How to Read Rap in Free Style

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You may find free-style rapping overwhelming at first, but you’ll make progress quickly if you follow these steps.

Table of Contents

Practice your first rhymes

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Listen to a lot of freestyle songs. The word-of-mouth rap in the community will be a little rougher, less polished than the songs you’ve heard, but because of that, it’s more unpredictable and creates more emotion. Freestyle rap has a feel to it, and listening to different freestyle rapists is an effective way to learn particular techniques.

Catch live matches or freestyle hip-hop competitions where you live. If you have a chance, go see and listen. This is a great opportunity for you to meet rhymes who are making a name for themselves and to make connections in the industry.
YouTube is a great resource, it offers a lot of videos of freestyle rap fights from the past to the present. Everything from rapper Notorious BIG rapping on a street corner when he was 17, guy Eminem’s wars of words to some underground rapping videos of underground people. tradition) and new songs by Kanye West are worth your research.

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Let’s start with an accompaniment. Go online to find an instrumental accompaniment or play back the accompaniment of your favorite song on Youtube and listen for a while. Listen and feel the accompaniment. If you already have a pre-written rhyme for this song, start from there, or you can try writing new rhymes while listening to the piece of music. Listen over and over again until you start to feel the rhythm of the music and how the rhymes fit the song. Also don’t worry if you get lost.

Start with the first beat of the measure. Most rap songs are written in the traditional 4-4 rhythm, also known as four-beat music. This means that every first note in a staff is a strong beat: ONE-two-three-four-ONE-two-three-four. Let’s start with such accompaniments.
Usually, there will be a break in the song where the rapist is waiting to enter the lyrics 2. If you can’t find the lyrics or can’t get on Youtube, use that piece of music to practice.

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Extemporaneous. Once you get a feel for the accompaniment and use up your rhymes, try taking it one step further towards freestyle. Repeat a sentence you already wrote, but come up with a new rhyme for the second half of the sentence.

If you say something meaningless, don’t worry. This is normal when you are just starting to feel the rhythm and are forcing yourself to make rhymes quickly. Anyway, no one listens so don’t worry too much.

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Stop thinking. If you keep wondering what to say in the next sentence, sooner or later you will stumble at the sentence you are saying. Let your mind freely think from one sentence to the next. A freestyle rapist succeeds when he is relaxed and comfortable with the pieces of music he is making. If you feel you can’t rhyme, don’t force it. Listen to the accompaniment and then start writing a few lines or try another piece of music.

Lock yourself in your bedroom, basement, or garage if you don’t want anyone to hear you practice. Investing time in yourself will ensure success when you introduce yourself to your audience.

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Continue your speech. No matter how many mistakes you make, train yourself to keep trying. If you stutter while rapping, you keep saying things like: “Am I stuttering? My words should be as sweet as corn.” Rap is like comedy: timing is paramount.

Experienced rap readers often have backup sentences so that when they get stuck, they can take out the fire. This can be a sentence, a phrase used when you can’t think of anything else and need to “buy time” to get back to the main topic. The more advanced, the shorter these buffers. Truly professional freelancing raps will use one-syllable accompaniments like “Yo” or “Truth is.” There are times, you even unconsciously say those buffer words.

Develop your own style

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Turn idle sentences into real words. The best way to speed up rap fluency and improve this freestyle is to reverse the process you’re doing. If up to now you have been reading from what you wrote before and improvising, now come up with a new sentence and continue rapping to a good sentence you wrote.

This is when rhyming groups will help you. If you already have an impressive rap line, start rhyming it with as many different things as possible. Just focus on practicing with that sentence so that you have more options when improvising later.

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Word play. At first, we often use pairs of words that rhyme at the end that are quite difficult like “bear” and “chair”, but later those rhymes will become boring and confusing. ^{[1] X Research Source}

Cross rhymes are similar in consonants but the vowels are not necessarily the same. For example, “vowel” and “bowl” are cross rhymes.
You can use sound tricks to duplicate or repeat sounds. Duplicate is repeating vowels, while repetition is repeating consonants in a sentence. In his famous poem “The Crow”, Edgar Allan Poe used both of these methods at the same time: “the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” repeats the “s” and “ur” sounds.

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Develop comparative measures. Like in Cassidy’s rap “Every strand is platinum like Sisqo’s hair” “Goin’ platinum like Sisqo hair” or Raekwon’s rap “I’m committed like a baby seal “I get deep like a baby seal”, Creative and surprising comparisons are the foundation of hip-hop as well as free verse.

Write down comparison pictures in your notebook to apply when needed. Write the phrase “like _______” on several pages and experiment by combining them with the same sentence: “My rap is cold/like a storm with rain” or “My rap is cold/like a sperm whale” creates very different impressions that will surprise you yourself.

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Be yourself. Unless you’re Rick Ross, it’s going to be hard to make big claims about a global drug empire if you’re just a teenager living in the suburbs. Write raps about what you know and be honest. The most important and unique thing for other freelance rappers to recognize in you is when your skills are grounded in your own perspective and sincerity.

While repeating someone else’s style or verses is a great way to learn and grow, it’s also the biggest taboo in the free rapping world. So when you are familiar with rap, then quit that habit immediately.

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Show off your freestyle rap with friends. When you feel brave enough, invite a few knowledgeable friends to watch and listen to their skill comments. This is a way for you to get used to performing in front of a crowd and also an opportunity for people to give you feedback and encouragement.

Get the audience involved by having someone choose for you an accompaniment to rap. This will make you more ready to compete if you want to give it a try. You can also ask a friend to choose a topic, an object in the room, or a word and shout it out loud. Let’s start rapping freely about topics, objects or words. This activity will force you to always be ready because your friends are the ones driving your freestyle rap.
If you have friends who also like to rap freely, talk to them. When one of you is speechless, the other will follow. Try to start rapping freely as soon as the other person stops and raps about the same topic or rhyme. If you guys develop a tune together, you can make a team!

Build vocabulary

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Write. The more rap lyrics and rhymes you write, the more you know. As you write, practice thinking up different variations of the same rhyming words. These rhymes will help you a lot when you are starting to pursue a free style as you will be able to come up with ideas very quickly if you have used these rhymes before.

Try your hand at various exercises, like calling up 5 random words and making a few rhyming sentences from them.
If what you wrote is not “rap”, don’t worry. Please continue to write. When you build the habit of taking notes and writing, your mind will be trained in terms of words and creative thinking. This is a skill that you need to apply quickly if you want to pursue a free style.

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Read a book. If you hope to be able to pursue a freelance rap career, then words are your right hand, like a painter needs paint or a sculptor needs clay. That’s why you need to have gathered a lot of common words that you can use in your rhymes. Reading a variety of books, comics, online newspapers, magazines… is the best way to do this.

Read biographies of rapists. Gaining more hip-hop knowledge and vocabulary at the same time, it’s a double arrow!

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Buy a rhyming dictionary and this will be your best “friend”. Don’t think of it as a tool, think of it as a source of creativity. The act of looking up words to rhyme while writing lyrics won’t be considered cheating because it might help you come up with an idea you haven’t thought of before.

A dictionary along with a good and inexpensive thesaurus are both great resources. The variety of words in your rhyme will make it so much more interesting.

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Learn new words actively. Preparation materials for the SAT (college entrance exam) or GRE (graduate entrance exam) are both very useful vocabulary resources. Look up words you hear in rap songs and learn their definitions. Hip-hop often uses a lot of jargon and local words, places and phrases, so you need to do some research online. Chief Keef’s song “Love Sosa” makes no sense if you think it’s about baseball players.

Try writing vocabulary words down on sticky notes and sticking them around the house. You’ll be able to learn new words while cooking breakfast or brushing your teeth if you put sticky notes on the kitchen and bathroom walls.

Advice

Confidence comes first. Just be yourself and rap all you like.
Start by practicing short and simple rhymes. Remember that the rhyme is a little “mediocre” but the words flow is better than a good rhyme that doesn’t flow. You should start rhyming common words like “it”, “at”, “air”,…
Practice every day. Never step back. Just keep trying, one day you will step on the stage of glory.
Explore your home and see things in a new light. This may inspire you to write lyrics.
If you can’t think of anything then start with something you read: “wikihow, well, who doesn’t need it, I’m boring rapping, but I’ll give it a go.”
Some other good times to practice rapping are: while taking a leisurely walk, sitting on the bus, waiting to see the dentist and it would be great if you had your phone to record the raps – then it would look like you’re texting so you can be less…embarrassed than having to take out a notebook to write down, right?
Try thinking in a relaxing space, like the bathroom, and turn on the accompaniment to rap along. This space calms you down and makes you think.

Warning

Rap fights often create a fun atmosphere and slurs have become the “common practice” of this type of competition. Once on the ring, respect the privacy of others and avoid touching.

Steps

Practice your first rhymes

Develop your own style

Build vocabulary

Advice

Warning

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