5 Awesome Tips To Improve Your Rap Flow!
If you want 5 awesome tips to improve your rap flow, this is the article to read! I consider a rappers flow and ability to deliver punchlines the first things people notice when deciding how good a rapper is.
What is Rap Flow?
That is a good question! What is rap flow anyway? Well another word you could use to describe rap flow is cadence, which according to dictionary.com is;
“-A rhythmic flow of a sequence of sounds or words”
So in rap terms you could describe it as your ability to deliver rap lyrics and sounds in a rhythmic and individual way.
Got It! But Why Bother Learning How To Improve It?
Frankly, it doesn’t matter how good your lyrics are, if you can’t deliver your lyrics in the first place no one will want to listen to you!
Before we get into how to improve your rap flow, might first want to learn how to rap on beat. Click the link to read about that!
If on the other hand you’re here to flow better, then here are my 5 tips to improve your rap flow!
1.Learn To Count Bars
A simple way of understanding a bar is by listening to a piece of music and counting the number of actual beats in each section. Hip Hop and the vast majority of modern music is generally set as 4 beats per bar. Therefore when listening to an instrumental you should be able to recognise each bar by counting 1, 2, 3, 4. The easiest way to count is by listening to the drums of the instrumental. A very simple Hip Hop drum beat might go, “boom”, “bap”, “boom”, “bap” (or kick, snare, kick, snare, if you understand drums….) So on the first “boom” you’d count “1” on first “bap” you’d count “2” on the second “boom” you’d count “3” on the second “bap” you’d count “4”. Then you count 1-4 over again. You will notice there is often a change in the music every 4-8 bars. So on many occasions you will notice that once you have counted 1, 2, 3, 4, four times, there will be a musical change such as a new instrument coming into the music.
2.Write Your Lyrics To Music
For rappers that write songs and verses with the intention of rapping to music, it is crucial that they write their rhymes to music! Yet sooo many rappers don’t do this. They then wonder why their verse doesn’t quite fit to the instrumental.
3.Write Lyrics To Beats of Different Speeds
This is an excellent way to help you improve your flow. Write to slows beats (60-80bpm), medium paced beats (90-100bpm-standard for most hip hop), to fast paced beats (120-180bpm-standard for house, dub step and drum and bass). This also helps you learn different ways of being able to flow and helps you become more creative with your rhymes patterns.
4.Freestyle
Freestyling or rapping off the top of your head, forces you to adapt to the moment and to move with the mood of the moment and the music. It is a great way of helping you develop your flow both mentally as a creative individual and also in terms of the delivery of your lyrics. This can also help you greatly when you actually want to take the time to write lyrics as it gives you a greater musical awareness and ideas of how you might deliver your rhymes. You can learn how to freestyle rap by clicking on the link and reading my article on it.
5.Rapping Without A Beat….. What??
This might sound a bit contradictory considering the other 4 tips are largely based on actually learning to spit your rhymes to a beat. In fact it’s the complete opposite tip 2! Nonetheless, learning to spit your bars to music without a beat and rhyming to just an acoustic guitar or piano for example (or going a step further and rhyming without any backing music at all!) will improve your flow BUT only once you’ve managed to master rhyming to the beat in the first place!… Once you can rhyme to a beat you’ll develop a sense of inner rhythm that can be further refined by throwing out the beat altogether.
Give those 5 tips a go! But don’t do tip 5 until you can do 1-4!
If you want to listen to a wild song that utilises multiple different flows at different time signatures, then sign up in the form below and get my exclusive song ‘Rephrased Yesterdays’