Time / Rhythm

Time and rhythm are critical for every musician. Many times people think that time is a conductor's or drummer's job. That way of thinking is limiting. In order for a group to sound tight, every musician must have a great sense of internal time. You can develop tightness with experience, but you don't have time to develop tightness in many performance and recording situations. You have to have it internally.

Ex1 - Playing to Tracks

Playing to tracks is a good way to make sure you are capable of at least following steady time. It's also a good way to develop your ear

Approach

Put a track on and play over the top of it, either doubling a part, or improvising your own part. Pay attention to any tendency to speed up or having to catch up.

Ex2 - Playing to a Click

For the purpose of developing a sense of time, playing to a click (metronome) is a step up from playing to a track. When playing to a click, every beat subdivision has a very definite point, so this is a good way to check that your time is precise.

Approach

The approach is like playing over a track, except that the other instruments can no longer cover any inconsistent time issues. You want to be able to "bury the click" by having your notes exactly match the click - boom, boom, boom, not bloom, bloom, bloom.

Next Steps

For a real challenge, use your mind to move the clicks from downbeats to upbeats. This forces you to use your internal sense of time for the downbeats, and the upbeats are only a check.

Ex3 - Removing Clicks

It's possible to be overly dependent on a click-track. If you are depending on the click, you are not depending on your internal sense of time.

Approach

The assumption with exercise 2 is that each click was on the down-beat. For the first part of this exercise, cut the speed of the clicks in half, while keeping the tempo consistent. So, instead of getting clicks on beats 1, 2, 3, and 4 - you only get clicks on beats 1 and 3. Once you are comfortable with this, use your mind to move the clicks to beats 2 and 4. Once you are comfortable with this, cut the speed of the clicks in half again. Practice with the click on beat 1, then use your mind to move the click to beats 2, 3, or 4.

Tips and Warnings

when you remove clicks, make sure you are hearing the missing clicks in your head.

Next Steps

With 1-click-per-bar, use your mind to move the click to the upbeat of 1, 2, 3, or 4.

Ex4 - Removing Measures

You want to be sure you can groove with or without a drummer. This exercise helps you to maintain your groove when the drummer stops.

Approach

If you have a rhythm machine, program a drum track or click track to repeat a four-bar phrase. Make sure you can groove to the track. Now, program the track so the drummer or click is silent for the last measure. Make sure you can groove to the track, and flawlessly hit beat one every time it comes around. Program the drummer or click to play 2 out of 4 bars, then 1 out of 4 bars.

Tips and Warnings

Make sure you can hear/feel the drummer or click during the silent bars.

Next Steps

Program the drummer or click to play one beat out of four measures

Ex5 - Looping 16

This exercise helps you to tune up your beat placement of the 'e' and 'a' 16th notes. Most people count 16th notes as 1-e-&-a-2-e-&-a-3-e-&-a-4-e-&-a. Our placement of 'e' and 'a' is typically not exact, but more of a rough mid-point between the downbeat and upbeat.

Approach

You need a loop station for this one. Set up your loop station for a one-bar loop. You can have a click on each downbeat. The goal is to record 16 perfect 16th notes - perfect both in duration and placement. The trick is that you are not allowed to record 16th notes back-to-back. You need to play one 16th note per measure for 16 measures, shifting the note by one subdivision at-a-time.

Tips and Warnings

This is still really hard for me. At first I tried to do it by feel, but I kept getting lost by about the 9th 16th note. The easiest way for me is to think of groups of four 16th notes. When I'm on a down-beat, make sure I'm feeling down-beats. When I'm on an upbeat, make sure I'm feeling both upbeats and down-beats. When I'm on an 'e' or 'a', make sure I'm feeling all four subdivision of the quarter notes.

Next Steps

Victor does this as part of his live show. He changes the pitches to create an interesting run. Once all 16 are recorded from the downbeat of 1 to the 'a' of 4, he layers over them backwards, starting from the 'a' of 4 and working back to the downbeat of 1. This allow him to lay down a track of counter-moving 16th note runs.