Metronome perspectives

There's an excellent piece on the Modern Drummer site getting views on metronome use from a number of top drummers and educators. I've excerpted some of the best bits, but go read the whole thing.


David Stanoch:
One tip for making friends with your metronome, which comes directly from a 1984 Modern Drummer interview with [Andy] Newmark, is to imagine the click to be your friend. Andy said he thinks of the late, great studio percussion icon Ralph MacDonald playing a cowbell. By making that his mindset, he could relax and play comfortably with the metronome’s time.



George Marsh:

As a practice tool, I like to use the metronome as a guide to help check rhythmic accuracy. And it can be used in creative ways. Back at a recording session in 1973, I had the pleasure of hearing African master drummer Kwasi Badu play a bell pattern using a metronome to mark the third note of each pulse in 12/8 meter. He heard the metronome as a representation of the beginning of one of the supporting drum parts, which didn’t start on the downbeat. Badu then proceeded to build on the bell pattern with the metronome still playing in its displaced position. The piece was a version of the West African dance Adowa. Kwasi overdubbed all of the parts this way.

From then on, I tried to think of many ways to make use of the metronome more creatively. One way is to set the metronome to any tempo and then play completely freely, with the only rule being that I keep listening—but not adhering to—the metronome. I just let myself fly around the beat. After doing this for a few minutes, I then land on the beat and play in time.


Jeremy Hummel :
Going around the turns. Most drummers, at some point, struggle with speeding up when playing fills, especially in transitional moments (verse to chorus, chorus to bridge, etc). Fills should be played in time, with taste and musicality. I find the best fills to be an extension of the groove, rather than a disruption. Practicing beats and fills with a metronome will help to keep the heads bopping—and not stopping.

More after the break:

Marc Dicciani:
I believe one of the best ways to develop good time is to internalize the tempo first. If you’re going to practice a lot with a metronome, make sure that you’re trying to feel and move to the pulse. Keeping your limbs relaxed and moving fluidly in time with the pulse or music will help develop your feel and groove, which will also improve your time. I also recommend setting the metronome to quarter notes or half notes (depending on the tempo and time signature), so the notes between them (8ths, triplets, 16ths, etc.) can breathe a little. In jazz, rock, folk, second-line, Cuban and Brazilian styles, and even symphonic music where there’s no drummer, the time breathes and the music feels great.

If you practice correctly, your time will naturally improve the longer you play. I’ve heard drummers who can play rudiments and rhythms perfectly matching 16th notes with a metronome but who have trouble playing with a good feel when they sit at a drumset. That’s why I strongly encourage my students to practice to music, recordings, and loops; play in a band; and listen to and analyze a lot of music in order to develop a good sense of time and musicality. Many of our musical and drumming heroes never even owned a metronome; they developed good time by practicing, playing, and listening.


Jim Riley:
I’ve heard session drummers talk about playing behind the click or playing on top of it. This never made a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, if you play the whole song behind the click, you’re still playing with the click—you’re just landing a few milliseconds later. I would hear other players talk about playing around the click, where they’re playing behind it during the verse and ahead of it in the chorus. But in the age of Pro Tools, where rhythm guitars and shaker parts are snapped to the grid most of the time, I don’t have that luxury. Therefore, it’s my job to make the music feel great even when playing in the center of the beat. That means I have to be aware of my tendency to want to rush fills at slow and medium tempos and work on controlling that.


Jason Gianni:
I don’t know if practicing to a metronome can actually make your time worse, but it can certainly affect your feel if you become too dependent on it. In addition, having a click constantly present can perhaps cause stiffness in feel, or if you pay too much attention to sticking with the metronome other areas of your musicianship may be sacrificed.


Claus Hessler:
I think of practicing with a metronome as like playing with an extremely stubborn percussionist.

(h/t to Bill Bachman, who is also featured in the piece)

How much to practice something

1. Get wood chisel.
2. Remove everything that doesn't look like
Billy the Kid deftly gunning down Bat Masterson
before the throng of stunned onlookers, a yapping
yellow hound at his feet.
3. SUCCESS!

One of the big persistent things nagging most drummers is the question of how much to do. When have you practiced something enough to consider it basically learned, so you can move on with confidence? Some teachers and other not-very-helpful individuals will tell you to just do everything, a lot! You have to be good, man! Were you aware that Weckl practiced 12 hours a day for X years? 

That's great, thanks. You make a mental note to dump a drink down his back at some point, and go back to living with the uncertainty. It's a familiar story.

Here, then, are some guidelines; in general, you can begin to feel you've learned a thing when:

It's memorized. At least so you don't have to look at the book while you play it. You don't necessarily need to be able to pull up everything from memory at a later date. And this doesn't apply to reading practice, EG: the long exercises in Syncopation.

You can play it in a practical range of tempos for the associated style. Part of your job is to listen to music so you know what that range is. If you're playing through some, for example, bossa nova related materials, you should feel good with them from about 88-180 bpm, and especially from 120-150.

"...a relaxed groove develops." One of the best suggestions in Even in the Odds. Try to achieve that at least at one tempo in a single practice session.

You have control over your dynamics. You can play it louder and especially much softer than your "generic" practice volume.

You can play it from a stop. The complete thing; no starting with one or more limbs and adding the hard part last. This is very challenging for a lot of students; often you can do it by just isolating the first few notes of the pattern.

More after the break:


You can get into it from something else without stopping. At least from the previous exercise, but maybe also from a generic time feel in the style. If you're working on an elaborate funk beat, be able to get into it from a more basic funk beat.

You can recover from mistakes. Without losing track of where you are in the measure- you should at least know where the next down beat falls. An intermediate step towards this is to at least not lose the tempo you were playing (assuming you weren't using a click) and jump back on it.

Your mistakes stop sounding like mistakes, and more like variations. They are accurate and in time, and played with a good sound- you played a good note in the "wrong" place according to the stupid book. I don't call those mistakes, actually, I call them "music trying to happen." You should try to harness those accidents a little bit- try to repeat them when they happen, or at least understand what you did.

You can make variations on the fly, or fills, and get back to the original thing. Formats for practicing this could be:

||: 1x as written | 1x variation :||

or 

||: 3x as written | 1x variation :||

or 

||: 2x as written | 1x variation | 1x as written :||     

At that point, you can consider yourself basically competent with a piece of practice material, and can safely move on to the next thing. Some things you'll want to work on much more, either because they're so fundamental to drumming you have to work on them forever, or you need to have them highly developed for the kind of drummer you want to be, or because want to make them a special part of your personal thing.

In general, you don't need to trouble yourself with:


Learning everything at extremely slow or extremely fast tempos. These are a real productivity-killer. In actual playing, each of those situations are somewhat special circumstances that call for dedicated practice time apart from your regular routine. Keep in mind that you do need play new things slow enough that you can do them perfectly- sometimes that will put them at what feels to you like an extremely slow tempo.

The millions of variations/modifications you can do on any written thing. I can pile on so many things to do with a basic rock beat that you would never get past the first thing in the book if you tried to do them all at once. Don't practice that way. Get the one thing at hand, and move on.


All of the above don't necessarily apply exactly equally to every single thing you do. You (and your teacher) have to be able to judge the difference between core things on which your entire drumming career depends (which you need to practice a lot), and things that are more background facility-developers (which can grind you to a standstill if you try to do too much with them). For jazz drummers, most of the things done with Syncopation would fall into the first category; Dahlgren & Fine would fall into the second.

Coordination "kernels"

Here's one for the teachers. This is an approach I've found helpful with students having difficulties with coordination on written patterns in jazz and Latin, and a good alternative/supplement to the usual solution of "slowing it down", or going full Jeff Berlin and taking it out of time, which is to me not an acceptable solution for drummers. Using this method I've had students of differing abilities nail problem patterns up to tempo in fairly short order.

To begin, let's take a look at the jazz time feel as it's normally written:

 

The part we're interested in is the little clump of notes around "2 &-3":

That "kernel" is the true, natural shape of the jazz feel as it is executed, and which we'll be working with. So, let's take a fairly basic jazz comping pattern that challenges beginners:

We'll isolate the same little coordination unit, plus the snare pickup on the & of 1, and the other snare notes:

Read on to see how we work that up to performance tempo:


Play that by itself, one time only, until it's very solid at the target tempo, or close to it. Then start playing it over and over, counting as I've indicated, with an un-metered "grand pause" between each repetition. The pattern itself will be at the target tempo, the space will be as long as you need to collect yourself for the next repetition:

You could also treat the 3 and the 1 as fermatas; whichever, it's important that you don't keep counting or feeling a tempo during the pause. Stop, take a leisurely breath, then play the pattern again. As you get comfortable, you can gradually shorten the length of the pause until the repetitions flow together as God intended, as a steady stream of swing 8th notes:

It can be helpful to say "three" and "one" as long sounds as you begin flowing one repetition into the next.

Obviously, reducing tempo is the proven common method for overcoming coordination difficulties, but also introduces its own set of issues into the mix. Playing slowly is itself a special challenge, and I have reservations about reinforcing the idea of slow tempos as "training" tempos rather than fully fledged musical settings in their own right. Increasingly, I'm feeling that the mechanics of playing the same pattern at fast and slow tempos are so different that, really, it's not so much the same pattern after all. Finally, not every student at their current stage of development  has the patience or particular skill required to painstakingly reduce to turtle speed and gradually creep up to the target tempo. Those are important qualities, but I don't need every student to develop them at exactly this stage.  

The great Jeff Berlin metronome controversy

This has been floating around for some time. His observations are mostly good, but I don't happen to agree with his conclusion. Watch the video, and I'll give a few thoughts about it:



His major points seem to be:

1. Learning new things is not and should not be done in time. 

Discarding the rhythmic element- as he is basically suggesting- is one way of learning new music. I don't believe it's the only way. I follow the jazz musician's view that rhythm is primary and the notes are secondary- "get the rhythm and the notes will follow" is the philosophy. I've developed some strategies for taking things not quite out of time which I'll be sharing soon. At any rate, in African-influenced musics (e.g. American music) the rhythm is the thing- lose that and you've lost the fundamental idea.

He seems to be arguing against the idea of learning new material with a metronome from the very beginning, which I certainly wouldn't recommend either. I'm sure there are some bad teachers who do that- in fact I kind of get the feeling this is just an infight with some adjunct faculty at MI (or with MI students' teachers back in Iowa).



2.  "Latin" and rock musicians "never" used metronomes.

This is such a sweeping generalization (he explicitly states that he's referring to the entire continent of South America and the Caribbean) that there is no need to refute it, is there? Metronomes have been around for some time- they're not high technology unheard of in the Afro-Latin world. Certainly the well-known musics of that sphere have metronomic, pulse-oriented time. This also leads one to wonder just what the difference is between playing with a metronome vs. just another musician who has better time than you. You're still following an external source.

It's also worth noting many rock musicians were not able to cut it on their own records, hence the extremely active careers of studio musicians like Hal Blaine, Gary Chester, Earl "the metronome" Palmer, and many more.

3.  Not all time is metronomic.

  Certainly classical musicians must have a very flexible concept of rhythm to play that music correctly and to follow a conductor- European music tends to follow more vocalistic rather than pulse-oriented time. Competent musical education addresses that.

4.  Good time comes from knowing music, from knowing parts.

That's the conclusion of his demonstrations with his camera operator. It's an important point, but I don't understand why it is supposed to exclude the metronome. One thing that he did demonstrate with the "Mission Impossible in 6" thing is that, contrary to what he implies, understanding rhythm does not start and end with knowing parts. 

5.  Accomplished musicians can use a metronome to "remind" them (in his example) not to rush.

He doesn't say what he believes is an acceptable level of accomplishment for metronome use- his examples are of a beginner learning a totally new piece of music- who he says should not use a metronome- and a world-class musician, for whom it's an acceptable tool. Where's the cutoff?

I really think this is a matter of sloppy communication and maybe a little sloppy thinking, combined with (I'm guessing) a combative personality. Berlin is a great electric bassist and a smart person, but a lot of smart, accomplished people have crackpot ideas. This is not even particularly crackpot; his premises are basically sound, he's just locked himself into a conclusion that I don't believe they support, and which happens to bother a lot of people. If you can ignore his more dogmatic assertions, what he says is worth thinking about.

Pad practice survival

When I first started I used to practice the rudiments while watching TV, I found it boring so TV helped distract me. -Jack Dejohnette

One of the harder things for me to master was the discipline of putting in large amounts of pad practice. In college, when I did my first truly serious practicing, we used to do it standing in the hallway- it would be just you, the pad, Stick Control, and the textured beige wall. I don't know why, but sitting down was unacceptable- not cool, a taboo. I could hack it for a maximum of 90 minutes before I had to go do something else- it was just too bloody boring and hard on the feet after awhile. I learned to hate it so much I gave it up all together in favor of working everything out directly on the drums. In recent years I had become more aware of gaps in my technique, and became determined to take another crack at pad work. Now, after five years of hitting it consistently for 90 minutes-4 hours every night, I'm finding that a lot of things I assumed were just my personal technical limitations are not, after all. Here are some tips for making this work for you:

-General: practice seated, using a silent pad. Vic Firth SD-1 General concert snare drum sticks are recommended. Focus least as much on uncomfortable slower and moderate tempos as on fast ones. It's popular now to practice Moeller-type rebound- and finger-intensive stuff at ff-fff, but I've gotten the best real-world results by practicing at a low-to-moderate volume- p to mf- and using a lot of wrist. The tendency for a lot of drummers is to play through the pad like it's a floor tom with a loose Pinstripe on it- instead play it like it's a concert snare drum, drawing the (imaginary) sound out. For practicing brushes, the Ed Thigpen brush pad is great.

- Keep the TV or, better, a movie going in the background. Preferably something without commercials, or music/sound effects that are going to compete for your attention. The idea is not to watch TV while, oh yeah, running some exercises- practicing should still be your primary focus. You just want something to string you along through your repetitions of the more dry material. You don't want to get too engrossed in the plot, so familiar things are good- I've watched the Rifftrax commentary version of Titanic a couple of dozen times, for example.

- As an alternative to the metronome, create practice loops from the recordings of your choice. This can easily be done using the excellent free program Audacity. I usually use 4-16 measures  from the intro of the tune- hopefully without drums and/or without a lead voice. I may also make a loop of the entire head of a tune I want to learn or learn better. It takes some care to get seamless loops, with disruption of the time, but it's worth it. You can also just use complete tracks, of course.


Here are some books I've used a lot:
- Stick Control by George Lawrence Stone
- Master Studies I & II, by Joe Morello
- Syncopation by Ted Reed (see Ramsay's Drummer's Complete Vocabulary for practice methods if you aren't familiar with them)
- Drum Method, Rudimental Swing Solos by Charley Wilcoxon
- Basic Drumming, Basic Drum Technique and Beyond by Joel Rothman
- Accent on Accents I & II by Dahlgren and Fine

Todd's Methods, Pt. 2: triplet partials in Syncopation

The second in a series of quick, sketchily-outlined demonstrations of my practice methods. Here I give a couple of my variations on common ways of using Ted Reed's Syncopation. If you've worked with that book much, you're aware that it can yield some very dense results. What I've done is simplify them a little to make them more musically appealing (and more Elvin-like), and to allow them to be used at faster tempos.

Download the pdf.