Can "Groove" be taught?

[Fergie Fulton]

Originally Posted by Stone Soup

Let's be scientific, here: Groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic "feel" or sense of "swing" created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section.

FEEL cannot be learned, only nurtured.

No. Rhythm can be found in the "clickety clack" of a train. Rhythm is not groove. One needs rhythm TO groove. Groove is an understanding of where the FEEL of a musical piece is.

Now when you say scientific, just how much scientific do you want?
Are we going to work to the level you call scientific, or are we going to be properly scientific.....and if so count me in.
For starters.....sorry but if rhythm is part of it then rhythm is groove. You are playing semantics with words. If someone is called a "swinging player" or used, the term " he swings" is used for them, it means they have rhythm, or as you would have it, groove.


Maybe the reason some people cannot groove is because they do not listen to a wide and various types of music in order to pick out nuances from each that allows them to groove?

I find that when ever I work with a player with timing issues it is because they do not have a wide enough reference points is what they have learned. Rather than physically practice they need to listen and listen to wide, various different types of music. They need to internalise and find empathy with the music, if they get this, they start to feel and when they start to feel they relate to the overhaul sound they hear. Then they can pick movement out from within that sound, they hear bass instruments moving at a different sub division of the tempo, they realise within the sound there is a sound and within those sounds are different feels.....even different harmonies and may be melodies.
But you have to be taught to listen, and I order to teach it you have to be able to explain it, so that means understand it.

So can listening to Latin music improve the timing of a thrash death mental player?
Answer...yes of course it can and the reason it can is because it becomes part of what they already know, and because their timing is better, the hold the rhythm better, so define the beat better, so the play better, they can move their relationship to the beat better and stay in time, in other words they groove.
Can great jazz player who's note values and tone are great, but their time wanders find any value in listening to strict tempo music?
Answer... Yes of course it can, listening to Marching music or music made to a click with help them tighten up their playing?...but how much is needed to be listened to and how much is needed to be used is a different situation.

If you watch and study a player you learn very little, if you listen and learn their music you learn very little unless you have good reference points to relate it to.
All you can do is an impression of them, a shallow version of what are, a clone if you will. You have not learned how they thought, how they created what you have been listening to, how the idea to use and play the notes they choose, with that tone in that style.
You never see the ingredients....you have as much chance of being able to reproduce the flavours, feel, textures etc of your favourite cake by watching it.
Even if you taste it, can you cannot identify the ingredients, there quantities, the order they were use in etc to create the cake you love?
If you have never tasted ginger how can you identify it if used in the cake?
If it is a blend of ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg, to give just a hint of that combination then you will miss out adding the ginger, if you have never tasted ginger you cannot identify it.

Music is the same but even more subtle, one person playing a guitar can imply many different things in the performance of that song. Various people depending on the musical experiences they can draw on will here different things, they do not need to be heard in black and white, or defined, they can be implied, they can let the listener fill in the blanks if need be.

Any player that can do that, in any genre, with any instrument, can create a groove, can be taught to groove or taught to groove better, but the teacher has to be able to identify the problem and put it right.
To simply say someone cannot groove is mis-understanding what makes groove, so what part do you work on, their timing, their feel, their counting skills, their reading skills, their auditory skills, the technique? But what within the technique is the problem the left hand or the right hand, is it all the fingers or just one, is it the instrument, is it their tone etc?

So if anyone believes someone cannot be taught how to groove, it may be because the teacher does not understand how to approach the problem, not the students ability to learn.
So to be semantic with words, yes groove cannot be taught, but it can be learned...but to what level of playing does playing in time finish and groove start?

[Hobobob]

When I started playing, I had a horrific sense of groove. I was all about the Geddy Lee super aggro play as hard and fast as I can. Eventually, I started to learn what playing bass in a band actually was about, and while I kept some of the aforementioned aspects, I learned a tremendous amount about locking in, sitting in the pocket, and grooving. Now, I'm much more concerned with making the song sound good than showing everyone just how awesome I am. I believe that anyone with a decent sense of time can learn to groove with the best of them. It just takes lots of work, practice, and the desire to truly learn. Not that there aren't folks with literally no sense of rhythm whatsoever....

[Tupac]

Originally Posted by Stone Soup

Let's be scientific, here: Groove is the sense of propulsive rhythmic "feel" or sense of "swing" created by the interaction of the music played by a band's rhythm section.

FEEL cannot be learned, only nurtured.

No. Rhythm can be found in the "clickety clack" of a train. Rhythm is not groove. One needs rhythm TO groove. Groove is an understanding of where the FEEL of a musical piece is.

I don't know about that. Rap music is made with drum samples and synth basses, and I find that some of that music sounds as groovy as the best of them.

[Russell L]

Originally Posted by Stone Soup

The person has to have the it in them, somewhere, in the first place. How will you teach someone with no rhythm to "groove"? People who are so inclined can be taught different styles, but people with no natural feel absolutely cannot be taught to groove.

I don't buy into the "natural" thing so much. No one is born with groove. I also believe anyone can learn to play music in general. Oh, there are things from early life that help, of course, that may make it seem like someone is born with "natural talent," whatever that means. Like, listening to a lot of music during preschool years. It helps develop a part of the brain that has to do with music, and like stuff. The ear gets trained (like me at age three banging on the piano, and eventually figuring out how to play songs by ear at age 8---I even picked out Exodus, by Ferrante and Teischer, although not as fancily done). Folks would say, "That boy has a talent for music." Nope, I'd just been messing with sounds for several years already.

You can LEARN this stuff. IMO.

[Russell L]

Also, IMO, rhythm is rhythm. It's when you start adding nuances of feel that it becomes groove. In other words, ARTICULATION IS EVERYTHING! Hit the first note hard, then the next three softer, now play it staccato, next line legato. Oh, and cut this note off short, and push the dynamics louder as you play this line going upwards, etc., etc. ARTICULATION gives "feel." Otherwise, it's just notes with a designated rhythm.

[Modern Growl]

Groove is all about feel, rhythm and timing.

You can play just 2 notes and "groove". IMO you can learn anything - but some are more born naturals.

[Modern Growl]

Originally Posted by Russell L

I don't buy into the "natural" thing so much. No one is born with groove.

Strongly disagree. Some are born with a more creative nack and more musically inclined. Some just "feel" music more than others.

Those that perhaps don't have that strong musicl inclination & feel within them CAN STILL LEARN it - but it doesn't come as freely or easy to them.

This goes with anything in life. We all have our strong suits.

[JustGer]

I think it can be taught, but it's not something learned in moderation. I think you either have it or you don't, for me it came after playing with a seriously talented drummer for 1-2 years, it just turned on one day! I thought I had it before, but I didn't.

[Nashrakh]

Originally Posted by Modern Growl

Strongly disagree. Some are born with a more creative nack and more musically inclined. Some just "feel" music more than others.

Those that perhaps don't have that strong musicl inclination & feel within them CAN STILL LEARN it - but it doesn't come as freely or easy to them.

This goes with anything in life. We all have our strong suits.

Hmm. I'd say it's not so much that one is born with a groove but that the type of music you grow up with tremendously influences your own sense of rhythm.

We all know the stereotypes of "black" and "white" people having inborn groove or no groove resepctively, think South Park. I say it's not a question of skin color but of musical socialization. Can't argue with "Western" music sorely lacking in the rythm department at least. Lol

So I guess that puts me in the camp of people who think anyone can learn it if they expose themselves enough to the appropriate kind of music.

[Clef_de_fa]

Originally Posted by Russell L

Also, IMO, rhythm is rhythm. It's when you start adding nuances of feel that it becomes groove. In other words, ARTICULATION IS EVERYTHING! Hit the first note hard, then the next three softer, now play it staccato, next line legato. Oh, and cut this note off short, and push the dynamics louder as you play this line going upwards, etc., etc. ARTICULATION gives "feel." Otherwise, it's just notes with a designated rhythm.

Well all that can be learned and written in standart notation. So it isn't some magical thing that can only be learned by earing it first. Like so many people say.

[mrbell321]

I think there's a problem with over-generalizations in this thread. The question "Can groove be taught?" is, at best, imprecise and, worst, just a bad question. At it's most straight forward, it could be taken to mean "Is it possible to present information about groove from one person to another". The answer is a most definite "yes", but that's not what I think most people are looking for. "Is it possible to present information about astrophysics from Neil deGrasse Tyson to an ant?" Yes, but that doesn't mean the ant will know any more about astrophysics at the end. So I'm being a bit pedantic, but as an engineer, that's really my job, and the hardest part of the job is asking the right question to the right people in a way that everyone understands it.

So, lets try to fix the question. How about "Can groove be learned?". Again, the answer is "Yes". I'm sure we can even find evidence to support this, but lets try a thought experiment: Imagine your favorite groovy bassist's best groovy work. Was it his first attempt at playing/composing? The answer is almost certainly "no". You might say that I'm conflating technical ability with groove. I could argue that you cannot have one without the other, but perhaps a more satisfactory scenario would be: Once given sufficient technical ability, was the grooviest music very early or somewhat later the the artists "career"? The answer is "they learned to groove better over time".

Still, the question may not be quite right. This is obviously a person who had that "innate" sense of groove to begin with. I won't go into why I think "innate" is a usually misnomer. So how about: Can a person with no history of music learn to groove? Let's take the position that groove cannot be learned. This means that "There exists no person out of 108 billion(estimate for all the people who have ever lived) that at one point in their adult life had little exposure to and/or interest in music(the only evidence we have of where groove comes from) and at a later time was able to feel the groove in something". I find this highly untenable. So, "Groove cannot be learned" would appear to be false, or "Yes, groove can be learned"

We could reformulate the question into the postulate: Some people cannot learn to groove. Without some serious, long-term studies of dedicated people who clearly have trouble with groove, I don't think we can say with any level of confidence, and proving a negative is VERY difficult so we may never say w/ 100% confidence. I can imagine an experiment, but it is not feasible. Neuroscience is not my strong suit but the answer may lie there.

As with almost everything dealing in population-wide surveys, if you could graph the continuum of people and their ability to groove, you would probably see a bell curve. On the left, there may very well be people with no ability to groove and they will never get any better. This is going to be a minority. In the middle is most people. They can feel the groove of a song, but w/o some work, they're not going to "capitalize" on it and they may not appreciate very complex grooves w/ odd meters and polyrhythms. To the right are "prodigious groovers"(which, btw, would be an excellent name for a band). I'd put Wooten in this category. I can't follow some of his grooves(so, put me somewhere in the middle of the curve), but that doesn't mean they aren't there. I'm sure he could.

So, "Can groove be taught?" The answer is somewhere between "Yes", for most people, and "we will probably never know", for some minority.

And all this, without even defining, in measurable terms, what "groove" means.

[Stone Soup]

I'll rephrase my answer. Groove can be nurtured in people who are inclined to truly FEEL the music. Some feel more than others. Some will NEVER feel music. It cannot be written. It can only be implied. It can only be interpreted by an individual with FEEL (there's that word again).

Each of you, saying "groove can be taught", most likely don't groove. You only think you do.

Buncha' straight time playin' *****...

P.S. mrbell321, your above post is very well put.

[5StringFool]

For all of you that say you can't be born with groove, watch this video of a 29 month old little boy playing drums.

http://youtu.be/hKOApC9KB48

[Clef_de_fa]

I think this should be a read for many player here :

Natural ability??

[Marty Forrer]

Originally Posted by CraigTB

It's like everything else - some people are born with incredible innate talent for it, others have to practice to get it, and there's probably a tiny percentage of people that could never get it (like being feel-deaf instead of tone-deaf).

Play along with lots of groovy music, you'll get better at it.

To me a good groove player has a lot of patience in their playing - nothing is ever rushed.

The last sentence in this post is the money shot. Same applies to swing, which in a way is the same thing. A well respected bassist once told me "play like you've just had a big fat joint and you are real relaxed".

[Stone Soup]

Originally Posted by Clef_de_fa

I think this should be a read for many player here :

Natural ability??

I don't need to read another forum thread full of opinions. Beside that, the thread has nothing at all to do with groove. That thread is about someone's ability to play. A computer can play a series of notes more accurately and faster than any human, but a computer cant groove--unless you consider a complete lack of feel (or swing) a groove.

[Russell L]

Originally Posted by Clef_de_fa

Well all that can be learned and written in standart notation. So it isn't some magical thing that can only be learned by earing it first. Like so many people say.

Yes, of course. What I meant was, first, play a passage of music with no expression as you would get on an electronic keyboard with the key pressure turned off. Just straight, notes played for periods of time only. Then, add markinbgs for expression, of whatever type, and play it again according to them. It's the same music, but with articulation (the ways by which to produce expression) added. "The Groove," as it were.

[Clef_de_fa]

Originally Posted by Stone Soup

I don't need to read another forum thread full of opinions. Beside that, the thread has nothing at all to do with groove. That thread is about someone's ability to play. A computer can play a series of notes more accurately and faster than any human, but a computer cant groove--unless you consider a complete lack of feel (or swing) a groove.

Well the natural hability to play and the natural hability to groove can be really related. Also there is a lot of backing with studies and book on the subject, not just throw down biase again either opinion.

[Clef_de_fa]

Originally Posted by Russell L

Yes, of course. What I meant was, first, play a passage of music with no expression as you would get on an electronic keyboard with the key pressure turned off. Just straight, notes played for periods of time only. Then, add markinbgs for expression, of whatever type, and play it again according to them. It's the same music, but with articulation (the ways by which to produce expression) added. "The Groove," as it were.

Sorry I should have said that I just wanted to add what I said to your already good post.

[nitetrane98]

I'm a noob on the bass but not to music. I never realized this was such a nebulous concept among players. It seems to be almost an extension of the line of thought, "Well, I don't know what it is but I know it when I hear it." Maybe we can give examples of what we think are killer grooves.
This is a live Larry Carlton clip. How easy it must be with a "Lay down the law" drummer. I feel this groove to my toes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnnBYUGxau0