12d • General discussion
3 Core Skills of Freestyling
There are three core skills to learn to freestyle.
The most obvious is rhyming.
The next obvious is rhythm.
The third is reason, idea generation.
Said another way, it’s speaking with rhyme, rhythm, and having a reason to speak.
All these skills can be learned, but not if you are afraid to learn.
Back in high school, I make beats.
Friends would come over and freestyle over the beats.
Watching them rap, they seem effortless in their rhyming and sure in their voice.
I think my friends are good because it comes naturally to them.
They have a talent for it, while I have a talent for beats, but I wish I could rap.
They say Desmond, you go, and I want to.
But I have no idea what to say; a tsunami of doubt floods my system.
Words start to drip out my mouth, but I worry if I’m making sense.
Technically, I’m freestyling.
My friends encourage me with synchronized head nods and hands bopping to the beat.
The beat fades out.
Before the next beat plays, Lucas, my closest friend, says, “I love it when you freestyle because since you made the beat, you find tight flows.”
I say, “Thanks, dog.”
You may think this is the moment Desmond discovers he’s dope on the mic, but it would be another 3 years before I become a confident freestyler.
All I remember from the experience is the tsunami that convinced me I should stick to making beats.
Because if I were good or had talent for rapping, I believed it should feel natural, not consumed with fear.
What I didn’t know?
At the beginning of anything, learning feels scary.
You don’t know the basics.
You fear the frustration of not improving fast enough.
You fear mistakes.
And in the everybody-has-camera era, you don’t know who’s watching, recording, ready to make you a viral meme.
You fear embarrassment, so you keep your desire to learn a secret, practice alone, hoping to gain enough skills through YouTube university.
Secret learning is better than nothing, but we delay our progress when we don’t feel the fear and do it anyway.
Getting through the fear, you can see freestyling for what it is.
Three core skills: speaking with rhythm, rhyme, and having reason to speak.
Then you can begin to practice the skills, master skills, and realize it’s not as hard as you imagined it would be.
There is no danger in learning to freestyle, thus no fear to block your learning.
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3 Core Skills of Freestyling
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