Improving your time keeping

[john lamb]

hey - I'm compiling a list of ways that people improve their time. I have 4 general categories so far...

* Metronome

* Recording + listening back

* Beatbug type real time measuring

* Unaided


Any suggestions?> thanks!

[Juan Expósito]

I would add:

- Playing WITHOUT the click/recording/listening.
I knew this was a good way and Simon Phillips talked about playing without it too, I don´t know where...
Once you get used to play with the click, it´s very important to sound with consistency and solidness when you play without it (grooving for a long time, fills, stops, silences...)

Also, when you record with the click and listen back, mute the click track and see.
The drums alone must sound GOOD.

The timing, that thing.

[bstocky]

Benny Greb had some cool ideas in his dvd. You can use the click as a Quarter Note or ANDS or the last beat of a triplet. You can program one/two/three bars of click and one or two bars of nothing as a loop and see if you come back in time with the first click of bar one. You could play your quarter note click through a speaker quietly, hit something, even bang your sticks together and see if you can make the click disappear. Then play 8ths or 16ths and see if you hear the click or if it's still buried under your playing.

[Clint Hopkins]

Get a drum machine and program syncopated eighth and sixteenth note rhythms and play along and see how well you lock in. Feel the space.
Better yet, make loops of favorite basslines, favorite musical passages etc., preferably stuff without drums, with Audacity or similar software
and practice with those for a more organic approach.

[Julián Fernández]

I found that working on a reboundless pad helped tremendously to my time playing... I´m hitting a couple of hours a day with Wilcoxon´s material and my whole feel is better now. It´s easier (at least to me) to adjust your clock when you´re working with a pad than working on an actual groove. Give it a try and you´ll see. (The key to me was sticking to the routine -even if you have to do at 3am!-).

[langmick]

Speaking or singing a melody or vocalizing read notes really is a great way to improve.

I spent almost every morning for a few months, until my PC blew up, creating a loop in ableton at various bpm. I used these rather than a metronome.

Grip is important, I find. The whole feel of your body when playing, and what happens during longer stretches of playing a very simple groove.

It's funny that this topic came up, but the other day I was on my practice pad kit and had headphones on with a click, I basically had no sound coming from my hands, but I could feel myself hitting. I found that when we play the sound can get in the way of concentrating on how your body feels when playing. This allowed me to focus on my movements, rather than the sound I would be creating.

[john lamb]

Great stuff! Nobody has said play with a slow click yet

JR Robinson says he never worked with a metronome - instead he recorded himself, but he put the recorder outside so he could only hear it muffled, so he would only focus on the general feel of the music.

For certain things I like putting the click on a polyrhythm - such as a quarter note triplet while I'm doing a duplet thing or visa versa. Especially if I'm trying to clean up a triplet phrasing that's killing me...

Any more ideas?
thanks!

[renardvert]

Right now, I'm playing with my click at 10 bpm, beeping on the first beat of the bar. So I'm really playing at 40 bpm but with one click every bar. I was told to do that to improve my timekeeping. I think it's working and I find that what it does is that it makes me more aware of any innacuracies in my timekeeping. I used to think that we could play perfect time but nowadays, I think it's more a matter of really being conscious of any tendencies you might have in your playing. So that when you're about to drag or rush, you make a slight adjustment and keep the time moving forward. Still working on it these days.

[langmick]

With the Ableton loops, I was also able to put some silence in, that was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I set it up for the fill turnaround on the bar.

There are a ton of things you can do with Live like that.

[langmick]

There is another important component to good to time and that's confidence and intentionality.

Im gonna play this at this tempo, and then keeping conscious attention to the feel and listening.

Maybe there is practice good time and playing good time, and they are similar but not the same.

I find that to be true.