Morph Productions

There's no question that hip hop is as big as it ever has been right now and I've seen no shortage of young local MC's wanting to making a living off of it at my studio .  I wanted to write something to those people who are seriously trying to be successful and make a go of it. MC, rapper, hip hopper, whatever you call yourself there's a number of things to consider when approaching your craft.  First and foremost, like any artist in the music industry you're going to need the right songs.  Next you're going to need a unique voice that will be recognized on the radio as being you.  Lastly you're going to need lots and lots of bling.  Just kidding, haha, what you're going to need is your own unique message.  Basically you need something unique to bring to what is an overly crowded market.  This of course applies to any artist in the music industry but applies to people in the hip hop world a little differently which I will explain below. 1. Hit Song...

I've spent a lot of time reading books about the music industry and I've always found them helpful, especially years ago when I was just starting out.  Since I'm always telling people who are looking to get started to read these books anyway, I figured I'd do a quick blog post on some of the books that I think have some great info in them. "How To Make and Sell Your Own Recording" - Diane Rapaport I remember reading a version of this book when I was 16 in the early 90's and it really helped give me some ideas as to how an indie artist has to promote and build their own career.  The book has been updated since then of course but anyone who's recording their own music and plan to sell it should definitely pick this up and read carefully. "Confessions of a Record Producer" - Moses Avalon I read this book about 8 years ago when I was still in the thick of my Sony publishing deal and I remember continually thinking, "yep...

There's a bunch of fake harmony plugins out there and if you've tried any out (or worse, shelled out cash on them like me) you've likely been pretty disappointed with the results. I've found a pretty good way to create harmonies using Melodyne. The obvious way to make a harmony with melodyne is take your lead vocal, select the scale snap option (with the scale properly selected in Melodyne of course) and move all the notes up/down a 3rd, 5th or wherever you want it. Certain notes won't work being at that exact interval and will have to be moved up/down a semitone to fit with the melody and under the chords you have. This method does work ok but does sound a bit phony because while the pitch is different from the melody, the performance is exactly the same and this tends to make the harmony track sound robotic. A way to make your harmonies sound a lot more realistic is to record an entirely different vocal singing the original melody and then using that to dra...