Freestyle rap is awesome - it's lots of fun, and you don't need anything to do it but your own mouth. Spontaneously coming up with a dope rhyme can make you the envy of your friends, and the centre of attention. It doesn't take you long to learn either. Let me guide you through a few key points that you need to learn to effectively improvise rhymes.
Step 1: Stream of Consciousness, and Flow
A lot of people think that the first thing you have to learn when you freestyle is how to rhyme. I disagree. The most fundamental thing when you're learning to freestyle is getting a continuous flow, a stream of consciousness. Don't worry about rhyming, you can throw that in later. Just talk and see what comes out. Do it alone in your room if you like. You can talk about things around you, or things that happened to you. It doesn't matter. Just keep your lips moving, don't worry if it doesn't even make sense. The most important thing is the flow of words. Also, focus on making the words hit on the snare - the offbeat.
Practise this for 30 minutes a day for a week.
Step 2: Rhymin'
Next, you do need to learn to rhyme. By this stage you've probably already started slipping in rhymes anyway. Think of a word, or pull a word from a dictionary. Say or write down as many words as you can think of that rhyme with that word. For all you grammar school kids, remember it doesn't have to be a "perfect rhyme" - it's okay to rhyme "physicist" with "limitless", or "adventure" with "mention", even though it doesn't even end in the same letter. It just has to be good enough so that the ear hears a rhyme.
Practise this for 15 minutes a day. Then 15 minutes of straight rapping, every day for a week.
Step 3: Topicals
After that, you need to hone your topical skills. Pick up your dictionary and pull a word and rap as much as you can about that word. When you can't think of anything else to say about it, stop and think of something more to say, and rap it. Also, you can get a friend to give you words or phrases to rap about. As you get better at this, your friend can start pitching you more and more ridiculous things, to challenge you to fit them in. So at the start you might have trouble rhyming about the word "cemetery", but eventually he could tell you something like "two elephants sitting in the jungle" and you can make a rap about that.
30 minutes a day for a week.
Step 4: Punchlines
Now there's a classic structure in hip-hop that's used, especially for battles. The form is set-up, then punchline. A punchline is any line that has a joke in it, or a diss towards your opponent in a battle. (Not, as some people think, a line that's about you punching someone) Normally the set-up won't have anything to do with the punchline - it's just a line you say to rhyme so you can set up the punchline. For example, say an opponent in a battle is wearing Adidas sneakers: "Check out the crowd, yeah they're coming with me/Take off your Adidas man, you're not RunDMC". The punchline is the most difficult thing to master in rap, but it's also what gets the crowd really cheering. However, you need to learn the fundamentals of flow, rhythm, rhyme, and topicals first, otherwise your punchlines will sound like ass.
Practise this for 30 minutes a day for a week.
Of course, while the fundamentals of freestyling are important, what is equally important is having dope beats to rap over. There's no point in putting all that effort to become a rapper, and then have your production let you down. What you need is some phat, original beats. For that, I recommend checking out these reviews of beat-making software.
