How To Get Better At Freestyle Rapping: 5 Quick Tips
The ability to spontaneously “go off the top” and freestyle rap seemingly FOREVER about anything around you is one of most life-changing yet difficult to master aspects of rapping.
If you are about to know how to get better at freestyle rapping, you will not only be able to often instantly turn friends into fans…
…You will also develop a skillset that will help improve your flow, your vocal delivery, your rhyme choice…
…And eventually, if you stick at it, you may even be able to freestyle entire songs at a professional level, much like the artist in the thumbnail for this article Juice Wrld was able to do.
In today’s video, we’re going to provide you with five quick tips for daily practice so that you once and for all know how to get better at freestyle rapping.
NOW: Before we begin these quick tips on freestyle rapping are discussed even more in-depth in our bestselling course: “The Freestyle Fortnight: How To Master The Art of Freestyle Rap In 2 Weeks or Less” which comes with drills, daily lessons, and hours of free bonus trainings. You can find out more info on that by clicking HERE.
Let’s do this in countdown order…
Secret #5 Practice “The Rhyme Game” When You Don’t Have A Beat Available
If your goal, like the title of this article. in learning how to get better at freestyle rapping is to be able to do it every single day or at a moment’s notice…
…You need to first be able to practice skills that will help you master freestyle rapping without needed to have beats around all the time or even necessarily having friends to bounce rhymes off.
With this in mind, the first daily tip we would suggest is to turn “The Rhyme Game” into a habit.
It’s best played with two or more people, so we’ll describe it that way… but you can also do this on your own.
“The Rhyme Game” is simply where you attempt to rhyme as many words possible over the last word of the sentence your friend said.
So, for example… if you’re getting some fast food with some friends and they say, “I can’t wait to crush these wings”, as in they’re reading to scarf down #RickRossVoice LEMON PEPPER wings in a second…
You can say,
Crush these wings?
Why you do that, your girl is gonna touch my thing
I’m amazed at how much lust she brings
Probably because it bed YOU smell like musty jeans”…
Example Rhyme
And then your friend tries to keep the rhyme going…
Musty jeans?
You’re fantasizing in your umpteenth dream…
My girl would NEVER touch you… you’re an ugly teen
Who’s face look like he got jumped on by a rugby team…”
Example Rhyme 2
And so on.
By the way, with this game because there is no beat – it’s fine if you take a few seconds to think of the next line.
Don’t feel like you’re on a stopwatch or anything. The stopwatch and needed to be on beat comes in the later tips. Just go as quickly as you can.
The beauty of this game is that:
- You don’t need a beat to practice it
- You can do it on your own if your friends aren’t around
- You will get better at picking rhymes out of thin air.
You’ll get better at picking rhymes out of thin air because you’ll be FORCED to rhyme about whatever the last WORD said was, rather than just having your mind go blank and not knowing what to say.
The real trick behind this thinking is that you SHOULD have ways to “force” yourself to think of interesting and original rhymes.
And “forcing” yourself to get better at freestyle rapping is developed further in secret #4…
Secret #4: Choose A Different Style of Beat To Freestyle To Every Day
If you are going to master the art of freestyling, trust me people are going to ask you to rap on beats of THEIR selection, not of what you have pre-practiced based on your own choices.
Therefore, you might only be freestyling to Kanye Type Beats because you’re a Kanye type fan…
…And then if you’re not prepared someone is going to throw you a triplet flow Migos and Lil’ Baby type beat and you might not be prepared because you’ve only been doing Kanye type beats.
Therefore, a great hack is to make yourself a private playlist of instrumentals in YouTube. You don’t need to buy the beats or anything just make a playlist of them back-to-back on watch later, etc.
Choose them based on the different sub-genres of rap that you can cycle through, so let’s say you do:
- Monday: Trap
- Tuesday: Soul Sample Kanye Type Beat
- Wednesday: DaBaby Hard Bop Beat
- Thursday: Rick Ross Cinematic Beat
- Friday: Old School Punchline Type Beat
And so on.
Now in the Freestyle Fortnight we actually provide you with beats in different styles to practice off of with guided drills, but you can also just create your own drills based on Secret #4 as well.
Practice those each for a little each day so that you get comfortable with the different styles of beats you might be thrown randomly.
Additionally, this secret will help improve your flow and songwriting as you will be “handling” different styles of rap beats over the course of the day.
Secret #3 “Story of The Day” Freestyle Technique
When I was pretty deep in my freestyle journey I was “nice with it” and could rap through entire beats with freestyles off the top, but there was no narrative theme to my freestyles.
I would just freestyle about anything in front of me or do braggadocios flows and impress people like a parlor trick.
It wasn’t until I met somebody who wasn’t as good as “rhyming off the top” of me per se but would tell stores in their flows…
…Talking about the girls he’d hooked up with, what he was planning to do the next day, what party we were at, and so on…
…That I realized sometimes it’s best to just freestyle in stories and worry less about “rhyming perfectly” in an off the top flow.
Much like secret #5, this secret allows you to practice on your own time and puts less pressure on you to “rhyme perfectly” or never have your mind go blank.
Therefore, consider doing a “story of the day” freestyle a few times a week or when someone asks you to start freestyle rapping and that method will be super helpful as well.
Secret #2 When Your Mind Goes Blank, Do A Freestyle Chorus
Another secret hack that the same guy who would do freestyle stories with me is he would always add some form of a chorus in his freestyles.
If it was a freestyle about the party we were at, he would unfailingly add a “we’re at John’s house… we’re at John’s house… after I pull a chick, then I’m OUT / ‘cause I’m at John’s house… after I pull a chick, I’m OUT” or whatever.
Notice how even reading that you can hear how it adds not only a more full, professional sound to the freestyle…
…But it also can help fill in the gaps for when your mind is going blank occasionally in the flow.
The dirty little secret behind all of this is that occasionally EVERYBODY who goes off of the top has their mind go blank or they trip over their words.
The difference is that the professional skilled freestylers have a series of tactics to make it sound smooth even when it isn’t…
…Or how to make something that SEEMS like a mistake actually enjoyable for the listener.
Half of the fun of freestyling is the CROWD engagement of it…
…They enjoy listening to you mention things about THEM, such as stories or choruses as we’ve mentioned…
Much more so than actual recorded written music, which might actually have full songs just about YOUR experience… which is acceptable within the recorded realm.
Secret #1 Force Yourself To Master At Least 2 Minutes Of Non-Stop Freestyling
We’ll end this article with a reminder to all of the folks who read our “how to freestyle” articles and then post things like, “I can’t do it for more than 30 seconds to a minute before my mind goes completely blank”.
While on one hand we totally understand that at Rap Game Now, and nobody comes out of the womb going for 1-2 hours like Juice Wrld or Harry Mack…
The fact is if you are only going for 30 seconds or even one minute and then just STOPPING…
You are quitting too early. Getting better at freestyle rapping is a muscle that you must develop.
Don’t think you’re dumb or incompetent for not being able to go or 3, 4, or 5 minutes. You can get there in time if you PUSH for just a little longer.
Additionally, we have found that if you can get to around 2 minutes to 2 minutes and 30 seconds with no interruptions, it becomes easier to go for a full for 3 or 4 minutes.
This is because the mastery required to master 2 minutes is more than half of the battle. If you can go for that long, your mind will re-wire itself to be able to go longer.
However, if you only go for 30 seconds or so consistently, your mind is simply not getting enough time to re-wire itself properly in order to become an expert freestyler.
Therefore, we suggest making your goal to master just 2 minutes uninterrupted at first, and then simply seeing if you can go for another 2 minutes.
Lastly, remember that many modern beats are not much longer than 2 minutes or 2 minutes and 30 seconds, so in essence by setting your goal at that length, you can mentally get a boost by saying that you now know how to freestyle through the entire beat.
