Music and Songwriting/Street Religion - A Guide to Lyric writing and improvisation
How to Freestyle for Write Guys - and Intro to Freestyle Rap
[edit | edit source]This course is my sketch of how I taught myself to freestyle rap. I learned about street style Hip Hop when I lived in Philadelphia, encountering my first cipher on the Temple campus in North Philadelphia and discovering how spontaneous Hip Hop gatherings could occur anywhere in the city. I learned to beatbox by hanging around Temple's Freestyle Friday the Mic Stew and MC Karma among others. I eventually developed a method for getting my freestyle lyrics going, and this is it in its most elemental form. There is obviously a lot more you can do with rapping - learning to write punchlines, metaphors, using different styles, more complex rhyme and rhythm techniques, freestyle games. This is just to get a basic flow going. Once you have this much mastered, you should be able to start creating freestyle lyrics with others and getting into jams with other rappers and musicians. I also use these basic techniques to improvise new lyrics to songs I accompany on guitar, so the skills can transfer outside of the genre easily enough.
Intro to the Course - https://youtu.be/-Q-jYKa_kRk
Rhyming Lesson - https://youtu.be/beRi5-0AHLs
Timing Lesson - https://youtu.be/t2NZKOI-AKo
Defining Context Lesson - https://youtu.be/fukjiDzyU3s
Synthesizing Lesson/Freestyle Black Belt Test - https://youtu.be/L6ftpegdrng