You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Getting Your Rhythm Stronger

Episode Date: May 22, 2019

This week is packed tight, full of SpeakPipe. Peter and Adam answer with ways to strengthen your rhythmic muscle. Wanna send a SpeakPipe of your own? Check out the bottom of the page at http://www.openstudionetwork.com/podcast.Let us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel and leave a comment for this episode.Interested in more jazz advice? Go here to browse our catalog of jazz lessons and courses available for purchase.Follow us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram at:https://www.facebook.com/heyopenstudiohttps://twitter.com/heyopenstudiohttps://www.instagram.com/heyopenstudio See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, Peter Martin, how is your... What a ham. I'm Adam Anas. I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the Yule here at podcast for some reason. Could I find a cornea rhythm? I don't think so. Great, give me a minute.

Nope, can't do it. Daily jazz advice coming out of you. I love it. We've had actual requests about people talking. They want us to talk a little bit about our comedic banter. Like, it's actually a thing. Oh, really? Do tell.

That's ridiculous. Oh, we amuse ourselves, so. Okay, so today's episode is sponsored by OpenStudio. Go to OpenStuonononetwork.com. Check out all their great courses. We got courses by Peter Martin. We got courses by Christian McBride. We have courses by Jeffrey Keiser.

That slacker? Diane Reeves, Sean Jones, Gregory Hutchinson, Ulysses-Owins, Jr., Ruben Rogers. The list goes on and on and on. Yeah, Peter Sprague. Adam Manis, the new jazz glossary. That's right. I was checking that out. Oh, thanks, yeah.

Did you learn anything? I did. There's some, well, some, some, some, some, some, some, some, some, well, some, some, national material there. So today we're talking about rhythm. We got another speak pipe. He's spoken to the pipe. Okay. Let's hear. This is from Patrick. We've had a couple from Patrick before. Let's check it out. Cool. Hey, open studio. This is Patrick from Anna Cordes. When I try to play intentionally with melody and harmony foremost, trying to play what I hear. I'm finding that my rhythmic intention drops out. Like I don't have enough energy to keep all three of those things in balance together.

And I'm wondering if maybe you've got some ideas for how to practice keeping the rhythmic intention foremost while we work on shifting energy into the melodic and harmonic ideas and playing what we hear there. Maybe it's an opportunity to bring in some advice from some of our great drum instructors at Open Studio. Or maybe you'll say I'm smoking too much speak pipe again. Anyway, thanks for help with not losing the groove. Talk to you later.

Bye. All right. Now, just a public service announcement, everyone, don't smoke the speak pipe. That's right. We have no idea what they put in that thing. Well, it depends on what jurisdiction you reside in. It's even legal to smoke smoke. I mean, for our listeners in Colorado, it's fine.

Amsterdam. Canada. Canada. Yeah. If you're here in Missouri, not a good idea yet, although you can carry a little bit of speak pipe with you and it's decriminalized. That's right. All right. We're working on.

So, okay, cool. Thank you for that question. I think this is a good thing to think about it. And I actually don't think this is as much about rhythm. This seems to be the one area where confidence comes for many players in the kind of jazz continuum of development. Confidence comes later of the three kind of main elements. We talk about melody, harmony, and rhythm. And I really believe that for most people, it's,

a little bit of a psychological barrier to get over the people going in because I hear a lot of things like, you know, oh, my rhythm, I don't have good rhythm. People say this like, I can't dance or whatever. It's like one of these things that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And look, we all start out. I mean, to me, it's easier to have an innate sense of rhythm, a sort of natural talent for that. I see that more in people until they start talking themselves out to it or letting other people talk themselves out of it than even melody or harmony. Like those are kind of more complex things in terms of how you apply those skills to your instrument. Whereas rhythm is something that I think we all kind of have a little bit better than we do. But it's definitely something that culturally can be pulled out of us. So if you look to people that have a really good sense of rhythm without necessarily having to work at it in a real methodical way with their instrument,

you might find some clues on how you can develop that confidence as well. Now, this is easier said than done. I know I'm just saying, oh, it's all in your mind. Just do better, you know. and that's not the way it works. But at least that mindset shift and just sort of allowing yourself to maybe be a little more confident than you are and let your sense of rhythm out that's already there could help. When you go to play and he talked about, you know, kind of I love this sort of, you know,

intentionality. I think he used that word. Intentionally playing what he hears, what we hear, that's great to do. But we don't want the intentionality to become. come like this overly calculating and conscious way of playing because that's going to be the hardest to sort of regulate melody rhythm harmony and many other myriad of other things that we have to be applying to our playing whereas we want things to be a little bit more spontaneous when we're actually playing so it's like how do you and we're always talking about this how do you

make that leap from like very intentional practice to less not necessarily less intentional but less conscious playing yeah I think because then the rhythm thing can kind of start to take care of itself in some ways if you're practicing and listening to the right things. So here's what I think might be going on. Because if he is doing this intentional thing of only playing what he hears and he's really let it go. Yeah. And then the rhythm suffers.

That to me says that Patrick, maybe you don't have the rhythmic vocabulary developed from listening, from collecting those rhythmic things that are yours. You don't have that as developed as those other pillars of your playing. And that's something that needs to be worked on. It's something that's kind of the hardest thing to practice. Yeah. Right?

because we can easily see a scale and see that a D dominant scale goes over a D7 chord. Like that's easy to conceptualize. And then our little lizard brains want to put that into patterns of triads or sevens or whatever, you know what I mean?

That's easy to calculate. Rhythmic things you would think is easy to calculate, but it's more of a, it's more of like a personality trait than almost any other part of the playing. So you have to, you have to collect these things that come out. You have to collect your sense of groove,

your sense of syncopation, rhythms that you love, and be able to put them places that you need to put them. I think there's also a technical thing involved in rhythm. Being able to control rhythmically all over the instrument is that's the technical challenge, right? Like can I do in the middle of the keyboard on white keys, the same thing I can do, reaching out way at the top on white and black keys?

That's a technical challenge. Those kind of things need to be addressed to get the rhythm strong. Well, that would speak to something that we preached before, which is concentrating specifically on rhythm when your scale practice the kind of controlled environment things on any instrument. The same way of a drummer, you might think like, okay, well, drummers have better rhythm or whatever. But part of the thing is like when they practice, you know, rudiments and specific exercises the equivalent of their scales, you know, of scales for another instrument, they're able to focus, I think, on rhythm in a way because, I mean, melody. and harmony, like, it's not an innate part of actually what they're doing. I know that there's applications for that in terms of when you're playing with the group, but it's really about a rhythmic foundation.

I don't believe a drummer. I mean, yeah, maybe people who have better rhythm, you know, end up going over to drums. Yeah, partly, but also it's like they're a concentrating on that practice, but we can replicate a lot of that. We can. On our instruments. One thing you should do, Patrick, is do some self-reflection. Record yourself in these sessions if you're not already.

And listen for it. Don't smoke, speak pipe before you self-reflect. You got to be clear-headed. Separate activity. Record yourself and listen to where your rhythm fails. So I remember years and years and years ago, the rhythm of like, one, two, three, four, do-da. For some reason, like, I was always early on that rhythm. And I would hear myself in practice whenever I needed to do something that started off the beat and ended off the beat. It was always early, whatever. So I recognized that. And then I literally just worked on that until it was like laying in the pocket, like a drummer would. You know what I mean? But that's something that you don't really think about

if you're only working on harmonic melodic concepts, voicings and scales or whatever. But sort of finding these rhythmic patterns that are weak in your playing in your hands and being like, okay, is that a technical thing? Am I just feeling that weird? What is that? And then being able to fix that,

that could take you far. Well, and you mentioned something right at the beginning you used the term rhythmic vocabulary. Yeah. And I think that this type of practice, what you're talking about is, you know, first of all, isolating certain rhythms that are going to be used. And that's really what a vocabulary

is, the same way we talk about learning different arpeggios or scales and then practicing those, getting the fingerings, depending on your instrument, whatever the technical thing is. But it's true that most people don't do the same thing with rhythm. So it's no wonder then that that's the area that's sort of, you know,

that's lacking in terms of rhythm, melody, and harmony because we don't give the attention to the practice. But what happens is what I was talking about at the beginning is people get it in their mind, oh, I have bad rhythm then. No, you have bad, but that's not like a self-fault as far as your talent. You haven't worked on it like the other things. Totally.

You know, it's like you're going to the gym and you're only doing upper body stuff and you're like one of those dudes this big swall and they got the little little chicken legs. And they're like, I don't know. I guess I'm not talented by leg. No, you've never done an exercise for your legs. It's not going to follow, you know. So, yeah. So record yourself playing with these different rhythms that, you know, on the beat rhythms,

off the beat rhythms, triplets go in between. Yeah. And that's vocabulary. See, now you're developing vocabulary. If there's, you know, three over four, all this, you know, four over three, whatever you want to do, like over the bar line stuff, see where the discrepancy is with the metronome and fix it. And I think it starts really with like, you know,

it's vocabulary in the sense of the learning of it and then the application of it. The application is more the part that will give it some time. And as long as you're listening when you're practicing, that'll come naturally. and organically into your playing. It's not going to be instant, but that will start to come because you're going to be practicing

and repeating something over and over again, training your ears to hear it correctly as your hands are manifesting that. So if you're starting with a bait, and I love your thing of listening to something, that could be a recent performance or just record yourself playing over blues or something simple.

And, you know, everything from maybe a rhythm that you're like, oh, I know that rhythm like, you know, bodoo, badu, bab. Say, like where you're starting on the upbeat, but maybe it's like, ooh, bado, and it's a little bit rushed or whatever. So you isolate that rhythm and then just play that. You can mix it up and play it some different melodies or whatever,

but you're really listening and getting that metronome going, doing those things. Then you're building up a vocabulary specifically of that rhythm. And you're going to be able to link that with different melodies and harmonies, you know. That's true. And it's, you know, in a lot of ways, I think, but it's going to necessitate number one, listen to yourself. Yes. So that you can find those things because you don't need to.

I mean, it's fine to practice stuff that you can do. But we're always saying, you know, it's like practice the stuff that you can't do. Practice the stuff that's hard. That's where most people get tripped up in this and they're, man, jazz is so hard. It's actually not that hard if you figure out what you can do and figure out what you can't do and go straight to it. It's just there's enough elements that you need in it that it can get a little bit complex and can be like an over-bearing on you if you're not disciplined about hitting the stuff that's hard. Pick that one thing that you can't do, work on that for a couple weeks and you'll be great. Eventually you're going to be really, really good.

You keep doing that over and over again. I think listen is so crucial. not just, I mean, listen to yourself, do this self-reflection, but you also need to collect this vocabulary. So listen to great players and their rhythms. And then listen to yourself again, recorded, and pick out the phrasing, the rhythmic phrases that you're like, oh, that's lame. Right. And then take that, subtract that from your playing. Never play that again.

Exactly. Sometimes it's about what, yeah, learning what not to do. So, and that's really what's coming out of the listening of yourself. Like when you're going to be listening to the reference recordings to the great stuff that you love, that's mostly, if not all, like listening to the right stuff to acclimate your ears, to develop your ears, to give yourself ideas to try and then to see what you need to develop. Listen to yourself, you don't need to listen to the stuff you do good and be like, ooh, I was killing. Let me practice that some more. No, find the places where you're not killing and practice that. That's right. Or just go on be a bet. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've, we've preached

this from day one, but it's, it's, you got to find your weaknesses, address them. And then eventually if you keep doing that again and again and again, you've, and really listen to the great recordings is as much balancing out when you're going through like I think back to, because I'm like, man, I don't listen to as much of the recordings that I love as I used to when I was younger. But I'm also like, because I'm always trying to listen to new things. I enjoy that. And there's just so much time. But I realized like when I was younger and trying to develop, I was listening so much.

I used to record myself a lot because I figured out that that's how you got better. Yeah. And it was painful. So like I needed an antidote to that to listen to some good stuff. You know? I got tired. And mainly just practicing. I was always listening to myself.

And I love music. And my ears were developed before a hand. of what I could play. So I wanted to hear good stuff. Until you get good, you're not going to be able to hear good stuff. No, it's good to compare yourself like that and watch yourself get closer and closer to the ideal. Thanks, Patrick. Great question.

Yeah, thanks Patrick. Good stuff. Good luck with that, man. It's a hugely important part, but you got it. You know, we have a little something over at Open Studio that would help folks with this, actually. You get into the jazz glossary. You get into some rhythmic concepts, don't you? We're talking about some rhythmic concepts.

Well, if you have the All Access Pass, you could also, like he alluded to, go to one of our great drummer's courses. Right. Hutch or Ulysses Owens Jr. That's true. Check out how they approach rhythm, which is actually really, really good for any instrumentalists.

Yeah, and therein is why we opened up the All-Axas pass in the first place. We know, I mean, we've got over a thousand lessons on the site. Now, we know nobody can go through all those in a year. Nope. But I mean, good luck to you. Three a day, right? But the fact that, you know, exactly,

if you say, wow, I'd love to check out a drum listen, I don't want to necessarily, I don't need to buy the whole course. Yeah. But you've got that access to, to jump in to jump out as needed. Yeah, yeah. So come check that out at openstidionnetwork.com.

We have the all-access pass, all the courses. We've got some new stuff coming. And leave us to speakpipe. You'll hear it.com. Leave us to speakpipe. You'll hear it.com. Yeah. You can also check out the Open Studio blog.

There are lots of great free information. That's right. Check us out. And until tomorrow. You'll hear it.