Many years ago I took a lesson with Ben Allison. We were discussing practice with the metronome and walking bass. Of course, at all but the slowest tempi the metronome has to click at a half note value or less, otherwise it gets irritating. Thus an age old question: when practicing “swing” time should the metronome be set to click on 1&3 or 2&4? Some answers become obvious right away such as: sometimes set it on 1&3, and sometimes on 2&4, do what you like, put the metronome on 2&4 as these are the “strong” beats, or just beat 1, or beat 2 etc.
Ben’s insight was something like this: set the metronome to click off the beats that you the player are learning to feel. In walking bass, for instance, beat 1 is very important. When the bassist provides a strong 1 the syncopation native to swing time is thrown into relief. In other words, a powerful beat 1 allows a high hat on 2&4 to sound like a funky syncopation rather than a contender for “primary” beat. So, as a bassist, set the metronome on 2&4 most of the time to aid development of a strong sense of where your 1 is, and set it to 1&3 when it’s time to investigate where your personal 2 and 4 are.
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This guideline implies that drum kit players working on swing patterns should reverse the above rules and put the metronome on 1&3 most of the time to develop a strong sense of 2&4 (swing percussion’s predominate beats) in their patterns. Similarly, horn players working on rhythmic accuracy in jazz settings would benefit from practice with a metronome on 1&3, as tutti sections and shout choruses often contain lots of syncopation off beats 1 and 3. There’s also a possibly apocryphal legend that Benny Goodman’s brass and reed sections would tap their feet on 1&3 rather than the expected 2&4, reinforcing the idea that, in order to “swing” well, musicians must metronomize (ie internalize rather than play, just as we listen to a metronome without actually playing its beats) the metric units we’re least likely to emphasize.
The resulting theory: When performing metrically stable but syncopated music (salsa, jazz, waltz, etc) musicians tend to internally maintain a predictable but less important beat pattern related to their playing, using it as a reference point to generate their own pattern, which is on some level syncopated in relation to the internalized pattern. Thus I tend to tap my foot on 2&4 when walking bass, some salsa bassists tap their feet in a clave pattern that syncopates nicely against the tumbao bass pattern, etc etc. Further, this idea reinforces a central concept of music based on rhythmic cells, syncopation, and repeated patterns, namely:
When playing a “groove,” there is no “one” per se. The rhythmic framework is internally referential and has no specific beginning, middle, or end. The framework’s rules vis a vis location of strong and weak beats, and the timbral value of sounded beats, work together to create the groove texture. While the groove may usually begin in a certain spot (the “and of four,” or the “downbeat,” etc) it is the overall interaction of the groove rather than any specific rhythmic point that creates the sound.
Syncopated rhythmic frameworks, and even fairly straightforward oom-pah stuff, do not exist until all their principal metric nodes are being sounded correctly. In other words one can’t make a rhythm groove simply by knowing where 1 is in relation to their pattern. The player’s part must fit elegantly within the whole rhythmic texture for it to make good musical sense. While the rhythmic truism “you need to know where 1 is” holds some water, there is no 1, or any other beat, unless there’s also a 2, 3, 4 (or 5, 6, 7, 8 etc if necessary), and, further, the exact location of these beats in time is the bailiwick of specific players. The push and pull between multiple musicians, “metronomic” time, and the rules of a particular groove, work together to make a pleasing rhythmic texture. Taken further, in groovy music the beats that musical analysis or notation might dictate as super important (like 1), are actually meaningless compared to the overall principles of the rhythmic framework.
Anyone who has learned to play groove based music knows that, for their part to fit, they must internalize beats other than obvious ones and threes, feel how their part fits in the texture, and learn to meld their pattern with other players’ parts. Also, this idea is much more clearly explained in the video above, with Bootsy Collins and John “Jabo” Starks both showing how they came to discover that, as rhythm section players, their strongly accented or internalized 1 would make horn, percussion, and vocal accents groove harder. Notice how Collins and Starks both illustrate James Brown’s concept of “the one” by emphasizing beats other than 1, Collins snapping 2&4 and Starks singing a horn line that is syncopated against 1. With these examples Collins and Starks show how, even as they are focusing on an exactly (“right on top,” as Starks says) executed 1, this beat is contextualized and validated within the groove texture by other players’ accents on different beats, like 2, the and of 3, etc. While, for these funk musicians, 1 is both the analytical beat one of a measure and the primary internalized beat, for musicians in other styles concepts related to James Brown’s “the one” may occur in different parts of a pattern, like 4 (as is the case with some salsa music).
Can thinking about rhythm and interaction in this way inform the development of new but groovy rhythmic frameworks? Also, while there are many great computerized drum applications that use algorithms to generate swing and randomness, can a new approach to algorithmic rhythm generation be informed by the “push and pull” created when musicians play a groove, each accenting various beats while keeping some internal metronomized pattern in mind? My composition descarga used synthetic rhythmic frameworks based on more or less familiar rhythmic patterns, and, while I used certain concepts (like the syncopation between clave and tumbao patterns) to create exotic grooves, the audio files I created did not have any of the subtle inflection and randomness found in good rhythmic music. Towards my goal of creating an “organic drum machine” using max/msp/jitter, part two of this series will discuss more preparatory concepts.
