What Colour Is Your Metronome?

I heard an interesting drummer one night. He had good chops, good ideas, and served the music well.  He also kept messing up the time. Few things make me sadder than hearing an otherwise capable musician who is in dire need of some metronome practice. 

I know what some of you are going to say: Practicing with a metronome will mess up your natural timing. I have only one thing to say to that. I've never been faulted for keeping good time.

When I was at jazz school, I landed a gig alongside a bass player whose time was wretched (but the job paid well and had other perks). About a month after starting this gig, my ensemble professor pointed out that my time was, uh, messed up*. He concurred that playing with someone who has bad time can seriously mess with your sense of time. Fortunately it's not a permanent condition. In contrast, playing with people with solid time will also improve your sense of time. And, what could provide a more solid partner than a metronome?

The key to working with a metronome is to focus on the metronome. Too often we start the metronome and then turn our attention to the exercise. You need to listen to the beat of metronome and then put your strokes exactly where they belong. A real torture test is to play on a hard surface. You can't fudge this one.

Slow & Steady
Practicing slow tempos will help with slow tempos. No surprise there.  A tendency to speed up is bound to show up at 40 bpm. Slow practice also gives you time to really focus on what you're doing.

Pedal to the Metal
The metronome is helpful in regulating faster tempos and also with speed development. To play a fast jazz ride at 300, just set your metronome at 300. To play faster still, bump the metronome up from time to time (also see http://drumyoda.blogspot.com/2013/02/faster-faster.html).

Inside Story
One of the best exercises I've seen for really nailing things down is to put the click 'inside the beat'. If the exercise is 8th-note based, count the clicks on the '&'. For swing or shuffle, set the metronome on the skip beat, as in 1-trip-LET.  For a real challenge, have the click represent 'e' or 'a' or the middle triplet. I find these fun to do and not that difficult. Mark Kelso's DVD has an excellent overview of this (https://www.groovydrums.com/musician-first-drummer-second/.)

Spatial Perception
Another great challenge is to spread out the clicks. Begin with the click on all four beats, then on 1 and 3. Then let it be just on 1. Then let the click be the first beat of a two-bar phrase.

Just One of the Gang
People in the know (e.g. Bernard Purdie, Gavin Harrison, etc., etc.) treat the metronome or click track as just another member of the rhythm section. That should be your goal -- let the metronome be the clave to your samba.

BTW, I recommend spending no more than half of your practice time with a metronome (and only for the first 10 or 15 years). And don't worry. The music will 'breathe' just fine despite your excellent time.

* I heard a better one at a big band practice. The leader called out one of the trumpet players and said, “You're time's sort of all shot to hell”.

The Myth Of Independence

When I was at music school, we had a coven of enthusiastic drummers, and almost every week one of our members would see some note-worthy drummer at a club and dutifully report the next day that the player had '4-way independence.

 
But there's a problem with that assessment. In order to have all four limbs move truly independently, each one would need to have its own brain, and extra brains are pretty rare. Octopi have a separate 'brain' for each tentacle, and each can go about its business more-or-less unsupervised. But we poor humans have to make do with just the one brain to manage four disparate activities.

Despite evolution's short-sightedness, we've managed to get by fairly well in mono-brain mode. Take the old saw about walking and chewing gum at the same time. While these are completely independent tasks, they are simple repetitive movements that require almost no brain power. Once we start walking and chewing, we switch to auto-pilot and walking just happens! If we want to stop or change direction, the brain steps in and manages the change. Then it’s right back to auto-pilot.

We drummers take the walking-with-gum thing a lot further. We can keep a syncopated bass drum pattern going while playing a different pattern on a cymbal. We can then add some contrasting snare drum work. Throw in a hi-hat and it seems like 4-way independence. Four-way? Yes. Independent? Well, no ... not really! As with walking, one, two or even all of those actions are on auto-pilot most of the time. We can make little changes here and there, but then auto-pilot takes over once again, thanks to your remarkable nervous system.

Independence mainly relies on ostinatos and (so-called) multi-tasking. An ostinato is a set pattern that is repeated by one voice. Your ride rhythm, for example, is an ostinato, and it is played pretty much automatically, freeing the other limbs to do other things.

As for multi-tasking, humans can't really do this. What we actually do is quickly switch the focus of our attention, and our ability to do this is limited. We work on one thing, set it aside to work on something else, then put that task on hold while turning to a third or revisiting the first. For many tasks, we can switch in a microsecond. So I can leave that cool ride rhythm unattended while I do a bit of thing on the snare, and then my attention can go back to the cymbal.

Of course, all this wonderful co-operative activity is taking place behind the scenes in the brain -- what we often call muscle memory -- and for a lot of tasks it’s very useful. But for playing music, it's absolutely vital.