How Slow Can You Go Pt. 2

OK. 30 BPM is SLOW. I’ve started using it as my reference when practicing scales as well as practicing songs. Oddly, I find the scales harder than the songs. One intermediary step, more related to the first article then to the exercise that follows, I should add parenthetically, is to place the metronome on the offbeats of every beat. So the click is on 30, and now it lands in the same spot on every bar, on the offbeat. VERY HARD not to get pulled ahead to the next downbeat. Anyhow, on to the other exercise.

Ever get really thrown off by a drum solo? What is happening that is so disorienting? The superimposition of different metric feels over the original pulse. Suppose you’re trading fours. A good drummer, regardless of how they think of it in their own heads, because there are many different ways to describe the same process, is probably at one point or another ignoring the natural accents of 4/4 and creating longer and shorter phrases with counter-intuitive accents that somehow add up to sixteen beats.

So how do we, as melodic instruments, work on this capability? We have enough to think of as it is. Well, I think the answer is to learn to feel these rhythms. That’s basically the answer for any rhythm after all. To play in any meter or tempo naturally, it can’t be a conscious process, it must be felt. So, once again, the question is how do we improve our ability to superimpose phrases of various lengths and awkward (at least at first) accents over a regular time signature?

Well, the metronome stays at 30. But now you’re going to have it click on every 5th beat. So in the first bar the click is on beat 1, the second bar beat 2, third bar beat 3, fourth bar beat 4, and no click in the fifth bar. It is crucial to notice that although the click is playing over a regular interval of 5 beats, that you are playing in 4/4 so the click gradually moves through all the beats as the song progresses.

Apparently, after a few months of this, it becomes much easier to feel phrases of 5 over 4/4. Of course, you could also do phrases of 3,6,7,8,9, and even higher. You could also do the same thing except displaced by an 8th note. Or you could have the click represent a certain odd number of 8th notes. Perhaps 7/8. In this case the click would land on 1, upbeat of 4, then 4, then upbeat of 3 etc.