How To Rap: Turn Sentences Into Bars

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What’s up everyone, so the question I got for today is how do you turn sentences into bars. This topic is going to be for people who want to rap in a way that’s a little less poetic and closer to prose. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t use poetic techniques, it simply means you’ll be making longer, more straightforward lines to match your bars. So let’s get into how to do that.

The first point we need to start with is what is a bar. Now to save some time, basically a bar is a measure of time in music and for rap music typically you’re able to fit about 10-16 syllables per bar naturally. With this baseline in mind, we can start to understand how sentences can translate to bars, there’s a few ways to do this.

The first strategy you can use is to write sentences which fit within that syllable count. Simple enough! Once you count out a bar, you just make sure the whole sentence fits:

I always rock the mic with the utmost of ease.
I’m the best you’ve ever seen from the jungles to seas.

Simple enough, right? Both sentences fit within one bar each and all we have to do is map these sentences into the bar. What if you want to write a longer sentence though? In these cases, you can let the sentence hang over the edge of the bar and pick it back up in the next bar. Here’s an example:

I get sick of the way these inconsiderate idiots
act like in past lives they were legit for the period.

Here, I’ve just split a much longer sentence into two bars. If you want to maintain your rhyme scheme, this takes a bit of foresight as to where you break up the sentence and how you end it, but it can easily be done.

What if the issue is that you’re writing short sentences that don’t quite take up a full bar? One options is to try to fit your shorter sentences into a half-bar. Since bars are split into four counts, you’d want to end them on the 2 or the 4 count:

This girl has me shook. I like the way she looks.
Her face is extra pretty, makes me want to sing a hook.

In that example you can see for the first two lines I’ve used very short sentences then mapped them onto half bars.

Now that we’ve established three different ways to turn your sentences into bars, we can mix and match them to say practically whatever we want, but in bar form. Here’s an example.

I used to know Jim. We kicked it on the daily.
He was with this girl Kim who I thought was crazy
sexy and a freak too. I stayed clear though.
She wore caution signs on both her earlobes.

Here, we use the methods described below to transition between longer and shorter sentences while maintaining our flow and rhythm. Now, often to make it fit smoothly, you’re going to have to play around with your sentences and shorten or lengthen them as well as change words to make sure we maintain rhyme. You can’t really just write a normal set of sentences and expect it all to work out well. That’s part of the difficulty, writing in a way it flows and has meaning as well.

I hope that gives you a few ideas for how to turn sentences into bars!


That’s all for this video, feel free to ask questions in the comment box below. You can also check out RapBetter.com, which is a community dedicated to creating better rappers.

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