Author: Snacky

This is a book about improving your rap freestyle skills.

Everyone can freestyle. When you have a conversation with your friends or family, or even when you talk to yourself: you’re freestyling. You don’t have a script, you don’t have anything written down. You’re telling your stories, sharing ideas and expressing yourself. This is when some of your best material comes pouring out: when you are comfortable, when you feel natural. What we’re going to do here is build up your confidence when other people are listening to you; when you’re on the spot; when you’re amplified or being recorded; when you’re actually being heard. As you get better at freestyle, your new skills will help you express yourself to friends, family and strangers — as well as in job interviews, at work and giving speeches. You will be better at thinking in the moment, sharing your ideas, projecting your voice, and  you’ll tell your story with more confidence.

Freestyling in particular develops these skills by channeling your expression using a framework of beats, rhythm and rhyme. It’s dynamic improvisational poetry. When we freestyle, it feels like we open up a gateway into our subconscious. We don’t have time to think it over so there’s no self-imposed filter. New rhythms and tempos catalyze new ways of communicating. Sometimes what comes out is embarrassing, sometimes it’s scary or sad or hilarious, and if you’re lucky, sometimes it’s brilliant. We also might get to know about what’s lurking under the surface of our consciousness and how to channel it better. We keep things positive, supportive and peaceful. If oppressive viewpoints emerge, we take a moment to assess and respond to any racism, sexism or other negative mentalities that could derail the safe space we are working to provide.

We can’t teach you how to be a rap superstar, make records, make money, or get famous. That’s not a path we know or follow. We hope this book will help you to improve your freestyle, and you will be able to bring those skills to improve any game you play, whether it’s performing on stage, busking on the streets, building community, public speaking, business meetings, peer counselling, interpersonal communications — whatever. You will be better at getting your thoughts flowing freely, and be able to share them in diverse contexts. What you do with those new skills is up to you.

Acknowledgement

Consider: Freestyling is a crucial part of hip-hop culture. We respectfully acknowledge all the people who founded, created and built it. We are indebted to those visionaries and those who continue to steward the hip-hop culture we love. This book doesn’t hope to teach you about hip-hop. We are not hip-hop authorities and we do not claim to have invented anything regarding freestyling. We produced this book in order to give something back and share the insights we have had while collaborating with hundreds of MCs during our weekly drop-in sessions over the years.

You can read more in the last section, “Taking it to the Next Level”. If you really want to learn about hip-hop, there’s music to listen to, great books to read, documentaries to watch, people to meet and lives to live that can teach you. This is just the beginning.

How to use this book

This book is divided into three main sections. We’d like it if you read the whole book, but we also encourage a non-linear approach, so feel free to jump around to any page you like at any time.

In this introduction you’ll read about what the Freestyle Focus Group is all about, and how we approach freestyle. If you are interested in starting you own freestyle crew and hosting your own freestyle sessions, the second section is for you. If you already have a crew and just want to get going, jump ahead to the section on freestyle exercises for you and your crew. They’ll keep you busy and challenge you to improve your skills during freestyle sessions. Finally, after a great freestyle session, you’ll want to deepen your understanding with further reading to inspire your practice and take it to the next level.

You can try our practice exercises by yourself, but it’s a lot more fun and more powerful to get a group of people to practice together. We see freestyle as a social activity. So find a space, invite some friends, and try out some freestyle exercises together.

If you’ve never freestyle rapped before, we hope this book gives you the confidence to get started. If you’re already an experienced freestyler, we think this book will help you share your creative talent with more people. It can even improve and diversify your skills.

The content in this book represents the ideas, methods and practice that we use every week in our drop-in freestyle rap workshop, and we’ve used it to introduce a lot of people to freestyle and share their thoughts and ideas in a positive environment. Of course, it’s not the only way to do it, but it works for us. We encourage you to try out our ideas, but don’t be afraid to experiment and try out your own.

Ready? Let’s get started.

(excerpt from Learn to Freestyle with FFG)

There’s lots of hangups and handicaps that can prevent someone from reaching their freestyle potential. This is a list of some common ones with some helpful exercises that you will find later in the book.

Mic Shy: some people are afraid to say anything on the mic, sometimes not even their name. Don’t  “over-encourage” them, this will make them even more mic shy. Different tactics work with different people: gentle encouragement, forceful insistence, faux-mockery, pleading, gentle-bribery and breakout sessions (with no mic or a one-on-one) can be successful methods. Also, try just letting them be and making sure to keep checking in with them. Keep the topics light so the barrier is low and they know they don’t need to be “cool” or stick to typical topics. Exercises that help include “What’s My Name?” (p74), and “Repeat After Me” (p77).

Nothing to Say: Some people are comfortable on the mic but experience content block so they “have nothing to say.” They can be offered topics to help them out, or encouraged to scat — vocalizing with no words at all. You can also engage them with a partner in a freestyle dialogue, asking them questions they can answer on the mic, perhaps about what they ate or what they did that day. Good exercises include “Points” and “Repeat After Me,” “Rapscat,” “Freestyle Standards,” “Talking points,” “Freestyle Alphabet,” “Freestyle Games.”

Rhythmically Challenged:  These folks will freestyle without adequate awareness of the beat and and rhythm, and focus too heavily on what they are saying rather than how they are saying it. All of us are to some degree guilty of this. The rhythmically challenged can be encouraged to listen to the beat and try to temporarily care less about what words (if any) they are saying. Work with simple, stripped down beats. Maybe even get them to rhyme with a metronome app — one word per tick. Then add two words per tick, then three, etc., varying placing words on the tick, and between ticks. Even better, get them to stop using words altogether and rap gibberish to the beat. Exercises: “Metronome”(p??) and “Rapscat”(p??).

Bad projection: Some people are comfortable on the mic, they stay on beat and have lots to say — but don’t say it well. This can be due to poor mic technique, low voice volume, or weak articulation. They can be encouraged to pay attention to how they hold the mic: specifically, keep the mic pointed at the mouth from a consistent distance while maintaining steady vocal output. Be aware of the voice volume level, the distance, and the sound of their voice from the system are related. If the mic technique is good, then examine the vocal style and the vocal volume. Good exercises include “Mix up Style,” “Tone Up and Tone Downs,” “Whisper Style,” “Shout Style.”