How to Play Music Vol. 3 - Grooving
Grooving
To have groove means to be able to feel musical time inside your spirit. It means you can produce time, or lock in with another musician who has established a groove. Musical time isn’t necessarily the same as the time you’d get from a clock or metronome, but it’s generally fairly close. In my opinion, any tool that produces known consistent intervals is a brilliant practice device for a musician who wants to improve their groove.
The obvious tool of choice is a metronome, which I will be using for all of our time exercises, but I want to take a moment to note that metronomes are far from the only practice tool that good musicians use. Throughout your day, you encounter grooves almost everywhere that you can use to practice your time. For example:
Analog Clocks
Turn Signals
Windshield Wipers
Recorded Music
Water Dripping
Flashing Lights
Record Spinning in Terminal Groove
Beeping Alarms
Etc.
What makes a groove feel good is that it’s steady. Walking is a perfect analogy. We all have a groove when we walk, if one leg gets injured or something has us off balance it feels weird and unpleasant. The steady left, right, left, right, once you set your pace on a walk becomes meditative and healthy- music works the same way. Musicians with great groove may or may not play with lots of flashy rhythms and patterns, but the strong steadiness of their inner time and beat is always apparent.
The complexity of a pattern is never what makes music groovy- it’s all about how nicely that pattern fits within and compliments the beat. The beat is the most basic, simple, wonderful thing that unites all of the musicians playing with each other, and all of the people listening to those musicians. The beat is what you bob your head with. The beat is what you tap your foot to. The beat is not the same as a rhythm- the beat is always there, always steady under everything, as a means of balancing and contextualizing the changes that occur everywhere else in music. Being groovy means never losing the beat.
In every exercise, you should be tapping your foot. I tend to be a heel tapper- I care not if you tap your heel or toe. Some people like to bounce their torso, some bob their head, I suppose you don’t HAVE to tap your foot, but I’m asking you to repeatedly because it’s very important that some part of your body is physically connected to the beat.
EXERCISE 3 - Play the Beat
If any part of this exercise causes your foot to stop tapping the beat, start over from your last successful step.
1- Find a metronome- you can use google, download an app, or buy a digital or mechanical metronome from your local music store
2- Pick a tempo, any tempo will do, but I recommend something around 60-80 BPM for beginners, advanced musicians can choose a tempo that suits them
3- Bounce your head and torso along with the beat
4- Tap your foot every time the metronome clicks, listen carefully for the sounds to align
5- Clap your hands every time the metronome clicks, listen for all three sounds to align
6- Count out loud: 1 2 3 4 over and over along with the beat
7- Try clapping only on beat 1, then beat 2, then 3, then 4, keep your foot steady.
8- Clap on 2 and 4, keep your foot and counting steady.
9- Listen to the composite sound of the metronome, your foot, your hands, and your voice- Everything should agree and create a satisfying groove.
10- Move your claps to 1 and 3 without changing your foot or voice, switch back and forth
-If this causes you to lose your tap, start over from tapping your foot and clapping on 2 and 4
11- With your claps on 2 and 4, tap your foot on 1 and 4 only
12- Make up your own variation of counting, clapping, and stomping
VARIATION
1- Set metronome to any tempo
2- Tap your foot along with it
3- Count repeatedly to three
4- Clap your hands on 2 and 3
5- Clap your hands on 1 and 2
6- Clap your hands on 1 and 3
Grooving: Continued
The beat doesn’t usually change, or if it does, it typically changes all at once, or via smooth acceleration or deceleration. To keep your sound interesting, you will need to be able to play different rhythmic patterns over the beat. We already did a few patterns in exercise 3, but everything was aligned directly with the beat in some way. There are also infinite patterns that can be created by utilizing the spaces in between the beat, or grouping multiple beats together. In order to do this successfully, the musician must accurately be able to divide and multiply the tempo internally.
Like walking, rhythm feels good when everything is properly proportioned and balanced. This doesn’t mean that every note needs to sound the same or have the same rhythmic value, but it means that every sound should fit accurately within its own part of the beat and not overlap into others.
Subdivision is the musical word for breaking each beat into smaller parts. The important thing a lot of my beginning students get wrong about subdivision is the dividing part. Some notes are long and some notes are short, but it’s how long and short they are relative to each other that makes them make sense. Dividing a beat into 2 doesn’t merely mean playing 2 sounds in the space where you had previously played one, it means creating 2 equal length sounds that total the length of the first. The analogy of cutting a pizza helps to visualize this, so does looking at nicely printed sheet music.
Good musicians can divide a slow enough beat into as many equal subdivisions as they want. To be able to play 99% of all music, a musician should be able to accurately subdivide a beat into 6 parts. I have encountered music where I needed to player further divisions than this, but I have found it to be a very rare occurrence. It’s most important to be able to feel divisions of 2 and 3, as 5 is uncommon and 4 and 6 are merely doubly divided 2 and 3 feel.
2 vs 3
The musical language I’ve learned for 2 feel vs 3 feel is simple time vs. complex time. I don’t know that these words are really important, but it’s good to know that these are the two big differences in how a groove feels. Dividing a beat into 2 equal parts compared to 3 equal parts yields a totally different overall feel, good musicians can switch back and forth between feels without blending the two, unless they do so deliberately.
If you’re having a hard time hearing what subdivisions should sound like, use your metronome to check. Some metronomes have an option to play a certain subdivision, like 8th notes or triplets, but you can achieve the same effect with any metronome by changing the tempo. If you are feeling a beat at 60 bpm, the sound of dividing that beat in 2 would be the same as the metronome set to 120, and the sound of dividing it in 3 could be the same as the metronome at 180.
EXERCISE 4 - Multiplying and Dividing the Beat
Part 1 - Doubling
1- Set your metronome to a slow or moderate tempo, 60 is nice.
2- Stomp your foot along with the beat, a stomp for every click
3- Say 1 2 3 4 out loud along with the beat
4- Clap whole notes, 4 beats long (hit on the one)
5- Clap half notes, 2 beats long (hit on the one and three)
6- Clap quarter notes, 1 beat long (hit on every beat)
7- Clap 8th notes, 2 per beat
8- Out loud, along with your 8 claps, speak 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and
9- Clap 16th notes, 4 per beat
10- Out loud, along with your 16 claps, speak 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a
11- Increase metronome to a fast tempo (120+)
12- Tap your foot along with the beat
13- Count quarter notes: 1 2 3 4
14- Count 8th notes: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and
15- Count 16th notes: 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a
16- If the tempo is too fast to count those syllables, try saying dig-guh dig-guh, tik-kah tik-kah, bad-dah bad-dah, chik-ka chik-ka, or any other phrase with both a front and back tongue articulation.
17- Find the top speed at which you can speak 16th notes using your favorite syllables.
Part 2 - Tripling
1- Set your metronome to a slow or moderate tempo
2- Stomp your foot along with the beat
3- Say 1 2 3 4 out loud along with the beat
4- Clap 3 even claps per beat. If you need to hear what it sounds like, set your metronome 3x as fast and clap along with that first.
5- Speak along with your clap, try saying 1 po let 2 po let 3 po let 4 po let. I often say 1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a, but this can be confusing since the rhythmic placement of and and a are different than in the previous exercise. If you say “and a” realize that the and is not halfway between the beats, nor is the a on the final quarter of the beat. Be aware.
6- Switch your clap to the beat, keep speaking the triplets.
7- Speak sextuplets, I prefer to say dig-guh-duh dig-guh-duh or tik-ka-ta tik-ka-ta
Part 3 - Combination
1- Set your metronome to a slow or moderate tempo
2- Stomp your foot along with the beat
3- Say 1 2 3 4 along with the beat
4- Using the method above, try speaking 8th notes, triplets, 16th notes, and sextuplets
5- Clap on the beat while speaking different subdivisions
6- Clap and speak (in unison) the following patterns while tapping your foot on the beat
-1 2 and 3 e and a 4
-1 e and a 2 and 3 4 and
-1 po let 2 po let diggudah digudah 4
-1 e and a 2 po let 3 and diggudah diggudah
A note on ¾ and 6/8 time:
Lots of my students get confused about this time signature and how it feels. It can be kindof a tricky one. ¾ is a simple meter, we divide 3 beats per measure by 2s, so if we counted out a few measures of 8th notes, it would sound like: 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3 and. When ¾ is fast enough, it feels more like complex time, with the whole measure feeling like one beat split into three parts: ONE two three ONE two three. These are both different from a complex time, like 6/8 or 12/8, where we are feeling three divisions within each beat. Both ¾ and 6/8 time have 6 8th notes per measure, but in ¾ they get felt and grouped as 3 sets of 2 whereas in 6/8 the musician feels 2 triplets per measure.