How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1
This story has a lot to do with singing and playing guitar together but the main lessons are about rhythm, making this accessible to a general music-learning audience. Enjoy!
It started with learning to sing and play the guitar simultaneously. If anyone’s listened to the song Carnival of Rust by Poets of the Fall they’ll recall the acoustic guitar part in the verse. I first heard that song a few months before picking up the guitar in 2009. The parts fit together so beautifully that I felt the overpowering need to play the guitar part and sing the verse over it. Not an easy task for someone just starting out on the guitar.
Still, I had hope; hope that didn’t last for too long for my lack of skill. So I postponed the idea of performing this feat. A few weeks later, when I was somewhat more confident on the guitar, I resumed my efforts. It made sense for me to learn the guitar part first and really drill it into my subconscious so that I could play it like a looper and sing over it. I presumed it would neatly fit into this three-step process:
- learn guitar part and make it second-nature
- learn vocal part and make it second-nature
- impress my audience of one.
It took me a couple of days to play the guitar part well enough for my standards at the time. A couple more hours and I had a good feel for the vocal part too. Now all that remained was to “play one over the other” as I kept telling myself. It seemed like I had solved the jigsaw and all I needed to do was stand back and admire the bigger picture.
Needless to say, I was delusional. As anyone who has so naively gone down this very path knows, not much came of my brilliant stratagem. I began to play the guitar part and as many others do, play one loop of the pattern before trying to sing with the second loop. I did get a few words out each time but then something would fail miserably either in my guitar playing or singing. More often than not, I would need to stop from absolute confusion.
Humbled, I began to think of how to get this right. Not knowing where the problem lay, I did what works almost all the time: play incredibly slowly. I went through the first few seconds repeatedly without much success until I understood that I was getting thrown off by the different rhythms of the guitar and vocal parts. They didn’t line up with each other and that mismatch made it extremely difficult for me to play.
I knew the problem but I didn’t feel any closer to understanding how to solve it. So I applied the traditional approach of brute force and mind-numbingly played the parts repeatedly in the hope that I could play by muscle-memory in a few thousand repetitions.
This carried on into the next day when after a few hours I resolved to find a better way out of pure frustration. My progress, though present, was negligible. I had to find a smarter way to do this.
Independence is a term that gets thrown around a lot, especially in music circles. There’s all kinds of independence: finger independence, hand independence, limb independence, even musical key independence. I had taken this principle of independence to heart and thought that what I needed to do was to achieve independence in my singing and playing. At the very least, if I could keep one part a little more in the background while focusing on the other part relatively more, it would be an acceptable level of independence for me. In my defence, this was not entirely wrong, but it does entirely miss the point. I had inadvertently fallen into the trap of “playing one over the other.”
While I was figuring out what to do while still repeatedly practicing with no direction, it suddenly hit me. What I needed to focus on was not independence but rhythmical dependence! I had to see how both parts lined up together in relation to the rhythmic pulse.
I understand how this can be fairly obvious to someone who is used to reading sheet music or is well-acquainted with harmonic parts. I (like many others), on the other hand, was habituated to thinking in a linear, melodic fashion, with the rhythm mainly providing a sense of tempo. This is in stark contrast to now, when rhythm takes centerstage in my perception of music a large portion of the time (pun intended).
This revelation of perceiving rhythm as a placeholder for notes was a turning point for my musical abilities. I could see that notes lined up in relation to one another to create varying moods. Each note fit into a slot and each slot could be divided into innumerable slots. I understood how subdivisions of the beat could be used to alter the entire mood of a piece of music. Placing three notes in three equal subdivisions of a beat (Ta Ki Ta | Ta Ki Ta) or placing the same notes in the first three of four equal subdivisions of a beat (Ta Ka Di _ | Ta Ka Di _) would make a world of difference to a composition.
Also, the way different parts interact rhythmically gives rise to a huge variety of accents, twists and turns that take the listener on a beautiful journey through time.
All this occurred to me when I was playing a 2-second section of the song where the guitar and vocal accents were off from each other by an eighth-note. I tried repeatedly to nail the passage but despite my best intentions, I would play and sing the two notes at the same time instead of them being one after the other. This led me to realise that I needed to see the notes flowing from one to the other in the context of the rhythm; this opened my ears to beat subdivisions.
With this newfound knowledge, I went through Carnival of Rust with reignited vigour. What had seemed impossible just an hour earlier, now seemed so intuitive. I could now play and sing all the verses with the utmost ease. I could see how the guitar and vocal parts lined up and reinforced each other to create the final result. Initially, it felt like I was playing just one instrument — a guitar-voice hybrid that played either one or two notes on each beat. I would think, “Ok so on this beat there’s this note on the guitar and I sing this note at the same time. And on this next beat there’s just this note on the guitar” and so on. After a while, I could see the interdependent parts working together with the rhythmic pulse and creating something wonderful.
Of course, I still needed to polish the edges but the heavy lifting had been done. Plus, I had a tool or a way of musical perception that would help me in all the years to come.
The main lesson for me that day was the experience of rhythmic subdivision. To this day, whenever I have a problem understanding the rhythm of a musical passage, the first thing I try to do is slowly go over the flow of subdivisions and observe if I’ve chosen the right number or degree of subdivisions of the beat. That almost always clears it all up for me.
As important as they are, subdividing the beat is something many amateur musicians ignore. With that in mind, please: subdivide. Subdivide and rhythm will be yours to make!
