I know most of you guys would send your rhythm tracks to a rapper or vocalist and they will write to it, well, that's the norm that most guys do.
But what about the other way? What if we have a great rap lyrics that does not all the time meet ritual meters of our rhythm track? Since the lyrics is great and we don't want to modify it, is there any way to elicit the metric information from the lyrics and program some beats underneath it?
This does not sound odd at all! If you look at professional lyricists and producers, you see lots of change ups and different meters used in different sections of the song.
What I am looking for is a way to be able to program drums underneath vocal which might change meters according to its lyrics. What I cannot figure out is the relation between drum rhythm and lyrics meters.
I know there are some experienced guys over here who do this.
Hopefully somebody shares some valuable knowledge.
Thanks in advance

 

There might be no relation, and that is actually a Good Thing for rhythmic creativity. Alright, make sure your body is ready, here comes my magnum opus/rant about this.

Rigid adherence to the western concept of a metric grid as if that's the only thing that is correct and everything else is "wrong notes" will leave you very stunted and frustrated (for years). Here's the truth that can set you free: the metric grid does not matter, at all. At all! You can step right outside of it if you know what you're doing, with amazing emotional effect.

What actually matters is the RELATIVE distance between audible metric pulses. So it's never relative to some DAW grid, it's relative to what we heard before in the track, and it may change relative to how we're feeling in the track at a given moment. It's also perfectly ok for this relative distance to be stretchy and gradually change over time, speeding up or slowing. If you want to create a smooth and pleasant ride for the listener, then you want pulses where the distance between each pulse is equal. That's the easiest for them to follow. If you want to throw them to the wolves with confusion and chaos, then what you should probably pick is a torn up rhythmic structure, where the distances between pulses get unpredictable.

If you pick a structure that is just unpredictable enough to be weird, but not yet bad enough to throw things off into incomprehensible chaos, that makes people want to groove and dance.

On writing to the vocal rhythm

Not only is this do-able, but you can get some amazing results by reversing the normal production flow and working from the lyrics (vocal hooks). Listen to your vocals and try to identify its main steady pulse, which will be kinda slow, with equidistant pulses defined by vocal emphasis or rhythm in the syllables as they're sung/rapped. Put markers on the main vocal pulse "ones", which do not have to be metric whatsoever, just points that feel like "one!" to you and are part of the flow of the performance.

Now you got these points, they're approximately the same distance apart from each other. Start working in about 2-bar sections, or whatever is natural for your desired phrasing. For each such phrase, you put down a simple train of 8th or 16ths midi notes, starting from each vocal "one!" and *stretch* the midi notes as a unit, which is a lot like changing the "local" BPM atmosphere inside the phrase. In oldschool DnB this was done by timestretch/repitching of samples, you change the BPM deliberately taking it out of sync with the track's main BPM> You stretch and play with it, until you find a groove RELATIVE to the vocal "One!" and everything else the vocal does after that in the phrase. Result: it feels like after each vocal One!, the music changes BPM subtly and grooves with the vocal. The equidistant midi pulses inside each phrase are recognized by listeners easily, and the fact that the BPM doesn't match the BPM of the vocal One pulse, is actually exciting and pressurizes the situation. Listeners have to track both, giving those synapses a workout.

This simple midi pulse train is your new melodic meter to play with however you like. Each phrase, as defined by the vox, gets its own.

vox: ONE ta da da da na ta! (appears to you like it's 7 equidistant pulses)
midi: ONE ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta! (9 pulses)

The result is a groovy 7 against 9 feel, and nobody with a music degree will be able to figure out how you came up with it, or why it grooves so good. They'll be trying to set it up using weird metres in their DAW, but their version is doomed to sound like a crappy, stunted wannabe, compared to your groovy original. And yet, you didn't use any human groove, it was straight machine rhythm - what is going on here? The two layers are hopelessly out of sync, but they both are structured by an internal equidistant pulse, so the brain swallows it. Identifies both pulses, and how they relate, despite the fact that they do not coincide metrically. This lack of metric coincidence is a very good thing for rhythm, despite what western theory brainwashes people to believe.

In the rare situations where you wanna use that rhythmic coincidence for effect, you can of course do it too Align only the main pulses of both layers, allow freedom inbetween...That also sounds quite good, and quite human. The key thing to understand is that there is no metric grid in music when you hear it as the listerner. That grid exists only in the DAW (& western music theory) and is massively misleading/limiting. There is instead a pulse, and normally it has equidistant onsets (simply because that's easy to understand and "feel" for people, they fall into sync effortlessly), but everywhere between and around this main pulse, you are COMPLETELY free as a bird to do whatever crazy stuff you want. Intersect completely different BPMs, meters, and it still comes out perfectly fine and groovy as hell, as long as you are paying attention to the "One!" - the hits of the main pulse that the listeners are all already sync'ed to and enjoying. Think of the "One"'s as lil islands that listener attention is jumping onto at regular intervals, but inbetween, they really couldn't care less what you have there, it's a wild sea. Put odd-ass rhythmic fish in it and monsters for them to enjoy or be surprised by as they pass. Each individual rhythmic fish is defined by how its internal pulses are equidistant, that is how the ear knows it is something interesting - and it's perfectly OK even if the pulses are machine-perfect here. There willl be so much detail and interrelationship of rhythm going on that the lack of human groove in each individual "rhythm fish" will be easy to overlook. At the next island, all the fish and monsters reset and resync to the new One.

You can also be artistic with this, take the main sync pulse away and replace it with a confusing one that is similar but not the same. Then all of a sudden, bring the original back in, on top of the weird one, and since you prepared both ahead of time they interlock in a powerful way for the phrase. It sounds like you are an unstoppable master of rhythm. The people will go wild for tricks of this nature, if done well.

Hope that's just enough seed info to set yourself free, for good. Have fun!

 

Last edited: Jun 5, 2019

The area inside your cranium must be like a musical Disneyland. I'd enjoy a few rides, but wow! I thought my head was a labyrinth of disjointed ideas.

 

loadup the vocals on 1 track
listen to the lyrics, finds its "pulse". how fast or slow it feels "on avvarge" to you.
you may want to change bpm in your daw and try to find the spot you FEEL is right when listning to the lyrics, with the intent of finding its "pulse"

have a midi controller or midi keyboard
load up any default drumkit you got handy.
now play the drumpads/keys to the pulse, so it feels natural.experiment, find rythems that compliment the main pulse, or dont.
repeat often, and it will become easier and more fun to play and create ideas "on the fly"

 

I've had the same kind of "problem" in the past and I normally create a tempo map from the vocal (or guitar or whatev) simply by manually adjusting (drawing) the tempo of a click track gradually or suddenly depending on whats required to match my "ideal groove".......the tempo track can then be used to control any midi data, normally in my case a drum groove, and in this way I can audition various patterns and when I'm "happy" I can just play in the other tracks along with the existing groove that was suggested by the origin of the song...