You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Develop Great Time - #51

Episode Date: March 22, 2018

Adam and Peter discuss some key things to think about and work on as you develop solid and good-feeling time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear It Podcast. Today, we're going to give you seven ways to develop great time. I thought we just did a time management podcast like two episodes. We did. And this time, we're going to give you seven different brands of watches to develop great time. Rolex. We're really a diverse podcast if you think about it.

We are. We are. People think it's so niche, this little jazz podcast. That's right. All right. All right. So now, of course, we're talking about great time, great rhythm, great feel. you know, such an important part of playing any type of music, but especially jazz in that most of

what we do is associated and has the undercurrent of some type of groove. Okay. So seven, let's get it kicked off. Number one, practice with a metronome. Start with the basics, right? That's right. But that's the most dependable timekeeper I know. And it's just a starting point. That's why I want to start there. It's not the be all end all. And I didn't notice I didn't say practice metronomically. You have to avoid practicing metronomically. But you want to do a fair amount of practice with a metronome because it'll teach you how to develop your own great time and it'll kind of let you know. Now, if you're practicing a lot with a metronome and it gets to the point where you're always rock solid with the metronome, you can start to do it less because you don't need

that crutch anymore. But if you're practicing with the metronome and you're having some problems like the metronome speeding up or slowing down a lot, it's either the battery or it's you, most likely you. This is a really good one. I try to practice with a metronome on every single practice session, at least a little bit, so that I still have that foundation. And the next thing we're going to talk about, number two, is to play with players with great time. This is really, really helpful. And it's because, I don't know about you, but some of my favorite players that have some of my favorite time feels,

they're not metronomes. They have a certain way they lay the time. I mean, they have solid time. But it doesn't feel, like you said, it doesn't feel metronomic. Right. It's got a spirit to it. And when you play with those players, you kind of can feel that. It's like, oh, they're kind of like pushing ahead at this spot in the beat, you know?

And that is a really cool thing to feel. It's really hard to feel it unless you're playing in that environment. So try to play with players whose time you admire and pay attention to that time as you're playing with them. Right, right. So number three, I would take that one and just do the inverse or the converse or the reverse or some other kind of verse that I can't think of. But that would be don't play with players with bad time. Easier said than done.

That's true. But if you start making some decisions, or at least you minimize that amount of time, because as much as it will help you to play with players with great time, it will start to affect you if you're playing with players with bad time. And I would say maybe not so much in terms of the metronomic quality, but in terms of like the groove and the field. Because we're starting to get into, you know, this area where great time is, not just about steady time. It's about a good feel and a good groove, steady time. All those go

into when we talk about developing great time. So try to avoid players with bad time. Unless you're so strong that you can fix their time. Yeah, that's good. You know one thing I love to do, this is number four, is to practice with recordings because you talk about players with great time. I mean, pick the legend that you want. Yeah. And you can live inside their time feel. Right. And that's a great place to be. I mean, just picking any of the, you know, go play with Philly Joe and feel how that feels. It feels amazing. Yeah.

Or anyone. Absolutely. It's the best way to feel the time that you want to be a part of that. You want to ingrain in your playing, you know, pick your favorite players that have your favorite time and play with their records. Yeah. And Philly Joe is a great example for what I wanted to say for number five. And that is don't fall into being what I like to call the time police.

You know, fluctuations in the actualized tempo are okay sometimes. It's really the groove that matters. And I think, you know, somebody like Philly Joe Jones and really all great drummers, all great musicians. Forget about just saying drummers, but we kind of hear it in the drummers a lot. You know, you can be grooving so hard that it speeds up or slows down normally speeds up, especially certain tempos. And you don't even notice it as a player or as an audience. And it doesn't matter. I mean, who cares?

It feels awesome. It feels awesome. And it doesn't mean, oh, he's got bad time because you can, you know, that's where the music went. Now, of course, the goal is to keep it rock steady, but the feel is more important than the steadiness of it. And they work together and they pull at each other, and that's the human part of it. Yeah, there are different philosophies about this. By the way, the time police part of the jazz police is like a division? It's a division that's, you know, they go rogue sometimes.

It's like a separate division, but oftentimes they work together. I feel like that's the fusion wing of the jazz police. It could be. No, no, but I mean, this is a thing. We're playing jazz. We're not playing. I mean, we're talking about jazz. Right.

playing jazz. We're not talking about being studio musicians in LA, which is a click track. Right, which is a different thing, right? Those players have rock solid metronomic time, and it works because they're playing on these, you know, pop records or whatever. When we're playing jazz, the groove is the most important thing. The feel of the tune is the most important thing. So yeah, don't be that time police and something, especially, like you said, I remember McBride said in the chorus fundamentals of jazz bass. It's okay to speed up. It's almost never okay to slow down. Right. So that brings us to number six, which is to record yourself playing so you can assess your time.

If you don't know where you are, how do you know where you're going? I feel like that should be on a motivational poster. It is. Every time I'm like a dentist. It's with a mountain. Like a cat hanging off a tree branch. That's right. Now, this one is actually super important.

Record as much of your practice sessions, as many of your gigs as you can stomach and listen to your time. And it's the only way to reveal a lot of weaknesses that we kind of either let ourselves go or don't pay attention to when we're paying attention to other things like lines or harmony or chord change or whatever we're dealing with in the moment. Sometimes we don't notice that our time is slipping. I'll give you an example. This was when I was first starting out and I started recording myself, I noticed that when I would play a phrase that would start on like the end of one like da-da-da-da-da.

I was always super late coming in, and it was like affecting the rest of my time, and I started working on that and putting those further and further up the beat until it just wasn't an issue anymore, right? That was something that was easily fixed by recording myself. Yeah, and I think that we start to realize and can kind of prove to ourselves that we're developing really good time, even great time, when we record ourselves and the recording sounds very similar, if not exactly as we remembered the performance.

So if you record yourself and can listen pretty soon after, you'll still have the memory of how it happened. The closer, and this is really just developing your musicianship in general, but certainly the time portion of it's a big part of it. But the closer, when you hear that recording, you're like, yeah, that's the way it's on it. When you hear a recording, like, wow, I didn't know I was doing that. That means you've got some development to do.

So it's kind of like the metronome too And that it's giving you that baseline barometer to Because you want to be able to hear all these things As you're playing them and make the adjustments And you eventually will But it takes some practice, take some work, take some dedication. So the last number seven for developing great time This is just relax and be confident

Whoever you are And wherever you are in the pantheon of time That's where you are that day So own it, you know, it's just like having a great sense of style. You know, you may not have the best wardrobe or the best hairdo or the best skin or whatever, but you've got what you've got. The more you own it and are confident in your own skin, the better you're going to look, the better your sense of style is going to be. And so really, you know, time is a manifestation of our musical style in a lot of ways, you know, the groove element,

the tempo element, the, you know, the tension between the beats, all these things to go into having great time. So, you know, the more confident and relaxed you are. Now, of course, if there's a crap foundation there with you, with your feel, you're going to have to work on that, but you want to be able to relax enough so that your sense of it comes out. See, some people, they get so nervous about the time and like counting and saying, am I speeding up, by slowing down, that on the gig, that they aren't even able to put their best foot forwards with their time. So on the gig, when you're performing is not the time to worry about your time. See how I did that? Not the time to worry about your time. You're very smart. That's very

smooth, yeah. No, I had one of my old friends from college, great drummer from London named Chris Higginbottom. He was He was, he sounds like he's from London. Higginbottom? Higginbottom, yeah. Is he from Surrey on Avon? I don't remember. He's awesome drummer. He's a great musician.

And we were doing some recording and I was like fretting about my time and I was like, it's not perfect or whatever. And he's like, he's like, man, I love your time. It's Adam's time. It feels great to me. It's not perfect. Hey, mate, old chappie, it's Adam's Adam's time. That's exactly what he Sounded like.

Yeah. Sounded like Bert Reynolds and Mary Poppins. Right. But Bert Reynolds as Barry Poppins. Yay, yeah, yeah.

So basically we're saying to develop great time, you'll hear it. Okay, that one sounded forced. I forced it. I forced it. Thanks for listening to this episode of the You'll Hearup podcast.

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