Rap & freestyle notes

How to map rap parts of the song

In this lesson you will learn how to

• change note type to freestyle or rap,

• what is the difference between these types.

Before you start

This lesson requires a songfile with first track ready and first two verses of the second track. You can either do it yourself for practice or download the files from here:

3MB

David Amber - Second Time Around [rap].zip

archive

Open

Mapping rap parts

Open this lesson's song file and switch to the red track. Go to the place visible in the picture below (around beat 3616):

Press p to hear the visible part of the song. You should hear that after the female singer ends her part, rap part begins.

Mapping notes

Why are we mapping them on the second and not third track?

Although the rapper is not the same person as the second track's male singer, we will still put his part on the same track. We are currently making a duet version of the song so we can use only 2 tracks. The original male singer just sings the two verses and some barely audible background vocals at the end of the song. We could just ignore the rap part, but it will be more fun to have the second player sing that part as well. That is also why the second track is simply called "Male".

Mapping the notes

Before we get into freestyle and rap notes, let's just map the notes almost as usual. We will skip the pitches though and just focus on synchronization and lyrics.

Changing note types

What kind of notes are available?

So far we have only added normal notes, where both timing and pitch matters. There are however more types of notes available:

• freestyle notes - not singable, Ultrastar just displays the lyrics

• rap notes - singable but only timing is evaluated, pitch is ignored

Normal and rap notes can also have golden bonus applied to them but we will talk about that in a later lesson.

Rap notes as name indicates should be used for rap parts. However, they are not yet supported by all Ultrastar distributions.

Freestyle notes are good for some background vocal parts or in place of rap notes if you use an Ultrastar distribution that does not support them.

Mark note as rap

To mark note as rap just select it and press r. A blur effect will be added to it.

If you press r again, it will go back to being a normal note.

Mark note as freestyle

To mark note as freestyle just select it and press f. A shadow effect will be added to it.

Freestyle lyrics are displayed in italics in lyrics editor.

If you press f again, it will become a normal note.

Mark all rap notes as rap

Let's now select all notes for the rap part that we have prepared:

and press r to turn them into rap notes.

A single line will look like this:

We can continue with the remaining lines in the similar way.

Shortcuts summary:

Let's summarize the shortcuts that we have learned in this lesson:

• change note type to rap or back to normal if it is a rap note: r

• change note type to freestyle or back to normal if it is a freestyle note: f

What's next

In the next lesson we will learn how to create a single player version of our duet song file.

To learn more refer to:

Note types