Btukfyl

The whole point of rap is that it's not in particular pitches. If it was, it'd be singing, and easily reproduced on piano - or any other musical instrument. As it's basically talking, it isn't attributable to a particular key, so won't be classed as 'music that can be written in notes'. Or 'music that can be played in notes'. You may be able to get close on something like a violin, with notes available exactly on and off recognised pitches.

Back in my day (you young punks) there was this thing called "Patter - Song," which comprised a full tune and spoken lines (preferably poetic) for vocals. Cake pretty much does/did this. And there's the (in)famous example of Rex Harrison not singing all the numbers in My Fair Lady. So unless you want to try to recreate the African Drum Communication via two notes on the piano, you will need a vocalist to be able to produce "rap."

Do rap/hip-hop musician sample jazz parts?

Yes.

If you can sample jazz for hip-hop, then you should be able to live perform it in hip-hop too. You should be able to play some jazz piano patterns and have it fit.

I'm kinda old so I think of groups like Us3 and Jazzmatazz, but I know current musician also use jazz samples now. I just cannot name any names. Maybe try The Roots.

I think hard bop and modal are the jazz styles frequently sampled. Try listening to hip-hop with jazz samples and check out pianists like Bill Evans, Horace Silver, and Herbie Hancock. You will want to sort through the huge catalog of songs they recorded and look for the ones that emphasize funk and groove. Silver and Hancock will have more of that rather than Evans.

Starting point example: Us3 Cantaloop sampled Herbie Hancock's piano from Cantaloupe Island

EDIT

I read your addition about karaoke...

... in karaoke there is often a backing melody...but for rapping part they put one note repeating

I still don't really know what this question is about. Are you trying to make karaoke backing track for rap music?

But, I'll just get back to your question as asked...

Why can't we play rap on piano?

I'm going to try restating that in a way that I hope captures your intent. "Why can't an acoustic piano mimic the sound of rapping without the words?"

In that case the issue is piano has fixed pitches for the keys but the voice has flexible pitch.

When talking our voices produce pitches and those pitches slide up and down freely. Even in some rap styles where the rapper maintains a sort of droning pitch, different parts of the lyrics can have shifts in pitch for emphasis. Such shifts many involve sliding, very small intervals, or even a dropping off of a distinct pitch in a very flexible way. A piano simply cannot do all that subtle, flexible shifting of pitch.

If you try to play the rhythm of the rap on piano (without the words of course), the problem will be the unchanging pitch of the piano. Even if you try playing a step up or down from a central note on the piano, the pitches will be very distinct and not at all like the flexible pitch of the voice. The result surely will be a very monotonous sound from the piano.

If not [piano], which instruments can rap be played on?

I think any number of percussion instruments would be much better suited for mimicking the rap. A snare drum with brushes can get a lot of subtle tones. A talking drum could also work, because they are pitched and importantly they have strings on the drum side that can be squeezed to bend the pitch.

Rapping is essentially rhythmic speech.

The sound of speech can have a very complex structure. It consists of:

• pitched sounds (mostly coming from the voice box), which can (simplistically speaking) be at any arbitrary pitch within the range of the voice, and have their pitch rapidly varied




• unpitched 'noise' sounds, such as plosives, fricatives, and other sounds caused by turbulent air in the mouth. These are an important part of the way the speech is perceived as rhythmic (sometimes even percussive).

Additionally,

• the envelope of both of these types of sounds is very controllable


• the resonance of the mouth can be changed in a number of ways, altering the timbre of the voice

The piano has many limitations preventing it from making a sound anything like speech:

• It can only play certain discrete pitches


• The envelope of a piano sound is essentially always an exponential decay


• It has no way of producing unpitched 'noise' sounds


• there isn't much control over the timbre of a note once it has been sounded

This doesn't mean that you can't try to imitate the sound of a rapper on a piano - but it does mean that your rendition isn't going to be very faithful.

If instead of a piano, we used a violin, could we sound make a more like speech?

Well, we wouldn't have the problem of being limited to a discrete set of pitches, or an exponential envelope, so we could do better than on the Piano. However, we'd still have a limited ability to add noise components to the sound, and less ability to vary the sound timbre than the human voice has.

Ultimately, if you want to create the sound of speech believably - you need a speech synthesizer, or a human voice!

The words and lyrics issue aside, the main reasons you cannot reproduce the "notes" of rap credibly on a piano are: (1) the lack of pitch bending capability, (2) the lack of means for altering the tone and dynamics continuously along each note like you can do with vocals.

Many rap songs actually sing tones roughly around some particular notes of the scale of the backing track, but the pitch wanders very liberally around the "note". But if you listen carefully, very often the rap sings the first note of the key, for example if the backing track is in C major, the rap might be centered around the C note. Other notes can be identified as well, and in my opinion the note choice affects the overall feeling. If you rap on a minor seventh or fourth of the scale, it feels a bit more insisting or something.

If you want to try it on the piano, here's a transcription of one chorus of Skee-Lo's "I Wish", written in traditional Western music notation, which is not really suitable for this task at all. However, the piano suits very well for playing music that can be written using Western musical notation, and that should tell you that the piano and the notation system come from the same source. Maybe you could also say that rap has something that comes from a different tradition and a different source? :)

I'm sure other repetitions of the chorus differ from this one. And how should it be transcribed? The rap is certainly following the backing chord changes and their modulations, even though for most notes the pitch is constantly bending slightly up or down, like it does in spoken English. Maybe it shouldn't be a C on the Bmaj9 on the second line, but a B? I don't know. YMMV. But if someone claims that the rap's pitches are not based on the backing track's tonality, and that they would have rapped the same pitches regardless of what there was in the background, then ... I disagree. :)

Here's the music video

Rap is talking, not singing. Pitches are indeterminate. Which is sort of the definition of singing versus talking. Singing has pitch. Talking doesn't. There's a certain amount of up-and-down, yes. But if it hit definite pitches, you WOULD be able to pick them out on a piano, or at least recognise 'that one's in the crack between E and F'.