Rhythm
I’ve always struggled with rhythm.
As I was learning to play guitar I felt like I could master all the other aspects of music. I could learn the mechanics of forming chords and finger picking. I could easily grasp the theory behind scales and how chords are formed.
But I could never quite get the rhythm. Even if I would play with a metronome, I would be so distracted by trying to count the beats, that everything else would fall apart.
With enough practice, I have gotten to the point where I can usually keep a beat. I can sense if I am speeding up or slowing down the tempo. But I still can’t count the beats. I have a gut feeling of when I have played a measure and when it’s time to change chords, but occasionally I skip a beat or add an extra beat without noticing.
Looking back, I realized that my struggle with rhythm has distracted me from further pursuing the aspects of music that I am able to master. I learned the basics of theory and mechanics, but I never invested the time or energy into mastering them because I was so distraught over not being able to master rhythm.
As I’ve been working on building up discipline in other areas of my life, I have found that I still struggle with rhythm. I’m trying to learn to count the beats of every day life, but there are often days where I skip or add beats. I can’t keep a constant tempo from day to day.
But because I’m so focused on my struggle with rhythm, I find myself distracted from the mechanics of every day life. I overlook the things that I can master.
2 Comments
Sorry to distract you for a moment about rhythm, but here are a few things my wife (a music education grad student) has told me about helping white people get rhythm:
1.) The goal is to “internalize” the beat.
2.) You can help yourself internalize the beat by moving your body with it. This can mean tapping your foot (which is actually better if you “tap your heel” since you get more of your body moving) or simply moving your core with the music. This highlights the link between dance and song – they are almost inextricably linked.
3.) Yes, metronomes are a bad idea because it’s “externalizing” the beat.
I agree, too, we concentrate too much on nonessentials a lot of the time and miss the big picture! In fact, there is a strain within music education that views formal training about theory a waste of time. Most of the musical greats were informally trained and learned through copying and collaborating with others, rather than memorizing chord structures and specific pieces.
Sort of like programming – we can waste time learning design patterns, or we can focus on the basics of simple design, testing, and collaboration.
I’m pretty sure your post led me to writing Finding Rhythm with Base so thank you for that!
I think I know what Derek is trying to say about “wasting time” on things like design patterns, but he misses a critical point. Design patterns are a reflection of the things he talks about (simplicity, testability, and through collaboration both via the objects in our code and the people behind the keyboard). That’s why they were written down. They have been an attempt at creating a common language in which we can talk to one another about different types of solutions to specific types of problems.
Design patterns are tools for us to use, evolve, or dismiss. Learning them is not a bad thing nor is it the only thing, it’s merely a thing, a tool for us to use, a pool of knowledge for us to pull from.
It is never bad form to learn from others.
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