Do you feel your lyrics improve over time?

[koalafresh]

Well, just a question regarding the composition of your songs. How do you judge whether a song's lyrical makeup is better than another song? Do you base it on figurative language, song structure, flow, emotion or creativity?

Personally, if it's something I make that makes it to the final process. I tend to like all of them. Do you guys have a way of deciding which songs are the better ones?

[plus]

thats like askin a parent which kid is their favorite. let the audience decide

[M.C.-Exclusivo]

thats like askin a parent which kid is their favorite. let the audience decide

I agree with Plus, when you look at your final product, it's very easy to improve your next songs, as people will give you feedback on the current one, but it is very difficult to decide your best, as you can look at bad things and good things in all of them. In my own opinion, you improve along the line, and so the newest ones are usually the best.

[MorphineRoberts]

i've been written rhymes for 6 years but, i've only been rappin for half of a year. I'd say i dont know. I'm currently workin on the crown jewel of hiphop 8bars, hittin the net in 2012

[Def Kool]

If you're serious you'll see that the next verse you'll write will be better then the older one or at least it's supposed to go that way

[Jon Ken]

I think when you get better at writing, you can not only say everything you want the way you want it, but you can chose the words and rhymes in a way that perfectly fits into the song. Two lines saying the same thing with the same rhythm and the same number of syllables but with different word choices can have completely different effects to the listener.

That's what I think.

[NoVA Entertainment]

thats like askin a parent which kid is their favorite. let the audience decide

I couldn't disagree more. This is what is holding all of you back if that's the case...

Stop treating your music like it's your child...it's not. It's just one interpretation of one of your many ideas.

You have to learn to be able to separate yourself from your music, or any art, just enough so that you CAN go back and be WILLING to revise and rearrange. Otherwise you're going to be too afraid to change a thing or too cocky to change or too much or something that is going to keep you from getting better.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone back and taken a beat and evolved it into my latest style or heard something else in the song that I didn't hear before and decided to emphasize that instead of this etc. Same goes ESPECIALLY for lyrics and writing in general.

I'm a creative writing minor. I've never rewritten anything or remade any beat without it getting better. And I've never critiqued a writing or a beat that didn't get better after revisions.

Stop calling it quits after your first draft. In college I made a minimum of 3 drafts for all of my major papers. You read the first and read the third you will immediately see it's about the exact same things, but the writing, the analogies, the grammar, the points of view are all better in terms of how they agree with each other and how the convey the message to my audience.

How many of you are going out there and posting your beats up only to get critiques and improve on them?

I personally know no one who is doing this. I feel like most people are making their beats as quick as possible, posting them and hoping for some leases, then making a whole new beat after that one doesn't sell.

What a shame...when you have it up for sale, they assume that is your final product. So it's a yes or a no and obviously most people say no. So instead of you getting feedback had you been humble and developed your music for a few months before you started deciding official tracks for your mixtape or album, you have zero feedback and are just making first draft beats (the worst version of the best beats you can make) and selling nothing because your music isn't even on par with YOURSELF.

Give yourself and advantage here...get critiqued over and over and over. Develop a true sense of what people do and do not like about that particular track. After enough tracks, you'll get a sense of what you do best and what you don't do so well. Work on both areas and become better. Otherwise you're not even giving yourself the best chance you could be getting.

If you are treating your music like it's one of your children then think of it this way...would you send your young child out into the wilderness? That is what you are doing when you post up your first/second/third drafts for sale.

I wouldn't send my kid out into the wilderness until they are the right age, which is determined by when and how well I developed their ability to camp, make fire and hunt. They probably won't get it the first time around and I probably won't realize their short comings without someone else helping to point them out from a different perspective either.

Eventually you will understand how far you need to go with your musical development and when you have a track that is truly at the stage to compete in the wilderness.

[Caesar Balance]

^^^^ Thats whats up. Thank you Nova. If anybody else didn't take your words to heart, I certainly did. I've had a load of tracks which I've been sitting on for a while - relistening to them quite often and changing things in the mix, or the instrumentation that I liked at first, yet changed after critiquing myself on my songs.

I think I should also be posting up my tracks for others to hear and critique, as opposed to holding onto them like my first child with heart complications. Rather, I'd like to continue letting the young ones run wild on the internet, and get some criticism from people who don't know me personally.

I think that would probably help a great deal. Not that I think my tracks are "bad" per se, but they could definitely be improved, particularly with regard to what the the worldwide audience hears.