From one of the better YouTube channels, for bassists, here's a video on the subject of time, in which the guy works through practicing with a slow click— which I highly recommend, practicing with the click on the 1 only, or on the 1 every two measures. Or every four measures, at fast tempos.
The basic idea there is sound, I don't agree with the word choices: “groove automation”, the idea of feeling the time. “Pulse memory.” It don't work that way, in my opinion. I think they attached some buzzwords to a partially formed concept, to promote the video.
Partially formed concepts are not bad, they're most of how the fine points of music are taught. Somebody gives you a clue about how things work, and you're left alone to figure it out through your practicing and playing. Some people do that correctly and use the clues effectively, others struggle with them because they were misled by the choice of words. They drew a wrong implication from it, and wasted a lot of time trying to develop something that doesn't work. Probably most of us have done it, one one topic or another.
Like saying groove automation makes it sound like a background process— a subroutine, while we're using techy language— as if the goal is to not think about it. The same way people talk about an “internal clock”— suggesting a mechanism that gives you perfect time without you knowing anything about it. The goal is the opposite of that, time/groove awareness.
“Pulse memory” is also misleading— the hardest thing to memorize is a naked pulse, as you get it from a metronome. It's one dimensional. Maybe someone can do it well enough to have functionally good time, but it's more natural to use memorized sound— the actual sound of a recorded piece of music, or of someone counting off a tune, or of a rhythm, counted or played. Those are complex structures, we have a better, more precise memory for them.
And feeling time; time feelings are easily influenced by your other physical and emotional feelings. Feeling is extremely unreliable. Instead, we want to be able to conceptualize time. That's what using the the slow click is all about: you're forced to subdivide, which is a conceptualizing process.
I've written more about all of this here. Like I said, this is basically a good video. If somebody just started working with a slow click all the time, they'd get their time together to a satisfactory level.
Hey, we haven't done one of these in a while. All the tempos from four very famous Miles Davis records, with his very famous quintet from the 50s, with Philly Joe Jones on drums— core literature.
Workin' It Never Entered My Mind - 58 Four - 207 In Your Own Sweet Way - 114 The Theme (take 1) - 137 Trane's Blues - 164 Ahmad's Blues - 114 Half Nelson - 257 The Theme (take 2) - 132
Cookin' My Funny Valentine - 67 Blues By Five - 177 Airegin - 292 Tune Up - 315 When Lights Are Low - 123
Steamin' Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128 Salt Peanuts - 350 Something I Dreamed Last Night - 56 Diane - 143 Well, You Needn't - 230 When I Fall In Love - 67
Relaxin' If I Were A Bell - 184 You're My Everything - 57 I Could Write A Book - 227 Oleo - 258 It Could Happen To You - 188 Woody'n You - 256
All of them, again, in ascending order: Something I Dreamed Last Night - 56 You're My Everything - 57 It Never Entered My Mind - 58 My Funny Valentine - 67 When I Fall In Love - 67 Ahmad's Blues - 114 In Your Own Sweet Way - 114 When Lights Are Low - 123 Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128 The Theme (take 2) - 132 The Theme (take 1) - 137 Diane - 143 Trane's Blues - 164 Blues By Five - 177 If I Were A Bell - 184 It Could Happen To You - 188 Four - 207 I Could Write A Book - 227 Well, You Needn't - 230 Woody'n You - 256 Half Nelson - 257 Oleo - 258 Airegin - 292 Tune Up - 315 Salt Peanuts - 350
It's good to attach a number to these things, and know that Miles ballads, in this period at least, gravitated around 57 and 67 bpm. Those showy numbers like Half Nelson and Woody'n You are around 257. Those slow medium items @ 114, and two different types of bright swingers around ~185 and ~230.
And here— for my own peculiar interest— are all of them doubled or halved to put them in the familiar ~100-200 range— the medium to top end of standard metronome range. Useful and helpful as a practical thing dealing with time. There's got to be some kind of useful information in Miles putting a lot of tunes in tempos that equalize to the low to mid teens, or high 120s to mid 130s.
Four - 103 Something I Dreamed Last Night - 112 You're My Everything - 114 Ahmad's Blues - 114 In Your Own Sweet Way - 114 I Could Write A Book - 114 Well, You Needn't - 115 It Never Entered My Mind - 116 When Lights Are Low - 123 Surrey With The Fringe On Top - 128 Woody'n You - 128 Half Nelson - 129 Oleo - 129 The Theme (take 2) - 132 My Funny Valentine - 134 When I Fall In Love - 134 The Theme (take 1) - 137 Diane - 143 Airegin - 146 Tune Up - 157 Trane's Blues - 164 Salt Peanuts - 175 Blues By Five - 177 If I Were A Bell - 184 It Could Happen To You - 188
Another funny item I dug out of my archives. I believe it's from the jazz festival at UC Berkeley in 1989— I was there playing with USC's guitar ensemble. A bassist and drummer gave a clinic that was mainly about time, and I think this was a handout. I forget their names, but they were Bay Area jazz professionals, not an 80s pop band from Indiana also called The Phonz.
They've padded it out with some jokes, but there are some good points:
The main thing I took from the clinic and never forgot was:
Laying back or playing on top are confusing terms, they are a smokescreen. Time should be played in the middle of the beat by the rhythm section.
It simplifies your thinking if you just decide to be the reference point stating the tempo, and let everyone else play ahead or behind. Which may put you seemingly ahead of / behind the beat, depending on the other players' ears / time concepts. The main thing is that you're being the reference point— you're not getting the time from them.
Rounding up my current views and practices on the subject rhythm and time, in teaching and practicing: knowing rhythm, holding a tempo in playing. This is mostly about beginner to intermediate level students. A lot of returning students— people getting back into drumming after taking years off— need a lot of help with this.
What people do Often students will look at a page of drumming materials and just start playing, at whatever is their personal natural tempo for playing something. Often they won't be able to play slower, if asked, or they'll creep up to their natural speed, more or less gradually. Obviously that won't work in real life playing, and it will slow them down in learning new things in the practice room, so breaking people of that is a big issue for teachers. A lot of us have vestiges of that in our own playing.
Set the tempo Before starting, decide what the tempo is going to be. This is always done in real playing, and very often not done in practicing— when not using a metronome or playalong track. Think about it for a second or two before starting.
I'll be loose about this at first, and then more strict as a student can get through the pattern— or if they are having problems playing a pattern at all.
Rhythms are shapes Or structures, if you prefer, the architecture of our playing. They're the ideas we have to work with. Students need to learn their proportions, and learn to structure them with their voices.
Rubato for figuring it out While keeping the same basic proportions, we can allow some freedom to take the time to identify the next note in a pattern, from the page, and play it correctly. Students can slow down or pause, but we want to keep the proportions of the rhythm, broadly. I don't let them rush through the easy parts and then slow way down when it gets hard.
Counting Usually I have students count the combined rhythm of all the parts— all limbs— before playing something. For these purposes I usually don't want them to count while playing, I want them to focus on making their hands move in the rhythm we just counted. I'm insistent about always counting rhythms articulately, and always proportionally, even when referencing them in conversation.
I usually do not have students count a full grid— usually just as a remedial thing if they're having problems with some other aspect of it.
People are universally pretty good at using their voice to copy something they heard. I'll count a rhythm for a student, and have them count it back to me, and when they can do it, matching my tempo exactly, then they play it, one time. Often that will sort out any coordination problems they were having with a drum set pattern.
Hands must follow the voice Increasingly I think the voice-hands connection the foundation of drumming technique. The hands will take over and run away with the time if you let them. Students need to be able to speak the rhythm in question accurately, and make their hands state it.
Slow click For advanced students. Practicing with a metronome sounding on beat 1 only— or on beat 1 every other measure. For me this has become the major way of learning to conceptualize time the way professionals do. It forces you subdivide, and to make your hands state time all the time, while also allowing your playing to breathe.
It's a persistent false idea that people have to just “feel” time, and some people have it, and some don't. What we don't have is people who know how to teach it. I've handled some pretty rough cases using the above approaches— with a lot of patience and attentive teaching on my part, they eventually get it.
“Through the years I had always practiced from slow to fast, but then I found out that that's the worst possible thing any drummer can do for his time. If you practice like that, you end up playing like that.
After that clinic [Stan Kenton, with Peter Erskine teaching drums], I started practicing everything in time and in meter. I started playing along with the metronome and records and being really conscious about it[.]”
“To improve my time, I geared myself to think in that way. I really set out in search of wanting to play with good feel and I think that was probably the most important thing I did. I know a lot of players who don't play with good feel, but haphazardly think that you're either born with it or you're not.
You have to develop it, so I tried to do everything to do so. I talked to people about it and listened to a lot of records, like a lot of Aretha records with Bernard Purdie and a lot of old James Brown records, and studied in depth what notes were being played. I would try to write it down and then try to play it and get the same feeling they had gotten.
I guess I understood the importance. Most of the young people I know now, and those I have taught, don't realize the importance of working on their time and their feeling. They think it's more important to work on their flash and their chops, their technique and their reading. If they would only understand that it's time and feeling that is going to get them the work, they would devote themselves to do that.”
- Steve Smith, 1981 Modern Drummer interview with Robyn Flans
This always hung me up— the seemingly infinite tempo possibilities for any one thing you practice. It was a constantly lurking thing that I'm not doing this fast enough, and you would never feel like you completed something. I think it stole my focus from learning something really well at the tempo at which I was doing it then.
Some guidelines, then, for thinking about tempo when practicing, for settling down and having a clear purpose about what you're doing:
Relax about baby tempos You need to be able to play the slow tempos great, too, so why the rush to just play faster? Everyone wants to play things at “flow” speed, where your hands are moving in a continuous motion, but many times you just have to carefully place every single note. So practice sounding great while doing that. And having worked it out thoroughly, you'll sound better at tempos where the rate of notes has a more natural flow.
Know the destined tempo Tempo suggestions in drumming books may not always be totally realistic. See the absurd "half note = 120" in the hardest parts of Dahlgren & Fine. That's just an invitation by the book's author for you to feel inadequate forever. Go to your record collection and find some playing in the style of what you're practicing, and make that your goal. You mostly don't need to do very complicated dense stuff extremely fast; sparse things that are dull at slow tempos may be designed to be played fast.
Technical issues Beware when you're playing a thing so fast you need to devise a special technique to do it. You may be doing the thing faster than intended. Or possibly your normal technique is needlessly complex and it's slowing you down. Check both things carefully.
Two tempos Play the page at a moderately slow tempo, then a moderately fast tempo, and move on. A comfortable medium tempo where you can achieve some relaxation, and a faster tempo where you're pushing yourself a little bit. I like the tempos suggested in A Funky Primer: quarter note = 86, and qn = 120. I like qn = 64 if you need to add a level below that.
Default It's easy to just start playing without thinking about a tempo beforehand, but don't just play your default tempo all the time. Know what tempo you're playing, and choose your tempos on purpose.
Out of time Some very demanding things— eg, heavy independence practice— don't need to be in time, at first. Play them slow to begin with, then take all the extra time you need to get the next note in the pattern. Just try to keep the rhythm roughly proportional to what's on the page.
Film editor Walter Murch talks about Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, conducted by George Solti, used in the famous “Charlie's Point” scene in Apocalypse Now. Late in post-production Decca denied the filmmakers the right to use Solti's recording of Valkyries in the movie, and Murch tells about trying to find another usable recording of the piece, and why none of them worked, and we learn some very interesting things about rhythm:
The greatest conductors and orchestras, and Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic were certainly in that group, are able to shape these minute adjustments to the rhythmic signature so closely that they are perceived as regular but in fact are not, thus enhancing the organic, living and breathing nature of the music itself. The problem with many of the versions of “Valkyries” that I rejected was that they were monotonously rhythmic: A metronomic signature had been decided upon and stuck to, regardless of circumstance. The result was a robotic stagger, a simulation of musical life rather than the real thing.
This is reflected in our intimate relationship with the rhythms of our own bodies, their heartbeat and breathing. We may think that most of the time our heartbeat is regular, but in fact it is not. It is constantly being micro (and sometimes macro) adjusted on a beat-to-beat basis, responding to neurological feedback between the heart, the brain, and the needs of the body for oxygenated blood. And the same applies to our rate of breathing, which is intimately related to our circulatory system.
The medical term for a healthy but slightly irregular rhythm is “ectopic,” and it is our largely unconscious awareness of this dynamic pulse which reminds us that we are alive. In cases of medical emergency, that closely monitored feedback between the heart and the needs of the body is often weakened or severed, and a machine-like regularity of heartbeat appears, signaling trouble or impending death.
Similarly, music that lacks this dynamic, quicksilver pulse is perceived, consciously or not, as lacking an essential spark of life.
Solti’s conducting of the “Valkyries” was instead a sublime example of what we might call ectopic music—a powerful embodiment of the living, pulsing heart and breath of Wagner’s composition.
It's worth stating again: you only get a metronomic, machine-like heartbeat when you're about to die.
“Consecrated jazz drummers have less accurate time than rock and fusion drummers for a reason. The beat is connected to the cycle of life and playing with an ensemble. It has warp and woof and slip and slide.”
“Magic happens at the drum kit when the four limbs are slightly desynchronized. Any truly swinging or funky drummer does not always place the articulations of the two hands and two feet at exactly the same time (even though it may look simultaneous to a lay person). These complex techniques are not covered by the European tradition of music notation; the groovy result is often simply called 'feel.' The tradition of 'feel' is at its most exalted in various hand-drumming languages of Mother Africa, the continent where most of the rhythmic motifs in American music come from. A drummer with 'good hands' may not have exceptional 'feel.' Naturally, the very greatest drummers have both.”
“Mingus use to say the damndest thing about me years ago. He'd say, 'Well, Roy Haynes. You don't always play the beat, you suggest the beat!'
I didn't know what the heck I was doing. But I know that the beat is supposed to be there. If I leave out a beat, it's still there. If I'm playing 8 or 12 bar fills and I play four and a half bars then leave out a bar and a half, that doesn't mean I don't want it to sound like that! But if I'm playing with a horn player sometimes they may get confused. They get hung up because I didn't fill in that bar and a half.
You've got to use a little imagination in there. That bar and a half still counts. I'll come out in the right place, where it should be to make the fill even, and the other players are somewhere else at that point. I didn't always play the beat, which I thought was very good. You don't always have to say ding ding-da ding ding-da ding, you know. It's there! So, if one of those saxophone players has to depend on that, then you know he's not right.
You've got to have that ding-ding-da-ding within yourself. Coltrane had it! Pres had it. Miles has it. So, it's beautiful to play with them, but there are so many other people who don't have that thing and you've got to carry them. How you gonna be inventive and create when you're trying to lift them up?”
I had a conversation with a student about counting subdivisions when you practice— “the grid.” It's a common thing to do, that I don't recommend— not all the time. It's an execution aid for playing rhythms accurately, that I find to not be great for general musicianship. My students who learned it from someone else have been prone to reading errors— they often don't seem to know what rhythm they're playing.
General principle: open your copy of Syncopation, turn to page 34— each of those repeating one measure rhythms is a piece of language, a clave. Particular rhythms like that are our point of reference for everything we do on the drums.
The grid is not a rhythm, it's a pulse. It's shapeless. If you tell your brain to think of everything as 1&2&3&4&, you're not really learning rhythm, any more than reciting the alphabet teaches you words. Thinking primarily in terms of grid, and being shaky on your basic fluency with rhythm, you're giving up creative awareness and control.
Some thoughts and guidelines:
Count the rhythm
Be able to count the rhythms in Syncopation exactly, without saying any syllables that are not sounding in the written part. Count them in 4/4, and also in 2/2, using the syllables 1e&a 2e&a. If counting e&as with Syncopation is weird, do it with the 16th note exercises in Louis Bellson's reading book, or the reading exercises in The New Breed.
Set ups and anticipations
Implied additions to syncopated rhythms, with special meaning for drummers, that help the other musicians play their part, and help maintain accuracy. On ensemble rhythms starting with an 8th rest, drummers will typically set up the rhythm by playing a note on the rest— that's an absolute nutshell description for playing big band style kicks. On anticipations— long notes on an &, or the equivalent with a rest (again, an extreme nutshell definition)— we want to know where the following downbeat is, for accuracy.
Two single measure examples, with the set up added, and with the downbeat after the anticipation:
Note that the second example would be problematic if you played it as a repeating rhythm, as in the one line exercises in Syncopation: on the repetitions there would be no room to add the set up on 1.
Locking parts
Grid orientation is more useful if you think in terms of interlocking parts. There is still a primary rhythm, but we are also aware of the rhythm of its gaps; together they form an interlocking grid. It's a useful way of thinking in funk and rock drumming; in jazz it sets up a rubadub type of feel.
Count before you play
Generally, I'm just not a proponent of always counting while you're playing. In music listening— even to yourself— is as important as anything else, and it's not easy to listen while you're talking.
Count beats, measures
This is a normal skill, that appears similar to counting a grid, but that actually serves a different function— counting quarter notes— 1234— while you play. Or counting 1234 2234 3234 4234. The purpose of this is just to stay oriented in 4/4, or within a larger phrase. Counting a grid is an aid for playing grid notes accurately. It's a different purpose.
“Think like a horn”
A standard piece of advice for playing the drums more musically, less like a drummer. Horn players don't typically count a grid. It's not conducive to lyrical phrasing. When counting the Syncopation rhythms, I suggest that you sing them with a horn like phrasing, with the correct note lengths— drummers will tend to sing the rhythms with all staccato sounds.
For another approach, see Dave di Censo's Rhythm And Drumming Demystified. He has developed what appears to be a very effective method for grid playing. See also my related post from last year, Time and Whatnot.
We'll see if this becomes a regular feature: dealing with it. If anyone has thoughts, ideas, frustrations in real life playing situations, mention them in the comments, and maybe I can write something about it.
Today let's talk about people with bad time, or who play in a way that interferes with good ensemble time, which... what's the difference? Players who make everything you play sound bad, or at least it feels that way. Someone on a drumming forum suggested an astoundingly bad way of dealing with it:
I have found that playing with musicians who have bad time is far more difficult than playing with ones that have really good time. I wonder if there’s an app that has a setting for bad time programmed in so you can practice playing with players whose time is very poor. If there’s not one, I wonder how hard it would be to create one, or modify an existing one.
So, that's not how performance works. The world is not a playalong track. You are an actor in this thing we call reality— you are a co-creator of the musical time, together with the other musicians on stage. Just as what they play influences you— to want to die, or live— what you play should influence them. Understanding that is the first step towards dealing with it constructively.
First you have to know what is actually happening. Time issues I have encountered include:
Habitual rushing
Some players just rush, especially when soloing, and if you listen to them too closely, you'll rush along with them. This has caused me a lot of problems, because I place a high value on listening.
Dragging at phrase endingsOne set of players I know got way too sensitive about phrasing with each other, and turned music that was supposed to swing almost into rubato chamber music.
Rushing on easy stuff and dragging on hard stuff
Vocalists do this a lot.
Dragging generally on ensemble passages
Horns so focused on playing together with the other horns they lose the thread.
Inaccurate rests and figures
Self-explanatory. Everybody does it.
Badly timed countoffs, pickups, intros, and solo breaks
They're not really thinking about the tempo they're counting off. Or they're vocalizing it badly. Intros and breaks played by people with weak rhythm, setting up what comes after them poorly.
Deliberately “floaty” time
Horns or vocalists. Not necessarily wrong, but it doesn't help you with the time.
People trying to be hip with their “feel”
People who listen to too much hip electronic music and not enough actual groove music.
Unsupportive bullshit
As people get more into chops they tend to forgot their actual job, and play too much of the wrong stuff. Their time may not even be bad, but what they play is such noncontributive musical clutter that it compounds other players' time issues, and gets in your way in dealing with it.
It's partly a problem of getting people to listen. For advice on that we have to go back to the very beginning of this blog, where I reposted an answer Joey Baron gave in a master class— from a transcript I found on usenet a long time ago. The question was how do you make the band listen?
Um, drown them out? No, well, you can't make somebody listen. You can try to hint, you can do things like with the dynamics— seriously, you could drown them out— you could lay out, you could do something with the time, like take it into a different feel, you could jump up and down and make funny noises— I've kind of tried all of those and they all work. It just depends on the context, who you're playing with. But you can't make someone else do something, but you can try, and those are ways. If you're playing in a funk groove and it's a constant backbeat going on, and the soloist is going on and on and on and on and on and just you feel like, wait a minute it's like this is turning into like, they should get a rhythm machine or a sequencer, instead of...
You can do things like: don't affect the intensity of the groove but just don't do a backbeat, like in hiphop stuff— or in the stuff that's all about mixing— a lot of times, they'll just mix out the backbeat with the rest of the track is going on. That's a big change, if you're not listening. I mean you'd have to be deaf not to notice that kind of stuff. In a more subtle situation, like if you're playing jazz or more softer type of music, you know just change the texture. If you've been playing on the ride cymbal for a while, play on a closed tight sound, change up the sound, do something to kind of wake people up or something?
You can also:
Learn to ignore them
If they're playing bad time, what kind of information are you hoping to get by listening to them? You have to have a concept of time independent from what you hear.
Independence is necessary even with good players. Not everyone improvises perfectly rhythmically accurate stuff 100% of the time. They (we) need to feel that the time is not going to go to hell just because they rushed one line. That push and pull creates energy. None of the ahead/behind the beat stuff people love talking about is possible without it.
Focus on the one other solid player
Often that's enough to make the gig tolerable, and maybe even worth listening to.
Make sure you're playing in a way the others can follow
Don't play unsupportive bullshit all the time. If you're way too into your patterns and ghost notes and linear funk grooves, you may be making the problem worse. In dealing with a bad time situation, I moved towards a more 70s way of playing funk, which is more chunky, with the full 8th or 16th note grid stated strongly. That's actually a better way of playing all the time. It's nice to play hip, fascinating shit, it's nicer to create an unmissable groove.
Develop a high level of awareness and confidence in your own time
How are you going to know what to do if you don't even know what's going on? Read my post on things that helped me improve my time awareness, and have more confidence in my time.
Be realistic
On the internet especially I have noticed drummers adopting some highly unrealistic ideas about what good time is, and adopting some extreme practice habits in service of that. Time squishiness is inherent to human beings playing music. Through a lot of playing experience and a lot of listening (to non-quantized, non-click track music) you learn what actual professional tolerances are.
It is often said that in a musical ensemble, keeping time is everyone's responsibility.
And in some hypothetical quantum universe or other fantastical musical fairyland, people may actually follow that in practice. In reality, it's all on you, the drummer. You will always be the one blamed when there are problems with the time. You are the receptacle for everyone's problems with the time— both real and imagined— and you will be expected to fix everything.
So your time has to be good, so good that you know it's good, and can speak with real confidence when it comes up.
Here are a few general philosophies and practical tips for improving your time effectively:
Feeling bad
For professionals required to play modern music in a wide variety of tempos, styles and settings, where you are basically expected to maintain metronomic accuracy, I don't believe you can rely on body motion, technique, listening, feeling... “innate groove”... whatever mickey mouse theories people have about the mysterious place good time comes from. It doesn't lie in your muscles, your soul, the motion of the sticks, or the structure of your anatomy.
It resides in your head. The time has to be conceived. You could say it's an intellectual process, I would say it's about awareness. Time awareness can be learned.
I should clarify: there is plenty of indigenous/folkoric music, some of which is extremely rhythmically sophisticated, in which the time may be very much reliant on the things I listed above. That music may be the greatest art in the world, but the demands are different for professional musicians playing the drum set.
Time is the point
In learning to play, we work on a lot of stuff. A whole lot of drumming crap, none of which matters if it isn't servicing the time. Not only do you have to be able to do it in time, you have to use it to construct the time. So we have to resign ourselves to the idea that time is something we have to build and constantly maintain with what we play. There are times where you are allowed or able to take a looser attitude, but you have to be able to do the constructive thing.
The nice part is that when you're playing really good time, little else matters. The crap you wanted to play doesn't seem that great any more. You can be a great drummer with very little drumming crap.
Counting rhythm
Vocalizing is how we make sure our brains get it. It gives you internal concept of the musical idea, which you can then express by playing it on an instrument. Counting the rhythms out loud is a functionally OK way for doing that. I think of it as a low-grade version of the very ancient, sophisticated and effective Indian rhythmic solfege.
For any piece of music you should be able to vocalize the rhythm of the notes only, and the notes plus rests, counting rests as if they are notes. Playing something written out for the drumset, you should be able to count the combined rhythm of the snare and bass drum parts, and the combined rhythm for all of the parts. Personally I only take this to the 16th note level: 1-e-&-a 2-e-&a. At normal tempos I wouldn't count complete rhythms for sixtuplets or 32nd notes— I count those as 8th notes, with no syllables for the subdivisions.
Anticipations
A major place where your time will get messed up is with anticipations— long notes landing right before the beat. You hit a lot of &s of 2 and &s of 4 in jazz, and they tend to rush. When you hit a long note on the & of 4, know where the 1 is, and know how long the space is from the & of 4 to the 2.
1 and 3
Jazz drummers can get almost phobic about the 1 and 3, like they're the white beats that will show everyone how ungrooving you truly are if you acknowledge them. But they're the context for all the super-hip stuff you play. You have to know where they are, and state them accurately, especially if you're doing an Elvin Jones type of cymbal interpretation.
Slow click
Practice with your metronome set to the slowest speed you can handle, regardless of the tempo you're playing. Like a quarter or 1/8th speed. So if you're practicing something at quarter note = 120, set your metronome to 30 or 15. This forces you to conceive the time in your own head, the exact same way you need to do when you're playing music. The metronome just comments periodically to tell you how well you're doing it. I set mine from 15-40 BPM all the time, unless there's a good reason to do something else.
People like to get cute with their metronomes, programming them to drop out for a few measures or whatever. That's just dancing around the real issue, which is ongoing focus on the time. Just learn to deal with a constant slow click.
Memorizing sound
BPM numbers and metronome pulses are lousy media for learning time. Instead, memorize sound. Here: think about the song Kashmir; hear the recording in your head, clap the beat, then check the recording to see how accurately you called it:
Try it with any other recordings you know well. If you wanted to, you could memorize the BPMs for your remembered music catalog, so you can recall the entire functional range of tempos just by thinking about it. Fool your friends.
The more important thing is just to know that this is a thing, learn to trust its accuracy, and begin exploiting it in your playing every day. For example, in playing and recording, I will often memorize the sound of the countoff— not the tempo, the actual sound of the person's voice— or the horn pickups, to check the timing of the tune in progress.
See what you think. These things have all worked very well for me, I think they'll work for you too.
“One afternoon, after a couple of nights of feeling that he wasn’t happy with where I was placing the beat, I asked Buddy if he wanted me to play a little more “on top.” He put a hand at the top of his head and the other at his waist and said “I don’t want it here and I don’t want it here – I want it RIGHT HERE, right down the middle” – pointing at his heart. What I learned from that statement is that everyone has a different opinion of where “on top” or “on the backside” of the beat is and the only definitive place to put the time is right down the middle and with conviction.”
Microtiming is a term that gives me hives every time I hear musicians use it. To me it suggests misaligned priorities, a disappearance up one's own rear end, and the resulting degraded musical abilities. The way most drummers use it suggests micro-perfection of execution: metronomic perfection and machine-like accuracy. I've seen other people use it in place of subdividing, because microtiming sounds more cutting-edgy.
What the word actually refers to is deviation from machine-like accuracy— meaning expressive, human rhythm. What it actually is is a theoretical term betraying the cluelessness of the people who made it up.
AUTOMATED ESTIMATION OF RIDE CYMBAL SWING RATIOS IN JAZZ RECORDINGS
In this paper, we propose a new method suitable for the
automatic analysis of microtiming played by drummers in
jazz recordings. Specifically, we aim to estimate the drummers’
swing ratio in excerpts of jazz recordings taken from
the Weimar Jazz Database.
See?
Where expressive human rhythm comes from is vocal rhythm, body rhythm, and a complex interaction of the human body with a musical instrument via technique to express a rhythm; and the performer's perception of his own sound in interaction with the musical environment via sounds coming through his ear hole. Intention goes in there somewhere, too: what the performer wants to do and believes he should do.
Let's take a common real world example: you grab your guitar and screech are you ready to rock, and begin playing Smoke On The Water windmill style, which you suck at. The drummer joins in and he's twirling his sticks so his backbeats are landing late— basically you can fly the 101st Airborne between the bass drum and snare drum hits that are intended to be in unison. The bass player is blasted out of his mind on a galaxy of uppers, downers, goofballs, and ketamine, and he's hearing everything in radically phase-shifted quintophonic and his execution tonight is a little fluid. He's usually quite meticulous. The singer is dry-humping your Marshall stack and it throws his rhythm off, too. And he's a heavy smoker so he's struggling to breathe. The tamborine player is dead on. The conflicting tolerances are massive, but somehow overall it still sounds pretty cool— I once heard a Melvins bootleg like that.
One could write an equally complex, multi-layered, less fun scenario involving more skilled musicians, or of the evolution of rhythm in most forms of music. But the attitude of the microtiming people is basically yeah yeah yeah just gimme a number. Tell me how to program the machine to simulate that. And that's when drummers will complain about not being able to do it. You see the level of missing-the-boat going on with this whole way of thinking. The music would never have happened in the first place.
So what do we do with this? Stop using buzzwords and stay focused on the real goal: we want to know how to play rhythm to a professional standard, with an expressive and stylistically-correct feel, while playing creatively. The way you do this— in addition to continuing to refine your time, rhythmic understanding, and execution, in all the normal ways— is to develop big ears. Be an active, focused listener when you're playing music and listening to music. Develop some precision in hearing the attacks of your notes, and the attacks of the notes of the other musicians. Do these things and the expressive timing and feel, and the “micro-perfection”will take care of themselves.
“I believe that 'time' is always there. I don't mean a particular pulse, but the time itself. It's all there somehow like a huge sign that's up there and it says time. It's there and you can play all around it.”
— Paul Motian, Modern Drummer interview by Scott K. Fish
This reminded me of one of the first things I shared on the blog, from Chuck Braman's invaluable 1996 interview with Motian:
“There's a specific tempo that's stated in the very beginning, and that's already there. I don't have to force it on to everybody else and myself included. I don't have to enforce it. It's happening already. I don't have to do shit. I could have just stayed there and not played a fuckin' note. They're playing along, they're playing that speed, you know? And so, what I'm doing is trying to add some kind of music to that.”
People worry about the metronome, “I’m not gonna move, I’m not gonna move!” because that means you are good. If you move, that means your time is bad. But Miles and them moved all over the place, and it was fucking awesome. No one ever listens to a tune and says afterwards, “Man, they were at exactly the same tempo the whole time, how hip was that?” Who cares? It was not just tempo, back in the day they didn’t care about tuning, either! Sharp and flat as hell, but the feeling was right. Nowadays people care. It probably has something to do with double-edged sword of schooling and the wrong kind of teachers. Obviously, tuning is good, keeping time is good! If you are ignorant to it, that’s a different thing.
Another item from Rick Mattingly's 1983 Modern Drummer interview with Steve Gadd. It's encouraging that a lot of the very common fuzzy talk about time makes no more sense to the greatest studio drummer in the world than it does to me. He also makes a very important point in his first answer, about managing your energy and enthusiasm.
RM: Jim Chapin quoted you as saying that coming from a jazz background, you
tended to put an edge on the time, and you had to learn to lay back.
SG: Yeah, it had a lot to do with that energy level that I was talking about. It was just that feeling of aggression—that personal thing between me and the drums— and the way I projected that into the music. And then eventually I was able to channel that energy into an enthusiasm for the music, and sort of separate myself from the drums, personally. I was able to channel it and start playing less. You start realizing that when you put that much energy into it, you might be on the upper side of the time. You just have to think about the other way to do it.
RM: How did you eventually learn to lay back? Did you sit down with a metronome and work at it?
SG: It's not that complicated. It was just something I realized I was doing, and when I was aware of it—when I understood it— then I could see how it could be different. It's just an awareness of something you have to look at inside yourself, and all you have to do is listen to yourself. I did it by being in a situation where I was recording, and then when I heard things back, it was like, "It felt one way when I was playing it, but now it doesn't feel the same way." So you have to realize that as comfortable as it felt at the time, this is what it sounds like. I think the only way to find out about playing on top is to put a click on, and then play loud and soft with it. If you can understand that it's real natural to get on top when you're playing loud, then you can start to understand it.
Time is a funny subject. It really is. It's a little bit different every time. And it gets confusing when you start talking about "playing on top" and "laying back" because those phrases are used in so many different situations. One person can say it and mean one thing and another person could say the same thing and mean something else.
RM: I remember the first time I heard one of those terms, years ago. I was playing with a group, and things were really feeling good that night. Afterwards, a guy came up and said, "I really like the way you lay back when you play." I was thinking, "Oh really? I lay back?"
SG: But it felt natural when you were doing it?
RM: Yeah.
SG: That's what I'm saying. Someone came up and said, "It felt good because you were laying back," and you didn't even know what the hell he was talking about. That's how vague it is. So the thing is, when they tell you it was happening because you were laying back, it might make as little sense to you as when they ask you to lay back.
RM: Judging by the letters we get, people are hearing these terms and getting confused about what they mean.
SG: There are a lot of confusing things that don't need to be that confusing. I think it will finally make sense to them when they finally play with people who make sense musically. Then they'll understand.
Fascinating piece by Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer on the movie Apocalypse Now, several other Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas films of the 70s, and a lot of other things. Murch tells about fitting Richard Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries to the famous “Charlie's Point” scene in Apocalypse. A version conducted by Georg Solti, recorded in 1965, was chosen for the scene, and it was edited with that version. But late in the process the record label denied Coppola permission to use it, and Murch had to scramble to find an acceptable substitute, which turned out to be hugely problematic— none of the 19 available stereo recordings of the piece worked.
Here's the scene:
The entire piece is fascinating, but Murch has some things to say about rhythm that are very interesting:
The greatest conductors and orchestras, and Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic were certainly in that group, are able to shape these minute adjustments to the rhythmic signature so closely that they are perceived as regular but in fact are not, thus enhancing the organic, living and breathing nature of the music itself. The problem with many of the versions of “Valkyries” that I rejected was that they were monotonously rhythmic: A metronomic signature had been decided upon and stuck to, regardless of circumstance. The result was a robotic stagger, a simulation of musical life rather than the real thing.
This is reflected in our intimate relationship with the rhythms of our own bodies, their heartbeat and breathing. We may think that most of the time our heartbeat is regular, but in fact it is not. It is constantly being micro (and sometimes macro) adjusted on a beat-to-beat basis, responding to neurological feedback between the heart, the brain, and the needs of the body for oxygenated blood. And the same applies to our rate of breathing, which is intimately related to our circulatory system.
The medical term for a healthy but slightly irregular rhythm is “ectopic,” and it is our largely unconscious awareness of this dynamic pulse which reminds us that we are alive. In cases of medical emergency, that closely monitored feedback between the heart and the needs of the body is often weakened or severed, and a machine-like regularity of heartbeat appears, signaling trouble or impending death.
Similarly, music that lacks this dynamic, quicksilver pulse is perceived, consciously or not, as lacking an essential spark of life.
Solti’s conducting of the “Valkyries” was instead a sublime example of what we might call ectopic music—a powerful embodiment of the living, pulsing heart and breath of Wagner’s composition.
After the break we'll have the complete recordings of the different versions discussed in the article, and you can get a feel for what he's talking about yourself:
Following up on George Collligan's commentary on this subject: The way you play the cymbal pattern is really the center of your artistry as a jazz drummer, so let's do a little survey of the ways of interpreting it— the variations in accenting and rhythm people do to make their personal thing, and to do their job within the ensemble.
I've written the patterns in the now-standard triplet form, but swing rhythm is more complicated than that; even more so with swing rhythm on the cymbal, which can vary dramatically depending on the player, the tempo, and the style. That's beyond the scope of what we're talking about here— just don't be too triplet-fixated in your swing interpretation.
And don't overdo it with the accenting; if you listen to the music, it's fairly subtle the way the players do these things. You have to find a musical balance: if the accent obliterates the other notes of the pattern, you'll be blowing a hole in your time feel. And the cymbal is going to be making this pattern all night, and if you're hammering the 2 and 4, well, people's ears will get tired of that after the fourth or fifth hour.
50s / bop / Blakey-like
For a long time this driving interpretation was just the way you played the cymbal. This is generally played repetitively, with a moderate-to-strong accent on 2 and 4. Listen to Art Blakey, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Paul Motian, Philly Joe Jones, Art Taylor, and many others.
In attempting be “loose”, it's easy to play the unaccented notes sloppily, which can drop the bottom out of groove— so, articulate the 1 and 3 even as you accent the 2 and 4. This interpretation is usually supported by a consistent, strong hihat on 2 and 4, so, again, it's not necessary to overdo the accent on the cymbal.
Quarter note pulse
In recent years I've been favoring this as my default way of playing jazz time. It communicates a strong groove to the other musicians and to the audience. I've heard it be effective even when a drummer's cymbal pattern doesn't sound very swinging by itself— as soon as the band comes in, it sounds great.
I don't know if this feeling is accurate, but it seems to me that I've most seen this approach in veteran players who were young in the 70s and 80s, when big-drum Tony Williams influence was at its peak. Younger players seem to favor the other styles, and you can really sound different if you emphasize and sustain this type of feel. That's just my impression— maybe it's BS.
Elvin-like
Accenting the “skip” note, sometimes “ghosting” or omitting the note after the accent. Everyone does this today, but it was once very special. When I figured out that it was a thing, I thought I was the only person in the world doing it. This is especially helpful in making a two feel without sounding hokey. It also tends to make the music lay back, so you can deploy this if you need to make that happen. Doing this in an exaggerated, overly-regular, over-practiced way can easily sound stylized, so beware.
This is often done in a mixed rhythm, with a strong pull towards a dotted quarter note pulse:
Listen to drummers who do this interpretation, especially Elvin Jones, and in the 1960s and later, Pete LaRoca and Roy Haynes. In his jazz playing with Chick Corea, Steve Gadd does a form of this, with a legato, tending-towards-straight-8th swing interpretation.
Continuing with the analysis portion of this skiplet-based method of jazz coordination-thingy, in which, in order to learn independence vs. a jazz time feel, we orient everything around the three close-together notes of the cymbal pattern:
A reminder: I promise you this is not just a mass of analytical BS, with which to burden your students until they fire you, and quit drumming. The thing we're trying to do is hard, and it is usually handed to students with no strategy for learning it— they are expected to get it by brute-force practice. What we're doing is giving an actual process for this task; we're replacing no-instruction with instruction. So, it may look like we're complicating the task, but what we're really doing is clarifying it.
The goal in these first posts is just to show you the basic idea, and how to attach the independent notes to the cymbal pattern. Do refer back to the original post on this subject if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
First, here is a very well known line of music from Ted Reed's famous book:
A common interpretation— the relevant one to what we've been talking about— is to play the top line of the exercise (ignoring the bottom line), while playing jazz time with the cymbal and hihat, swinging all of the 8th notes. Doing that to the line above gives you this:
Here is how we break that up skiplet-style— any notes on the & of 1 or 3 are attached to the skiplet following it. Note that at the end, we play all the way to the 1 of the next line of music— not shown above— which happens to have a snare drum note on it. With this method, we always deal in complete skiplets.
Of course, this is usually done directly, without having the cymbal part written out— the student needs to end up with the complete part, while reading out of Reed. Next time we'll talk about how to get there— how I go about actually teaching this approach.
