M2M Day 313: Forced discomfort
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For September, my goal is to continuously freestyle rap for three minutes.
Over the past week, I’ve practiced freestyle rapping to the unexciting drone of a metronome.
By using the metronome, my hope was that I could more precisely adjust my practice speed and more scientifically track my progress, which I have: The metronome has been a great tool to help train my brain to fire faster in real-time.
The problem with the metronome is that it’s boring. It doesn’t provide any of the color or musical interest that a normal rap beat or backing track would. As a result, although I might be getting faster, I’ve started to become comfortable flowing over the metronome.
Last night, encouraged by a friend, I tried rapping over an instrumental, and found that it was strikingly different to rapping over the metronome.
Because the instrumental has its own musical ideas, I needed to change the flow of my freestyle to fit into the instrumental’s rhythmic world. Not only did this force me to explore new rhythmic possibilities, but, because of these new rhythmic constraints, I had to find new ways to spin lines and land on my favorite rhymes.
In other words, the instrumental forced me to explore new territory and new possibilities, breaking me out of my metronome rut.
As a result, today, I practiced by rapping over a number of different instrumental backing tracks. For each track, I started with the same few lines, and then let the track take me where it wanted to, arriving at very different destinations for each.
By training in this way, and forcing myself into musically “uncomfortable” situations, I’ve discovered how to extract a lot more mileage out of my favorite lines and rhymes, as well as found new lines and rhymes that I can use to build out my freestyle foundation.
The lesson here is clear: If you’re getting into a bit of a rut, it’s usually best to intentionally and systematically disrupt your comfort.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
