get in the booth and do his verses yourself. then explain this is how it should be done.

 

And people want to argue that there's no such thing as being a natural at music. "Oh, it was all hard work on my part!"

Well, I don't doubt that there are plenty of people that worked really hard at it to become successful, but I'm sure they've had some sort of neuro-genetic leg up or at least not a deficit.

 

Make your friend march in time to a metronome and make him march till his feet bleed or he collapses from exsaustion. Then make him do it again and everytime he drops to his knees flog him until he gets back up. If he doesn't then he will eventually get the idea that he is not cut out for music.

 

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is crazy.

Think about the way your man learns. Does he learn by listening, watching, or feeling? To a degree, we learn via a mixture of audible, visual and tactile information but we have a strong bias towards one of the three. It seems likely that "beat deaf" is an apt term. Your rapper's learning strategies are not reliant upon what he hears; therefore listening to the tick of a metronome is possibly the weakest solution to his timing problem.

Try some alternatives. Rather than listen to the beat of the music, or the tick of a metronome, ask your guy to synchronize his rap in time with a visual cue; for example the motion of a mechanical metronome, or the flashing l.e.d. on a digital one.

If that doesn't work, go for the tactile approach. Ask him to tap out the time, perhaps by tapping his finger against his thigh, or against a tactile surface.

As you observe his responses to audible, visual and tactile cues, you'll notice notice a trend towards a particular learning style. It won't be all visual, or all tactile, or all auditory but a blend of each. There will be, nonetheless, a bias. You might observe something like:

weak auditory response, weaker visual response, strong tactile response

or,

weak auditory, strong visual, strong tactile

etc.

I you'd prefer that your guy doesn't get to feel like he's being treated as if he were a lab rat, be subtle. Vary the way that you speak. Mix into your sentences phrases such as, "do you hear what I'm saying?", "can you see how that works?" and "are you getting the feel of it?". Make a mental note of his replies. This will give you the hook that you need in order to efficiently communicate your thoughts in a way that's most easily absorbed by your man.

Once you have your hook, do the old "1. Describe, 2. Demonstrate, 3. Practice, 4. Feed back" routine. Never refer to what the guy is doing wrong. It's your job to reinforce what he does right. Practise does not make perfect, it makes permanent. Thirty minutes of practising the wrong thing requires three weeks of un-learning in order to get back to where you began.

Last of all, keep the practise short. Work for twelve minute, take a break for six minutes, repeat until bored. The brain prefers things that way.

 

Do me a favour Darth and just Fade

 

You got it, bra.

 

Does he know how to speak english? make him rap in english, words are easier and have more impact and are more "beat defined". If not a possibility, make him listen to a lot of songs and force him to tap the tempo on them while listening, then sing while tapping, etc.

I don't recommend spanish rap for it as they either use pretty complex metrics (when known) or don't care at all and use more like a freegrid style. That being said, if you find conventional rappers who do follow the rhythm (i don't recommend swinged rhythms or rhythms whit tripplets) go ahead and use it to teach him