YO YO YOOOOOOO!I planned on doin a hardcore track back when I was an unsigned rapper as just a one-off thing. Eventually, during the late spring / early summer, ma tastes changed to pretty much just happy hardcore and jungle.
In regard to any tracks before Intensity, I be cancellin them. That be meanin' that there won't be "Winner". Winner was gunna be a club rap, but the end result sounded too much like pop "music" that covers the radiowaves.
With the time left from ditching any interim releases, I be focusin on what be important in ma life right now, that being ma new college life and my ongoing pursuit of scorin chicks. This also be givin me time to perfect the hardcore sound for my first release. I'm not gonna be settlin' with releasing crap, this is a big first impression on the industry.
Speakin of crap, the "Vengence" EP (yes, I know it's really Vengeance, shut up) is available in AAC+ format for free here. To give ya heads up on why tis be free, ill tell ya why: it's shit. Tha entire production was just a mess. I had to settle with licensed beats, none of which were for rap, so I was rapping on top of smooth jazz more home to the weather channel than in a rap and a DnB track with faint vocals already in it. The mixing was atrocious too. I recorded all the lines with a cheap mp3 player. I now do all my recording with high-definition capture equipment.
Intensity is a real step above Vengence. The album art is both much cleaner and has more originality than tha preceding EP. I have a time bracket of about four months to do Intensity, versus three weeks for all eight tracks on Vengence, 60% of which got cut from the digital download. They were really that bad..... I even planned at one point to sell Vengence for $7 as a CD with only four songs, but demand from others whom refused to buy a CD that wasn't priced at below $1 per song caused me to crack. The lesson here folks is that if you want a quality product, you gotta pay for a quality product, but I digress. Intensity is also just one song with multiple mixes, rather than four songs, so I'm only writing one set of lyrics. I'm not doing all of the vocals either.
For lyrics, I split Intensity to two sections for the verses: the traditional "Brenergy's Ghetto Thugged-out Attitude Rap" section, and "the absolutely corny and ridiculously sentimental female vocal section with lyrics about love". The biggest challenge is having both parts compliment each other rather than create contrast. To accomplish this, the rap section trails to the vocals with lines such as "Every lion needs his mane, every gangsta needs his bling, every playa's got cred behind his name, but I gotta step up ma game" and the sentimental vocals working off of it.
These same principles apply to the music. The rap portions feature heavy kicks, 170bpm break beats, and bass. The sentimental portion features slower, more romantic music with acoustic guitars and lush pads. The chorus, naturally a sort-of sentimental rap duet leads to the hook. It eventually kicks in to a full hardcore beat with the chorus singing as synth. The second half puts the sentimental first, but with the bass, drum beat, and kick thrown in with the romantic backing, and then switches to rap (with female vocals thrown in) and then it gets to the chorus.
Will I actually sing? Depends on what the final lyrics are, what the beat will end up as, and who sings it. I want this track to be the perfect first impression.
Getting back on Vengence, what did I learn from that experience? Obviously that I shouldn't dilute it with 7-8 other inferior songs. That and always make your own beats. Now that I have a budget, I can afford software, synthesizers, and sample kits to produce stuff on my own.
If you are a female singer with a soft, child-like voice, and live in Nova Scotia, you might want ta consid'a sendin some sort of demo to beavpoundrecords@gmail.com. Who knows, maybe you'll be the girl heard by the legions of happy hardcore enthusiasts, kandi ravers, chavs, and rich posse bois when Beavpound hits prime time.
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