"Rappers aren't talented, they can't play an instrument"

[SliK]

It's easier for bad rappers to sound good (over a catchy) beat than for a bad musician to sound good.

To excel as a musician you have to be very talented, the same cannot be said for rappers.

Are you talking solely about playing instruments?

Because there are endless pop stars.

When I say musicians I mean real musicians, not pop stars. So yes.

[Eedee]

The statement has a nice bit of ignorance to it.

Some rappers know how to use a piano to make their beats. Besides, in this day and age, you don't need physical instruments to compose symphonies or instrumentals. You can do it all on FL Studio. Which is equally impressive, IMO.

[EminemBase]

Yeah well there was a comment I saw on some heavy metal video...

Something like...

'Rapping is easy. Rapping just takes practice, anybody can do that. But playing a guitar is special'

What a fucking retard and a retarded view. What the fuck does he think playing a guitar takes lmao, PRACTICE, and that's all any craft takes; some crafts are harder than others but... learning to rap like Eminem is a lot harder than rapping like Soulja Boy, you can't just dismiss an entire craft based on your ignorance or dislike for it.

I even dislike heavy metal, heavily - and I have friends who... they love it, but I don't dismiss the shit, because I don't know enough about it and I also know it takes a lot of practice and effort to do what they do, I just dislike how it sounds, but I never disregard the talent involved.

People who do, with anything, are just idiotic.

[EminemBase]

The statement has a nice bit of ignorance to it.

Some rappers know how to use a piano to make their beats. Besides, in this day and age, you don't need physical instruments to compose symphonies or instrumentals. You can do it all on FL Studio. Which is equally impressive, IMO.

Well I wouldn't say making a beat via FL studio is 'equally impressive' as mastering instruments lol.

[EminemBase]

It's easier for bad rappers to sound good (over a catchy beat) than for a bad musician to sound good.

To excel as a musician you have to be very talented, the same cannot be said for rappers.

Not really.

It's easy to make a hit even if you're shit at rapping... same can be said if you can barely sing - as it's the beat which is the hit, it's the catchiness...

But it's not easy to get props as a master wordsmith or a brilliant rapper if you're shit at rapping.

The fair comparison would be 'it's easy to be thought of as a brilliant rapper, even if you're not, yet isn't easy to be seen as a brilliant musician if you're not' - it's not easy to be seen as a brilliant anything, if you're not brilliant. Great rappers (Em, Nas, Tech) are given those props because they're genuinely brilliant at rapping and given those props often DESPITE shitty beats or mediocre music...

It may be easy to make a hit as a rapper aka Soulja Boy, but nobody is calling SB a lyrical genius.

[Eedee]

The statement has a nice bit of ignorance to it.

Some rappers know how to use a piano to make their beats. Besides, in this day and age, you don't need physical instruments to compose symphonies or instrumentals. You can do it all on FL Studio. Which is equally impressive, IMO.

Well I wouldn't say making a beat via FL studio is 'equally impressive' as mastering instruments lol.

Okay maybe not equally impressive, but my point in bold still stands.

[EminemBase]

The statement has a nice bit of ignorance to it.

Some rappers know how to use a piano to make their beats. Besides, in this day and age, you don't need physical instruments to compose symphonies or instrumentals. You can do it all on FL Studio. Which is equally impressive, IMO.

Well I wouldn't say making a beat via FL studio is 'equally impressive' as mastering instruments lol.

Okay maybe not equally impressive, but my point in bold still stands.

True that but, only thing is...

There was a time when Em said he always used live instruments and Dre taught him that as it just gives it this sound which is hard to duplicate, it gives it something special...

I wish he still thought that way.

As, if you listen to MMLP, you can hear that...

Recovery and all these digital productions sound like dogshit in comparison.

[Eedee]

Hence why I said "symphonies" aka using either live instruments or a program which sounds exactly like live instruments.

In FL Studio, there's many tricks to make it sound like a live instrument. Like, select a sustained violin, do the notes and whatnot, change the velocities of each note, voila. Sounds like a real violinist.

[Elision]

embase bringin the triple post

[SliK]

You all seem to forget that musicians have to write lyrics too.

It may not have s1ck multi3s or 16 bars per verse but, like poetry, it's often what they don't say that means as much. To say writing a rap takes more talent than writing a poem is ridiculous, just like writing a good rap verse doesn't take more talent than writing a good rock verse.

Rockers also learn instruments, write the music as well as lyrics, PLAY the music as well as singing. But I've already said this and nobody has tried to address it.

[Snakebeast]

You all seem to forget that musicians have to write lyrics too.

It may not have s1ck multi3s or 16 bars per verse but, like poetry, it's often what they don't say that means as much. To say writing a rap takes more talent than writing a poem is ridiculous, just like writing a good rap verse doesn't take more talent than writing a good rock verse.

Rockers also learn instruments, write the music as well as lyrics, PLAY the music as well as singing. But I've already said this and nobody has tried to address it.

Thing is, rappers tend to need to focus on their lyrics A LOT more to be considered "good". Look at Em. Infinite was considered a run-of-the-mill rap album. You could talk about Kanye, but he came up as a producer.

[SliK]

Yeah and musicians need to focus on their instruments, often mastering more than one (how many rappers can rap well in different languages?).

[AbramIsaac]

Hence why I said "symphonies" aka using either live instruments or a program which sounds exactly like live instruments.

In FL Studio, there's many tricks to make it sound like a live instrument. Like, select a sustained violin, do the notes and whatnot, change the velocities of each note, voila. Sounds like a real violinist.

It'll sound close enough.

It's hard to duplicate the small artifacts that come with a live recording though. The sound of fingers shifting across the strings, an off-balance bow, the sound of a pick as it strikes a string, etc. I agree though, when it comes to composition, it really doesn't matter whether you're using sheet music or FL studio. Many live instruments just can't be properly duplicated though, so I always feel like it's best to use a bit of both when constructing the beat if possible.

[Eedee]

Hence why I said "symphonies" aka using either live instruments or a program which sounds exactly like live instruments.

In FL Studio, there's many tricks to make it sound like a live instrument. Like, select a sustained violin, do the notes and whatnot, change the velocities of each note, voila. Sounds like a real violinist.

It'll sound close enough.

It's hard to duplicate the small artifacts that come with a live recording though. The sound of fingers shifting across the strings, an off-balance bow, the sound of a pick as it strikes a string, etc. I agree though, when it comes to composition, it really doesn't matter whether you're using sheet music or FL studio. Many live instruments just can't be properly duplicated though, so I always feel like it's best to use a bit of both when constructing the beat if possible.

You can also use samples and play around with those. Actually, I think some programs use a range of samples for each instrument. The one I use has stored a bunch of live instrument notes for a huge variety of instruments. You choose the note and it takes from it's library. So you might just get the bow/finger/pick sound you were talking about.

[EminemInsider]

You all seem to forget that musicians have to write lyrics too.

It may not have s1ck multi3s or 16 bars per verse but, like poetry, it's often what they don't say that means as much. To say writing a rap takes more talent than writing a poem is ridiculous, just like writing a good rap verse doesn't take more talent than writing a good rock verse.

Rockers also learn instruments, write the music as well as lyrics, PLAY the music as well as singing. But I've already said this and nobody has tried to address it.

Most of the non-rap music people consider "good" is filled with generic love song/romance/sexual attraction lyrics. The majority of musicians seem to only put lyrics there just to have lyrics to go with their music. It's a necessary evil to them. They're not actually interested in lyricism itself.

Also, there seems to be an unstated assumption here that the kind of singing/playing in most of these non-rap songs that people admire is usually of a particularly high technical caliber. It isn't. John Lennon was not a great technical vocalist. Bob Dylan was/is an absolutely dreadful singer, technically speaking. You don't need to be a great technical singer, or even a great instrumentalist, to make legendary music. So the kind of "talent" required in other forms of music isn't nearly as demanding as people suggest.