something special. Use additional instrumentation or beats to make it really pop out.
Finally, use the filters and plug-ins in your software program to add sound effects, such as phase or reverb, to help establish the feel and mood of the song.
As you can see, a lot of work can go into establishing good rap instrumentals with hooks in your song, easily as much effort as you put into the beat. By now, however, you hopefully understand how important those first rap instrumentals with hooks can be. It can make the difference between songs that get radio play, and generic, run-of-the-mill rap tunes destined for unknown obscurity.
