50+ Rapping Tips To Supercharge Your Technique - Indie Panda

Are you looking for an all-encompassing list of rapping tips to take your rap game to the next level?

Well, you’ve come to the right place!

Whether you’re just starting out in your rap career or you’ve been in the game for a while, we’re sure you’ll agree that developing your rapping technique is no easy task.

Not only will you have to develop a seriously tight delivery, but you’ll also need to hone your ability to come up with killer freestyle lines on the fly as well.

In this article, our team of writers-slash-rappers have put together this ultimate list of 50+ rapping tips to supercharge your technique, including tips for both beginner & advanced rappers as well as freestyling advice!

Table of Contents

• Beginner Rapping Tips
• Advanced Rapping Tips
• Freestyle Rapping Tips
• Tips For Rapping Fast
• Rapping Tips for Flow
• Closing Thoughts

Beginner Rapping Tips

New to rapping? These tips will help you get started:

1. Immerse Yourself In The Genre

The more you immerse yourself with the art, the more comfortable you can become with it. Listening to rap frequently goes a long way in helping you develop a feel for how it should sound when you rap yourself.

By listening to rap constantly, you’ll naturally pick things up from a variety of different rappers and carve out your own unique style.

2. Focus On Rhythm First

Rhythm is the lifeblood of rapping. Without rhythm, you’re just rhyming!

Consider listening to instrumentals of your favorite rap songs, getting a feel for how the words of the rap fit with the beat. Being able to synchronize your words with your beat is crucial to rapping. You cannot rap well without a good feel for rhythm.

3. Listen To Styles Of Rap That You Wouldn’t Usually Listen To

Everyone has a favorite style, and there’s nothing wrong with listening to it. But branch out and listen to styles of rap you normally wouldn’t as well.

Listening to a diverse range of rapping styles opens new creative possibilities for your own technique by opening your eyes to new types of flow and rhythm.

4. Memorize Your Favorite Songs

Listen to your favorite rap songs frequently: memorize them and practice their lyrics at every opportunity.

If you can master your favorite songs to a point where you can sing them acapella, you’ll find it much easier to make the jump into writing and rapping your own flows.

5. Loosen Up

It’s easy to feel anxious when performing, but learning to let go of that anxiety and just enjoy the experience is a big part of rapping smoothly.

It’s easy to overthink rapping and worry about whether or not you’re doing it right. Forget that noise and be confident: can you think of any popular rapper who doesn’t seem confident when they rap?

6. Nail Your Diction

Rapping is all about the lyrics fitting into the rhythm.

You can’t rap the way you would talk in an ordinary conversation. Instead, you have to find ways to fit words into your beat while still enunciating them clearly enough for the audience to understand (unless you’re a trap artist).

Don’t worry about rhyming at this stage: it’s more important to fit each syllable of your lyrics into the beat.

7. Experiment With Delivery

How you say a word is just as important as the word you say.

A softly spoken line hits differently than a louder one. Play around with your tone and delivery as you rap to make it sound varied and dynamic instead of dull and boring.

8. Put Your Emotions Into It

Emotion is a huge part of rapping. Ask yourself what your message is; Is it one of regret? Bragging? Love?

Regardless of your lyrics, the message will be lost without injecting emotion into your flows. A good way to practice is to physically act out the emotion you intend to communicate to the audience as you rap. Look sad, sound sad!

9. Rap Acapella

Once you’ve learned the basics of rapping and can do it to a beat, consider rapping acapella as well.

If you can rap without a backing track, you’ve definitely got a good grip on rhythm. Learning to beatbox can sharpen your rhythm skills as well.

10. Write Your Own Lyrics

Freestyling and writing your own stuff is a huge part of rapping, so start doing it as soon as possible!

Coming up with your own rhymes, beats and flows will better your understanding of all of those things, making you a much better rapper over time.

Advanced Rapping Tips

Have you mastered the basics of rapping? Here are some tips to take your skills to the next level:

1. Start Your Bars With Rhymes from the Previous Bar

Mixing up the structure of your bars is a great way to make your flow varied and interesting.

A cool means of doing this is to start a new bar with a rhyme from your previous bar, but end your new bar with a totally different rhyme.

2. Dig Out Your Dictionary

Improving your rap lyrics relies on a lot of stuff from that high school English class you probably thought was pointless.

Metaphors, similes, onomatopoeia, alliteration, you name it: if you want your raps to flow like water, to spark the lightbulb of inspiration in others, to prove you are the most ridiculously radical rapper around, you’ll need these things!

3. Master the Art of Wordplay

Whether it is using homophones (like plain and plane), puns, or playing your lines off of each other, wordplay is a huge part of rap.

Flows are meant to be creative. Take the time to write down your lyrics and search for ways to tie words, themes, and rhymes together to make them fun. 

4. Learn to Rhyme Unconventionally

It’s all well and good to use basic rhymes like bake and cake or slide and ride, but they are just that: basic. 

To really get to the next level, you’ll need to learn to rhyme phonetically. In other words, rhyming with words that sound similar but don’t actually rhyme in practice. Apple and jackal, for instance.

Learning to rhyme phonetically will seriously expand the possibilities of your game.

5. Use Multi-Syllabic Rhyming

We all know the lyrics from Eminem’s 8 Mile soundtrack:

“Palms are sweaty/Arms are heavy/Moms spaghetti/Calm and ready/On forgetting.”

Each of those lines has the same number of syllables: four. Truly advanced rappers don’t rhyme words, they rhyme syllables and vowels. Remember this!

6. Place Your Story Above Everything Else

A good rap doesn’t just sound good: it tells an interesting story.

Think about all the songs that talk about a rapper’s rise from poverty to fame. A story will always be more gripping than a song that just sounds cool. Create a song with a message; with a beginning, middle and end.

7. Inject Your Identity Into Your Rapping

Why is Eminem so popular? It’s because he’s unmistakable. You can never confuse him with anyone else, because of the unique identity that he always brings to the table.

When you rap, make sure you rap about you. Your struggles, your opinions, your experiences. A lot of people rap, so you have to set yourself apart somehow.

8. Read More Of Everything

As we covered in the beginner tips: listening to more rap will help you rap better.

But in the same way, reading more will help you write better flows. There’s no such thing as being truly unique, but the more written work you take in and experience, the more sources of inspiration you’ll have for yourself.

Be it novels, articles or newspapers, reading more will develop both your worldview and knowledge of the English language, resulting in some killer flows.

9. Impose Your Own Restrictions

If you find that you have a major crutch in your rapping – such as an overreliance on filler words like “yo” or “yeah,” – impose your own restrictions.

Challenge yourself to write a song with none of those words in them. Or write a song about “the hood” without ever using the word hood. Facing limits pushes your abilities to theirs.

10. Don’t Get Complacent With Your Style

Having a style that you are good at is great and all, but if you never mix it up, people are going to get bored quickly.

Don’t rap about the same subject matter all the time. Don’t stick to the same beats or flows. Find ways to mix your signature style with new elements to keep things fresh. Complacency breeds failure!

Freestyle Rapping Tips

Freestyle is an entirely different beast to traditional rapping. Take these tips to heart:

1. Understand The Road To Mastery

Mastery of a skill begins in the mind. A lot of people that want to freestyle rap never make it because they tell themselves they aren’t good enough for it.

Keep in mind that no one became a master on their first day. Even Eminem was an amateur at one point.

2. Always Think One Line Ahead

In order to freestyle smoothly, it’s imperative to make sure you’re always thinking one line ahead. While you’re rapping your current line, you should furiously be working on the next line to follow it. 

In order to do this effectively, you need to get to the point where you can rap your current line pretty much on autopilot, while your brain writes the next line for you. In other words, you’ve got to program yourself a line ahead.

This comes with practice, but a great tip is to practice by rinsing and repeating a hook line (that always remains the same), followed by a fresh line that is freestyled on each cycle.

3. Memorize Rhymes In Groups

In order to make your freestyling efforts easier, be sure to memorize as many sets of rhyming words as you possibly can.

For example; if you’ve got it banked in your mind that “Show this/Know this/Own this/Blow this/Bone this.” all work together as near-rhymes, you can simply stack them all up and write the rest of your freestyle around this pre-memorized set of rhymes. 

4. Don’t Walk Before You Can Run

When you first start freestyling, chances are you aren’t going to hold a candle to professional rappers, and that’s fine.

Don’t judge your freestyling ability and growth in comparison to a pro. Compare your abilities only to how good they were the day before.

5. Practice On Your Own

It might seem like jumping right into the thick of a freestyle battle is the right way to practice, but that would be super daunting.

Until you’re confident in your skills, just practice on your own. It’s much easier to develop your skills when you aren’t scared of making a fool of yourself in public.

6. Ignore Perfectionism

If you’re too obsessed with being perfect, you’ll procrastinate because you already know that perfection is impossible.

When you procrastinate, you aren’t practicing and you aren’t getting better. Acknowledge that it’s OK to not freestyle perfectly and that every attempt doesn’t have to be incredible.

7. Pick High-Energy Times To Practice

Exhaustion and creativity do not go hand in hand. If you’re tired, you aren’t going to think as clearly and creatively as you do when you’re full of energy.

Find the time of day where you have the most energy and the most creative drive, and schedule that time to practice your freestyling.

8. Choose An Easy Starting Subject

Freestyling is about being free-flowing, but that’s not easy to do when you first start out.

Don’t be afraid to focus on a simple subject or theme when you first start freestyling: school, dating, fast cars, whatever you want to rap about that’s not too taxing.

9. Find The Perfect Beat

Freestyling is hard to nail when you’re trying to force your flow into a mold you didn’t choose.

Pick a beat that you think is easy to rap to, not one that you think will impress people. Slow-tempo (85-90 BPM) beats are perfect for freestyling, as they allow you enough time to think of your next line while still sounding tight.

10. Roll With The Mistakes

Freestyling isn’t easy – and even once you’ve mastered it – you’ll probably still make mistakes.

Don’t let a mistake bring your whole flow to a halt. Just keep going. Oftentimes, someone listening won’t even notice, so don’t make a mistake a bigger deal than it is.

Tips For Rapping Fast

Rapping fast is certainly harder than rapping slow. Here are some tips to get better at it:

1. Memorize Your Material

It’s a lot easier to rap fast when you know what you’re going to rap before you start. If you’re new to fast rapping, we certainly don’t recommend that you try to freestyle it. Memorize a rap you already know!

2. Practice Enunciation With Tongue Twisters

It’s easy to get your words mixed up when you’re trying to rap fast, and fumbling your words is the best way to make a fool out of yourself.

To get used to rapping fast with tight delivery, try your hand at saying tongue twisters as fast as possible without making any mistakes.

3. Record Yourself & Take Notes

Just like re-reading your own writing, it’s sometimes difficult to catch a mistake in your lyrics as you’re rapping them.

When practicing your fast raps, record them. That way, you can play it back and pick up on the mistakes you’re making.

4. Breathe From Your Diaphragm

Belting out a long and rapid-spoken rap verse can leave you gasping for air if you don’t have good control over your breathing. That’s definitely going to cripple your flow.

Breathe from your diaphragm for better control:

5. Read Out Loud

You need to practice speaking a lot to avoid getting tongue-tied, and a good way to do that is to read aloud when you can.

This works especially well by reading things such as poetry or even rap lyrics. You have to train the coordination between your mind and your mouth, and reading out loud certainly helps. 

6. Warm Up Before Rapping

Your voice is your instrument, and you want to warm it up before going hardcore into a fast rap.

You don’t want to hurt it or have it underperform; massage your jaw, trill your lips, gradually work to the upper and lower limits of your vocal range. It’s a lot like stretching before exercise.

7. Rap Your Favorite Fast-Tempo Songs 

When you’re first starting out, it’s a lot easier to try and rap some of your favorite songs from well-known artists than to try and write your own material. Go ahead, memorize Eminem’s Rap God. 

8. Rap In Front Of Others

It may be daunting, but that extra surge of adrenaline will actually make you rap up to speed, and do it in a convincing manner. 

Start by rapping in front of friends – or at local competitions – but make sure you keep pushing your comfort zone when it comes to performing. That extra bit of pressure can be just what you need to pull out a killer flow. 

9. Take Care of Your Voice

Fast rapping is taxing on your voice, especially if you perform often.

Drink water very regularly, and consider drinking a throat coat tea such as this one to keep your throat soothed and free of phlegm. It makes a difference!

10. Don’t Push Too Hard

Your voice is like any muscle, and it needs a rest to stay in top shape.

Don’t be afraid to take a break if your voice feels strained or you’re getting hoarse. Better to lose a few minutes of rapping than a whole day because you pushed your voice too hard.

Rapping Tips for Flow

Flow is everything when it comes to rapping. Here are some tips to develop your flow:

1. Start From the Bottom

If you don’t have great flow, don’t try to go full throttle from the start.

Develop your flow with slow beats that are more forgiving and easier to practice with. You can work up to faster flows and beats later.

2. Pick a Familiar Topic

If you’re an amateur, the easiest way to start developing your skills is by staying in familiar and comfortable territory. It’s easier to rap about things you know than things you’re unfamiliar with. 

3. Practice Everyday

What is there to really say about this? All skills require constant practice to really get good at them, and rapping is no different.

Your flow will improve the more you rap, so practice whenever you can. More practice, more progress!

4. Embrace the Pause

A lot of people think that a good rap flow has to always be fast and furious, but a good pause can add a lot of drama and tension to your next bar.

Drake uses this kind of technique quite often. Don’t convince yourself that a good flow has to be a fast one.

5. Take Inspiration From Other Rappers

You don’t want to straight up copy a famous rapper, but you can look to their flows for inspiration. Learn the flows of the pros, and find ways to assimilate them into a unique flow of your own.

6. Learn to Beatbox

Beatboxing is a great way to make your own rhythm, which gives you an easy way to test a beat with lyrics you have in mind.

Don’t know how well your flow is going to work? If you can beatbox, you can test it out much more easily!

7. Brush Up On Your Drum Theory

You don’t have to know how to play the drums, but drums are a huge part of rapping.

You need to know about the kick and the snare and the way it works in a sequence of four beats. These simple four beats are the backbone of most hip-hop rhythms today and are crucial to nailing your flow.

8. Incorporate Multiple Rhythms

Becoming predictable is equivalent to becoming boring.

You need to master multiple rhythms that you can use in the same rap to keep your flow from becoming too predictable. One good rhythm is not enough!

9. Take an Online Course

This sounds like a joke, but it isn’t.

There really are online courses out there with the sole purpose of teaching people how to rap. Needless to say, you can develop your flow quite effectively under the guidance of a pro.

10. Practice Freestyle Rapping

Freestyle rapping is hard, and not everyone is good at it. However, there’s almost no better way to develop your flow than to freestyle rap. Freestyling forces you to master diction, rhythm and rhyming in a less-controlled setting than traditional rap.

It’s tough, but pushing yourself to rap well in a difficult situation like that will sharpen your skills for sure.

Closing Thoughts

And there you have it! Our ultimate list of 50+ rapping tips for perfect flow & diction. If you enjoyed this article, why not check out our list of easy rap songs for beginners next?

PRO TIP: Be sure to check out our list of essential gear for singers to ensure you’ve got everything you need as an up-and-coming rapper!