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No! The metronome

#41
FullumMusic said:
One of the best ways to keep time and tempo is body movement. Tapping a foot is nice, but really involving the rest of your body in some way is better. Head nods, shoulder nods, head bops, hip sways. It really depends on the tempo as to what you can move and how much. Long flowing legato stuff could mean full body swaying. Mid tempo stuff could feel best with shoulders back and forth. Uptempo could only feel right with quick head-bobs. You can feel subdivisions too. Shoulders and hips on the quarter notes; head bops on the 8th notes.

Just get used to moving your body in a natural way to tempos. Do it when you practice songs. Do it when you practice with a metronome. Feel the pulse of the tempo through body movement.

I'd even say, run the metronome at different tempos and move your body to it like it's a beat that makes you wanna get down.

Once you can feel the tempo with movement, you'll feel when the speed is wrong. You won't be able to move correctly to it. The movements will either be cut short in an unnatural way, or your playing will be falling behind the movements.
Click to expand...

Time should be solid independent of body movements. We should move in response to how we feel... we shouldn't have to move to keep time, using it as a crutch.

Kenny Werner touched on this in his book 'Effortless Mastery.' I don't have it in front of me, nor do I remember the exact quote, but he recounted a story where he worked with a bassist as a student who had issues with time. They would grimace, stomp their feet, bend over and bob their head in an effort to stay in time and feel the groove. He did an exercise where he had the student plant his feet, facing a mirror, and played while just staring at themselves in the mirror, playing without thinking about specific notes or chords.... just PLAYING while holding a groove. The person's time, tone, and feel improved drastically without the extra motion and wasted energy of forcing the groove.

I was guilty of that early on when I started playing jazz, moreso on electric bass than upright. Learning to walk, solo, and deal with faster tempos took me a while to get on board with. I used to 'put on more of a show' to compensate for not being comfortable. It all, ironically, got much easier on upright. You can't really dance around and move too much to compensate when playing upright bass... you gotta feel it and get on it with it. Maybe a head bob, or a foot tap if it's happening organically, but that's it. If I'm just not getting it, I shed that tempo/piece hard in the practice room with a metronome.
 
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#42
I love the metronome, it's kind of a trance state for me sometimes, and the perfection of it appeals to me somehow. That said, sometimes it can also get really boring. How about a Beat Buddy Mini or similar? Not bragging, but I always seemed to have the best sense of time in a band, drummers who speed up or slow down drive me crazy.
 
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#43
Gilmourisgod said:
I love the metronome, it's kind of a trance state for me sometimes, and the perfection of it appeals to me somehow. That said, sometimes it can also get really boring. How about a Beat Buddy Mini or similar? Not bragging, but I always seemed to have the best sense of time in a band, drummers who speed up or slow down drive me crazy.
Click to expand...
If you have any apple products, like a phone or an iPad, they all come with GarageBand which has a ton of drum options.
 
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#44
I like to practice my scales at very slow tempos, setting the metronome as low as 20 BPM and placing the click on the four. Most other exercises i play at 60bpm with the clicks on 2 and 4, but there are many ways to do it. The harder it is, the more it helps.

Eden has some fun exercises.

 
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#45
Stick it on 2 and 4 and pretend its a snare. It makes everything more musical.

Also, live: trust yourself. If you start thinking your timing is bad, you'll add unnecessary pressure. If im playing in a duo, the 'solo' or 'melody' guy usually relies in my for keeping the foundation there. BUT, I did have one guy who thought his timing was amazing, I ended up having to play to HIS time rather than in time.

Which I guess brings up an interesting question: what is in time? Is it keeping a precise beat at certain intervals, or is it playing the same time as your bandmates are playing the melody? Unless playing live with a click (which you should only need to do if playing with a backing track IMO) the music will and maybe should deviate slightly along with the feel and intent of the melodic phrases.
 
#46
I spent an aggregate several years chained to one of those Seth Thomas torture devices which became audio Listerine: I hated it but I used it!

I'd suggest something like a BOSS drum machine and play along with simple preset patterns and you can still set tempi just like a metronome. Nowhere near as dry as a plain metronome, or you can reduce it down to just snare or kick drum only if you want a metronome-style presentation.
 
#48
bigdaddybass12 said:
I have a low-key restaurant gig where I play with a guy that plays acoustic guitar. My timing has been pretty good until recently. It has gone to crap. Either I over-think or my mind wanders. The guitar player has a steady beat So it’s back to the metronome for me.. Any suggestions to make it easier?
Click to expand...

How/when did you start to notice this? You say the guy has a steady beat. Here's an alternative possibility:- Musical time is a dynamic consensus or agreement that is reached and continually re-negotiated in real time by everyone playing in the moment. It requires constant listening, awareness and flexibility from everyone, as well a a certain willingness to yield or enforce as necessary. For the most part, difficulties in playing with a metronome do not arise due to serious flaws in your playing but because of the nature of the machine. The metronome doesn't listen and does not negotiate or accomodate. Is it possible that your guy, with his steady beat, is in fact not listening to you and is just ploughing ahead, just like a metronome?
 
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#49
bass12 said:
Kenny Werner might not like it but body movement simply works. It's easy for one's fingers to wander when there's no part of your body maintaining a steady pulse to use as a reference.
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It 'works' as a crutch. You shouldn't have to always be moving some other part of your body to understand and hear where the time is. It does unfortunately become a habit for many that is hard to break, because it's been ingrained in a lot of people that 'you must always be counting with a body part'. You should be able to play along with a metronome or other time reference and stay accurate without moving anything but your fingers. If horn players and other instrumentalists can do it, bassists can too. Time is everyone's responsibility.
 
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#50
SteveCS said:
How/when did you start to notice this? You say the guy has a steady beat. Here's an alternative possibility:- Musical time is a dynamic consensus or agreement that is reached and continually re-negotiated in real time by everyone playing in the moment. It requires constant listening, awareness and flexibility from everyone, as well a a certain willingness to yield or enforce as necessary. For the most part, difficulties in playing with a metronome do not arise due to serious flaws in your playing but because of the nature of the machine. The metronome doesn't listen and does not negotiate or accomodate. Is it possible that your guy, with his steady beat, is in fact not listening to you and is just ploughing ahead, just like a metronome?
Click to expand...
...or maybe the guitarist is the one with the bad time after all?
 
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#53
JazznFunk said:
It 'works' as a crutch. You shouldn't have to always be moving some other part of your body to understand and hear where the time is. It does unfortunately become a habit for many that is hard to break, because it's been ingrained in a lot of people that 'you must always be counting with a body part'. You should be able to play along with a metronome or other time reference and stay accurate without moving anything but your fingers. If horn players and other instrumentalists can do it, bassists can too. Time is everyone's responsibility.
Click to expand...
I would be more inclined to call it a technique rather than a "crutch". With movement the time is still coming from you after all.
 
#55
JazznFunk said:
Time should be solid independent of body movements. We should move in response to how we feel... we shouldn't have to move to keep time, using it as a crutch.
Click to expand...
I've noticed an interesting thing. When I take a 6-mile run, my running tempo is, kind of, constant and slow at around 80 bpm (I count the movement of my left and right legs as the eighth notes.)

The tracks I'm listening to (even singing along) while running have different tempos, but...
My mechanical body movement does not interfere with my "mental playing"/"singing" songs that have different tempos.
 
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#60
Whousedtoplay said:
I've noticed an interesting thing. When I take a 6-mile run, my running tempo is, kind of, constant and slow at around 80 bpm (I count the movement of my left and right legs as the eighth notes.)

The tracks I'm listening to (even singing along) while running have different tempos, but...
My mechanical body movement does not interfere with my "mental playing"/"singing" songs that have different tempos.
Click to expand...
I rarely, if ever, listen to music while running, but I'm not sure this is a valid correlation. I'm not varying my running pace to whatever song is on, I'm paying attention to whatever my goal pace would be.... regardless of musical accompaniment. I also don't run while playing bass, so the discussion of internal tempo/clock vs the context of 'timekeeping' while running vs playing music is a bit futile.
 

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