How to make a rap song with a beat instrumental (a step-by-step guide)

So you already bought a beat from some dope music producer, or got it for free? Then it’s time to make it happen, to record a rap song. Of course, we can say the easiest way to do it – go to a studio, record your rap there and get some help from the sound engineer. But not everybody wants or can go to a music studio, so in this article, I will tell you how to make a rap song with an instrumental you already got.
First of all, you need your lyrics ready. If you don’t have at least something, at least an idea of the upcoming track, then it’s you got your beat pretty early 😅. I always recommend to listen to a beat and try to rap on it before buying it. Like this, you can save your money and don’t buy a lot of useless beats.

Recording: affordable way

Let’s assume that you are only an upcoming rapper (otherwise you wouldn’t need to read this article), so you trying to get into this rap game and don’t have fancy musical equipment yet. I will tell you a couple of ways of how to record your song.
The first way is recording with your phone and headset. It’s good to have an iPhone in this case because they have a pretty good mic already built-in. So you need the phone and another device where you will play your beat. You would need to plug-in your headset to this device, so you can record your voice without this beat.
On the second way, you can record your voice on your desktop or laptop, just plug-in any microphone you have and record your rap with default voice recording app or you can use free software “Audacity”.
By the way, you will need this application anyways because when you are done recording your voice, you will need to compose your voice and the beat you got together. The Audacity isn’t perfect for this purpose, but it’s free and powerful. It has a lot of instruments and effects. You can also find a lot of tutorials on how to use it and make mixing on your computer.

Recording: a quality way

For this option, you would need way more equipment and paid software. But these are only one-time expenses you would have to make. Specifically, you will need a not bad computer, condenser microphone, sound interface, DAW (digital audio workstation), some VST-plugins. Check all the stuff, set it up and let’s move on.
Open your DAW, bring your beat on one channel and start recording your rap song on another one. It’s pretty easy when you have all the equipment, right? 🙂 So when you all done, let’s move to the last step.

Mixing: affordable way

Here you will need again this free software “Audacity”, make sure you downloaded it before we move on. This application has a lot of useful effects for you, such as echo, distortion, reverb and the most important equalizer. For basic mixing, you will need a compressor, reverb, and delay. Play around with those effects until you get a good solid sound. You can also watch video tutorials on how to mix voice in Audacity.

This is how the interface of Audacity looks like. You can also the almost all sound effects it has.

When you are done mixing your track, just go export it from the program as a WAV format with these settings:

Mixing: a quality way

Previously, the quality way of recording your voice was easier, but mixing is more complex in this way because you will need to use more instruments and learn your DAW in details, especially with some VST-plugins. First of all, open your DAW, put there on one channel your beat and on another one your voice record (probably, you already got it done while recording on the same project session).

Secondly, you need to put equalizer and cut off low frequencies. This is a stock effect in Ableton Live.

3rd step is to add compressor effect on your voice. Usually, every DAW has this plugin built-in, but you can also use VST-plugin for this purpose, for instance once with the title “Scarlett Compressor”. You will need to add some threshold and input signal, or simply pick some preset which fits you the best.

This is how looks like the interface of “Scarlett Compressor”. You would get this plugin and few more for free when you buy audio interface from Scarlett.

After this step, you will need to add some more audio effects like reverb, delay and/or distortion. Some of DAWs already has even this plugins built-in, but you can use “Valhalla VintageVerb”, “ValhallaDelay”, ” FuzzPlus 3 “. When you are done with those sound effect, you can try to experiment with other effects like flanger or phaser; you can also record more backs.

Bonus: the easiest way to mix your song

If you want to get quality mixing of your voice with the beat you have bought, you can also ask a sound engineer or music producer to make it for you. Just send him the record of your voice and the beat. Professionals will make it quickly and with great quality. So with this option you would pay money to save your time and efforts, so you can focus more on writing lyrics, developing flows and recording more tracks;
That’s all for this article! Thank you a lot for reading, I hope it was helpful for you and now you can mix your songs by yourself or at least to see the way where to move. And if you are looking for some beats you can rap on, take a look at my library, you can download free mp3 versions (non-profit) as well 🙂