Using a metronome is essential, for me anyway. It tells me so many things about my playing, first and foremost that I often get lost when soloing. Mine has a visual cue for beat 1, and I've found that after a certain number of measures i've lost track of beat 1 and am actually on beat 2 or 3 where i thought i was on 1.
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Metronomes and Time/Rhythm Awareness
- Thread starter jallenbass
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Using a metronome is essential, for me anyway. It tells me so many things about my playing, first and foremost that I often get lost when soloing. Mine has a visual cue for beat 1, and I've found that after a certain number of measures i've lost track of beat 1 and am actually on beat 2 or 3 where i thought i was on 1.
This...
...appears to be at odds with this, where you agreed with me that the facts are genre-neutral...
I'm still not sure which 'specific music' I'm not recognising...
Sometimes I wish I knew nothing about the internals of music such that I could listen and enjoy it on face value. But as a player that is not possible. But the more I realise that it all has the same underlying facts the more liberated I feel in my playing. I'm becoming progressively less bound by/to genre/style and the constraints implied by them. I can set a series of baroque-style arpeggio to a reversed clave rhythm and use it to close a fretless bass solo in a pop song. Where is that wrong?
...appears to be at odds with this, where you agreed with me that the facts are genre-neutral...
I'm still not sure which 'specific music' I'm not recognising...
Sometimes I wish I knew nothing about the internals of music such that I could listen and enjoy it on face value. But as a player that is not possible. But the more I realise that it all has the same underlying facts the more liberated I feel in my playing. I'm becoming progressively less bound by/to genre/style and the constraints implied by them. I can set a series of baroque-style arpeggio to a reversed clave rhythm and use it to close a fretless bass solo in a pop song. Where is that wrong?
Dear Jeff,
I have so much respect for you as a great Musician/great bass player; therefore, I will let you make the final point/the last word in our discussion.
I'll answer your thought as well as possible. And then, I think that we will have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.
You are again referring to art, to using baroque-style arpeggios to a clave rhythm. I never refer to art/performance in any post unless it is a passing comment. I always referred to the teaching and the learning of the bass guitar. Only! But, as I mentioned before, separating art from being taught correctly is an unfathomable concept for bass players to understand. I'm not exaggerating; I almost never read a comment from anyone that understands that these two principles have nothing to do with each other.
I've said many times that a self taught musician has no limits, no rules, and no confinements of any kind in how they wish to learn. This is the way that 100% of all bass players learned how to play. But, if you, even as a self taught player, decide to study from a teacher or attend a school to be taught the electric bass, then the rules of what and how you are taught change completely. This is why my express "specific music" is strange to you; You've never been taught what this expression means because electric bass teachers and most people on TB don't understand its meaning. Why? Because they have never been taught via a narrow educational method. Even top name bass educators and schools where the electric bass is taught don't understand its meaning, so how could you or anyone else understand it.
Consider that few bass players on TB are trained in music. Most have been involved in a level and style of playing that has not improved for the majority of their time that they have been playing the bass. It would be to their advantage to know that an extremely narrow and perfect manner of being taught will change everyone's bass playing starting within a month. It is here,and only here (being taught correctly) that I put focus in most of my posts; whether people like it or not, there is a manner to be taught that students are not getting. This approach is so guaranteed to improve your playing that literally anyone that is taught via the "Specific Music" concept are going to open musical doors that are closed to them at this moment. But, people have to be open to trying this approach.
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I submit that you may be getting lost when you solo because you don't know how to solo. Instead of focusing on the literal forcing of yourself to fit within a click, I suggest that you simply practice soloing for another year via all the possible solo jazz materials you can practice. Then you will discover that you never had a time problem, but instead, you had difficulty in knowing what to play.
...
and just to add a little to my 'parentage and provenance' comments, once upon a time there wad no concwpt of key, only modes. Then the concept of relative minor was developed and the 6th mode (Aeolian) was rebranded Natural Minor. This was modified to enforce the leading note and make the chords sound 'correct'. It was then modified further to make singing easier - hello Melodic Minor. The idea that a scale could be different up to down was rejected by jazzers, so we have the Jazz Minor scale. During some of that time the tritone was as good as illegal, now it is de-rigeur in blues and jazz. Were any of those previous methods or ideas discarded along the way? Of course not. In fact, look up the number of questions here about modes - I'd say we've come full circle.
I do have a formal education. And I'm not talking about the type of trifle I wrote out in that other thread. Baroque style arrpegio are often built with compound intervals over many octaves and sometimes phrased over several bars and the notes are rarely in order. And its not pre-planned - rather conceived and executed in the moment. All as a result of studying a wide range of music over many years. Just playing the right notes is music 101. Playing them at breakneck speed with no dynamics is actually quite unmusical, but seems to be the want of modern bass players. Fashion, huh? Yes, I agree we should leave it here. Thanks for your time...
and just to add a little to my 'parentage and provenance' comments, once upon a time there wad no concwpt of key, only modes. Then the concept of relative minor was developed and the 6th mode (Aeolian) was rebranded Natural Minor. This was modified to enforce the leading note and make the chords sound 'correct'. It was then modified further to make singing easier - hello Melodic Minor. The idea that a scale could be different up to down was rejected by jazzers, so we have the Jazz Minor scale. During some of that time the tritone was as good as illegal, now it is de-rigeur in blues and jazz. Were any of those previous methods or ideas discarded along the way? Of course not. In fact, look up the number of questions here about modes - I'd say we've come full circle.
I do have a formal education. And I'm not talking about the type of trifle I wrote out in that other thread. Baroque style arrpegio are often built with compound intervals over many octaves and sometimes phrased over several bars and the notes are rarely in order. And its not pre-planned - rather conceived and executed in the moment. All as a result of studying a wide range of music over many years. Just playing the right notes is music 101. Playing them at breakneck speed with no dynamics is actually quite unmusical, but seems to be the want of modern bass players. Fashion, huh? Yes, I agree we should leave it here. Thanks for your time...
Wont argue with that at all..I get the concept of it in terms of the theory, and If someone is comping behind me, whether or not it's drums or piano I can do ok..but without those "crutches" I struggle a bit too much and have problems connecting what I know what I should be doing to what I am actually doing.
Working on it though, however not playing this type of music for awhile doesn't help at all..
Groove Master
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I wish Jeff Berlin would publish here a video of himself playing with a click....
That would be very interesting
Anyway I haven't read the whole thing but just think about all those classically-trained musicians playing for movies with the damn click....
That would be very interesting
Anyway I haven't read the whole thing but just think about all those classically-trained musicians playing for movies with the damn click....
Also interesting could be a positive contribution. So far, just telling everyone they learned wrong, they play wrong, they were taught wrong, they teach wrong or that they plain are wrong is becoming a masterclass in alienation, IMHO. YMMV
Groove Master
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If you need a metronome in order to learn to keep steady time, maybe you should become a lead guitarist. That way, it's considered stylistic to not be on beat.
But I don't want to be a guitar player...
I don't either, but somehow I developed perfectly good time without ever using a metronome.
- Dec 13, 1999
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And there are people that have perfectly good pitch recognition for interval relationships and chord structure and function, but to suggest that those that don't would have no benefit from practicing ear training with a keyboard is just ill-informed.I don't either, but somehow I developed perfectly good time without ever using a metronome.
I developed good time by learning how to read and play first. Then, I played with people. No metronome needed. I also have a degree in music. That's 6 semesters of ear training. If I was tone deaf, that wouldn't have helped me with pitch recognition, and I would have failed out. If you can't perceive rhythm and time, a metronome won't fix that, but luckily, most people can recognize a steady pulse. Ear training is an ages old form of honing one's ear and goes back as far as going to school for music does. I wasn't born with great rhythm. It came along as I was learning music in an academic setting.
- Dec 13, 1999
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- Chuck Sher publishes my book, WALKING BASSICS:The Fundamentals of Jazz Bass Playing.
Then why the condescending "lead guitar player" remark? Great, you learned without using one. There are people who didn't need to do a lot in ear training because, for whatever reason, it was a skill set that didn't need a lot of work for them. But to say that if they didn't need to put work in, using proven methods and pedagogy to develop the wherewithal to recognize interval relationships and chord function won't work for other people is, again, ill-informed.
Agree. I've been teaching traditional theory classes at the university level for over 20 years, and jazz theory classes for over 15. When I was a student, I came in to school with a severe overbalance on the aural side of the theoretical coin; I could hear everything but had trouble notating and expressing it, and at first did poorly at written theory. After the first year of theory (once I learned to notate what I was hearing) I got perfect or nearly perfect scores on every aural test, yet I knew that I still had much room to improve. I've been working on improving my skills for the last 25+ years since then and have made a lot of progress. As my old theory teacher used to say, "if you find something you can't do yet, a stone wall that you can't break free to the other side of, pick up that sledgehammer and start breaking some rocks".
As a teacher I have passed this advice along every semester, and the students who struggled with aural skills/recognition but work on it consistently make progress. Those who don't pretty much stay where they were when they came in. In my experience, pitch recognition, harmonic understanding, and rhythmic accuracy are skills like any other and will improve with practice. Devices like metronomes and drones are basically just learning tools that help the striving musician asses the objective accuracy of their progress. I have a hard time understanding why many people have bad things to say about them. If someone was training for the olympics as a sprinter, it's easy to say that a stopwatch won't make them run faster. On the other hand, without a means of clocking the 100 meter dash, how else would they know if their training was helping them run faster or not? And why not use the tool when it's such an easy way to make such a critical assessment?
No matter how good someone is at anything there is always room for improvement. Steve Nash has the highest free throw percentage in NBA history but it's not 100% and I'm sure he continued to work on that throughout his career.
That's all well and good. The lead guitar player remark was a total joke because soloists can play out of time, and often do as an artistic statement.
I cannot compare ear training and the use of a metronome. They are not comparable. Ear training helped me with recognizing harmony and rhythmic elements. I personally do not believe that a metronome really helps. None of the bass players I went to school with used one, nor were we required to. Ear Training was required, though. Again... not ill-informed. I base my opinions on my experiences.
I totally agree with this statement. I will always strive to improve until I literally can't pick up my instrument and play it.
Because I don't have to. I never practiced being able to follow a click, but I can and could when I started playing 29 years ago. I also only use a click when I have to due to a sequenced track being involved (MIDI). When I go to record something I've written with a real drummer, I've never used a click. I choose other musicians who can keep a steady tempo without one.
