Poll: Timekeeping... external or internal?

[funkydrummer]

One thing that playing with a click does is solve any conflict regarding time in a group situation. If a member feels the time is off (too fast/too slow) instead of just blaming the drummer- it creates a dialogue within the group as to where everyone feels a song tempo should be!

not always! I've had the unfortunate experience of having the bass player wave his headstock at me while I had giant red headphones on because I was listening to a click! Tells you when to get out of a bad situation, anyways.

I've had a similar experience with a guitar player before. Don't blame me for your inability to listen when the drummer is the one with the click in the ears.

That's happened to me more times than I can even go on about.

[Henry II]

not always! I've had the unfortunate experience of having the bass player wave his headstock at me while I had giant red headphones on because I was listening to a click! Tells you when to get out of a bad situation, anyways.

I've had a similar experience with a guitar player before. Don't blame me for your inability to listen when the drummer is the one with the click in the ears.

That's happened to me more times than I can even go on about.

One time, I tipped a bass player's music stand over for doing that. I know, I'm a badass!

[circh bustom]

I feel you have to be born with a clear internal pulse. You can learn to play with a click, or learn to keep your time steady, but for the most part it's internal. My 10 year old daughter kept great time on the trumpet the first time she played to a click. my father-in-law(a music teacher for close to 40 years) and I feel that if she didn't have a good internal, innate sense of time, she would've had a much more difficult time keeping with the click. Now it's a game to her, getting the spaces even no matter what tempo she is at.

[Julián Fernández]

I think most people fail to think that if a drummer can´t play to a click it´s because his inner clock: in most cases is about technique.
If you wanna see how strong someone´s inner clock is, have him/her sing, not play.
If you CAN listen to yourself pulling and dragging on a recording then you have the tools to work on it; you just have to find a way to play drums and still be as relaxed and focused as when you´re listening to the recording.

The whole thing about people born with it is non sense to me, and just helps people to stop trying or justify people who doesn´t wanna put the time that´s required (that one thing is really personal).

EDIT: No offense, Circh... Just trying to be honest about how I see it.

[circh bustom]

None taken at all. Im not saying that someone can't develop a good pulse, and sense of time, but being born with an acute sense of it is what I feel seperates the guys like Vinnie and Gadd.

[john lamb]

Peter Erskine in an interview on the DrumChannel described having a devil of a time playing with a click when he first started recording in the studio. He compared himself to JR Robinson who at the same point in his life was very comfortable with a click.

Curiously, babies are born with a sense of meter, and specialize for the rhythms they hear from 9-12 months/

[bclarkio]

Curiously, babies are born with a sense of meter

Maybe from hearing their mother's heartbeat in the womb.

Is that our first music lesson, associating sound with emotion?

I think timekeeping for me is external, because listening and following come naturally to me. My internal clock has an elastic meter, and keeping time is a challenge.

Why is a steady pulse so important, anyway? Who decided that for us?

People who went to this church



Instead of this one?



I sometimes wonder what our sense of time and music would be if we lived in a time and place that had no clocks, metronomes, recorded music, and assorted machines with their particular rhythms.

What steady pulses exist in the natural world?

I can think of the movement of the sun and the planets, day and night, but not much else.

The best reason I can think of to explain the appeal of clockwork time is that it is akin to the best rhythm or gait for doing something like walking or working.

I'm surprised, though, that in this era of machines that can play drums and music with perfect time that drummers and musicians as artists don't intentionally cast that off.

[circh bustom]

A steady pulse doesn't mean that it doesnt breathe or move or change. Elvin used to move his time around but one would usually say his pulse was pretty steady. Or as he would say "keeping tension on the time". Plus, we all want to watch hot women dance, and hot women are more inclined to dance when the pulse and beat are steady and they can latch their hips to it. Non-hot women can do the same thing, but...
The external timekeeping is just a guide, Im almost always pushing choruses or laying back on certain sections, but its my internal clock that allows that to happen without drastically changing the tempo. Maybe Im wrong.

[joecrabtree]

I was thinking about this while I was on tour. I always figured that training some kind of internal time would be the key to better groove, but in an experiment where I tried to keep time with no physical movement whatsoever I did terribly.

Check out the this video that I posted at the beginning of the month :


I've played with clicks for years and over time I've become more and more comfortable with it and it made me feel like my time was pretty good. When Lucas and I added the time-check feature to PolyNome I tried to demonstrate it in a video and discovered that it wasn't my time that was so great - it was the click's. I was relying on it much more than I realised. It was such a weird and unsettling feeling when it dropped out. Suddenly I was questioning everything and I had no idea whether or not I'd still be in time when it came back in.

For the last few days I've been working on some basic groove and co-ordination exercises and instead of playing to a continuous metronome I've been playing to PolyNome with the bars of rest thrown in. I'm now getting to the stage where it doesn't phase me so much when it drops out, and I can kind of tell if I'm going to be in time when it comes back in. It's seems to be a great way to build confidence and I think it's making a big difference to my playing.

Today I was working on some Bernard Purdie type grooves with lots of ghost notes and broken 1/16ths on the hat or ride. After 7 bars of rest I was still able to stay in perfect time. I tried taking out the ghost notes and my accuracy got worse. Then I dropped it down to a Billie Jean groove and it got worse still.

I'd love to know if anyone can consistently nail the 1 after several bars of silence if they don't move a single muscle...

Joe

[Gaddabout]

I think most people fail to think that if a drummer can´t play to a click it´s because his inner clock: in most cases is about technique.
If you wanna see how strong someone´s inner clock is, have him/her sing, not play.

I totally agree with this and have long suspected that singing [in time] and playing drums require two very different functions in the brain.