Build a word bank

Why a bank works

Freestyling is retrieval under time pressure. You are not inventing rhymes in the three seconds a bar gives you; you are finding ones you already have. Anything you have said out loud before comes back faster, so the point of the bank is not to recite it — it is to have walked the path once so the second walk is quick.

The five lists

• Your name. You will be asked for it, and in a battle you will be attacked with it. Know six rhymes for it before anybody else works them out.
• Where you are from. City, neighbourhood, country — for the same reason.
• What you do. Job, studies, sport: the thing you would mention in the first four bars.
• Your three topics. Everyone has them — money, time, love, pressure, the future. Prepare the ones you actually reach for, not the ones that sound impressive.
• Escape sounds. Families with enormous membership: -ime (time, climb, rhyme, prime), -ight (night, light, right, fight), -ow (flow, go, show, know), -ame (game, name, same, flame). These are what you steer toward when you have nothing — the fire exit.

Ten minutes with a pen per list. Say every candidate out loud as you write it, because spelling lies and your ear does not.

Store phrases, not words

Write “back on my grind”, not “grind”. A single word has to be attached to something before it can be a bar, whereas a phrase is already half a line and arrives with its own rhythm. It is also why lists of rhyming words out of a dictionary rarely help live: they are raw material, not the thing you say.

Where to get rhymes that actually land

A rhyming dictionary will happily hand you words nobody can rap. What you want are rhymes judged for whether they can be landed — arrived at without contorting the sentence. That is what the rhyme sets on this site are: every family was judged word by word for whether the words really rhyme and whether they sound natural in a bar, per language. Look up the family for your name or your escape sounds and take the ones you can imagine saying.

Then close the page and go and rap. A bank you keep reading is a notebook; a bank you have said out loud is a reflex.

Then forget it

The bank is not a script. Go into a round trying to place a prepared line and you will stop listening to the beat and to the room, and it will sound exactly like what it is. Prepare so that retrieval is fast, then rap about what is actually in front of you. That contradiction — prepare hard, then improvise — is the job.