Check out live battles or hip-hop freestyle competitions if your town offers them. Go and listen. This can also be a good way to meet other aspiring rhymers and make connections. YouTube is a great resource for videos of freestyle battles from all eras. Everything from Notorious B. I. G. rapping on a street corner at the age of 17 to classic Eminem battles to the smattering of underground rappers free-styling over a new Kanye West track are good research.
Begin with the downbeat. The vast majority of rap music is written with a traditional four-four time signature, also known as Common Time. This means that every measure will have a strong downbeat at the beginning: ONE-two-three-four-ONE-two-three-four. Start on that beat. Often, there will be blank space on tracks while the rapper is waiting to come in. If you don’t have access to instrumentals or YouTube, you can use those spaces to practice.
Don’t worry if what you’re saying doesn’t make sense at first. You’re trying to get a sense of the feel of the beat and making your mind create rhymes on the fly. Nobody’s listening anyway.
Lock yourself in your bedroom or your basement or your garage. Nobody else needs to hear your practices if you don’t want them to. Putting in the hours by yourself will ensure that your debut for listeners will be all the more spectacular.
Experienced freestylers often have back-up lines, which serve as the fire extinguisher in the red box that’s mounted on the wall of rap and used only in emergencies. This is a line, or a phrase that you use when you can’t think of anything else but need to buy some time to go back out on a tangent. The better you get at freestyling the smaller this phrase will become. Really good freestylers will use a one syllable filler line like “Yo” or “Matter of fact”. Eventually, your back-up filler line will be something that you can start saying without realizing it.
This is where those rhyming clusters will help you. If you’ve got an especially good punch line, practice by rhyming as many different things as you can with it. Exercising around that line will make sure that you’ve got lots of different options the next time you’re improvising.
Slant rhymes share consonant sounds without necessarily sharing vowel sound directly. “Vowel” and “bowl” for example, are slant rhymes. Assonance and alliteration are sound-devices in which vowels and consonants, respectively, are repeated in a line. Edgar Allan Poe in his famous poem “The Raven,” uses both at once: “the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” repeats “s” sounds and “ur” sounds.
In a notebook, brainstorm different endings for similes to pull out of your hat. Fill a couple pages with “like a _______” and experiment by combining them all with the same line: “My flow is cold / like a rainstorm” or “My flow is cold / like a sperm whale” leave very different impressions. You may surprise yourself.
While it’s a good way to develop and learn, repeating other rappers lines or styles is considered extremely taboo in the freestyle world, and will need to be dispensed with as soon as you feel comfortable.
Incorporate your audience into the fun by having someone pick a beat for you to rap over will get you ready for the possibility of competitions or battles if you’re interested in giving one a shot. You can also have a friend pick a topic, or an item in the room, or a word and say it out loud. Start freestyling about that topic, item, or word. This forces you to keep on your toes because your friends are the ones leading the direction your freestyle goes. If you have friends who like to freestyle too, trade verses. When one of you loses the flow, the other picks it back up. Try to start freestyling as soon as they stop and run with the same topic or rhyme scheme. If you develop a rhythm together, you might have the makings of a crew.
Try different exercises, like picking five words at random and working them into a rhyming structure of a few lines. Don’t worry if what you’re writing isn’t “rap. " Just keep the pen moving. Building good habits of journaling and writing will keep your mind disciplined toward words and thinking in terms of composition, something you’ll have to do very quickly if you want to freestyle.
Read biographies of rappers. You can kill two birds with one stone by reading about hip-hop while simultaneously improving your vocab.
A good, cheap dictionary and a thesaurus are great resources too. Your rhymes will eventually be a lot more interesting the greater the variety of words becomes.
Try taping up notecards with the definitions of new words around your house. You can be learning a new word while you’re making breakfast or brushing your teeth if there’s a notecard taped to the wall in the kitchen and bathroom.
