Feel funny dancing? Well, than you’re just as funny playing music. Git on the dance floor and let’s see what your feet and body say. Look him up on you tube! He’s the greatest – ask anyone who has played with him.Īccording to Alvin, he himself never practiced with a metronome.Ģ) Dance!!! I don’t care how good someone says their time is. Play an uptempo – and watch out, it’s time to get smoked because he is so intense, and you feel like he’s pushing you. Play a slow groove with him, and it’s so big, deep and in the pocket – it makes you feel like you are ahead of him. He was Elvin Jones protege and played with Coltrane when he was 12. It’s a tradition that is handed down.Īlvin Queen – he is the greatest jazz drummer alive right now, and quick online videos can’t do him justice. No matter what your level of talent is, you’d need to play with a more experienced musician whom you honestly trust groove wise (in your heart) to teach you. No words I can write here will give you the experience of what I am talking about. Did it speed up or slow down? You bet – but them grooves is 1000% right! On the flipside, some of the most non-grooving crap I have ever heard is all the music done with sequencers and drum machines – with perfectly metronomic beats, which my mathematical standards (but not human heart standards) is played to ‘perfect’ time! Put on an old Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire or Count Basie or John Coltrane. Grooves can get faster or slower and still be right. It was a far deeper problem than what musicians call “rushing” or “dragging”. He was thinking “metronome time” and the band was thinking African time – so we had apples and oranges as far as rhythmic concept. Sometimes he sounded too fast for the band, sometimes too slow. I recently played in a band where a musician was not pulling his weight groove wise. As well, I have played with groovers whose time is not the greatest, but their groove is happenin’! I have played with many musicians with “perfect time” and no groove. Here’s a fun tune where I get into a groove, and let me just say – I am still a servant and a student of music!!! Once you experience this groove it on the “drum” the choices you’d make on your instrument regarding dynamics, fingerings – everything – start to shift to accommodate the new rhythm concept. Likewise, the great composers- Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,Chopin, Ravel, Stravinsky – to name a few – unlocked realities regarding harmony, melody, rhythm, counterpoint and form that African musicians did not. What I am saying is that just as Einstein “uncovered” E=mc squared, African drummers and musicians “unlocked and uncovered” certain musical aspects of rhythm that to my knowledge, no one in Europe did. I’m not judging one or the other as better.
It’s an “US” thing – with the performer and audience, not a “ME” thing. You can feel it, and everyone else can too. When you are playing it or hearing it properly – you experience “body rhythm” and your body starts moving like James Brown or Count Basie- without effort, without “trying to look” like you are grooving for the sake of appearances. It’s a 12/8 rhythm where all the 3’s 4’s 6’s and 12’s subdivide – but this is not intellectual at all when you’re doing it! A European rhythmic concept can have all these poly-rhythms and subdivisions, but the “accents” which are unique to the African concept are buried in the drum rhythm. What happens is a law of physics gets activated when “the drum” is played properly.
#Metronome with subdivision how to
The experience that led me down the right path was learning how to play African rhythms on a simple hand drum (which Mike learned from Diz). To play music with an AFRICAN rhythmic concept is very different from a European rhythmic concept. Also – there is a difference between mere “time” and a “pulse”. There is a big difference between “head rhythm” and “body rhythm”. I was lucky enough to have the greatest teacher around – pianist Mike Longo – teach me rhythm, and he learned from Dizzy Gillespie. Let’s start wayyyy back with these questions: What is groove? What is rhythm? What is time? What do you think you’ll get out of practicing with a metronome? Why do it? I’ve tried a few times, but shut the damn thing off after 5 minutes, for real. I have never, ever, ever practiced with a metronome. I can only tell you what has worked for me, and I still have a lifetime of learning ahead! That being said – “there is more than one way to do it”. Not a simple question, or topic, I am sure I’ll say some things here that will raise some eyebrows. Recently a new fan who found me on YOUTUBE asked me if I used a metronome to develop my sense of groove.
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