5 T’s that can help you get more gigs Pt. 1 Time

There are several things that are important to develop and that will help keep you in work as a musician. Now these areas are certainly not comprehensive, nor do you have to be excellent in all of these concepts. But if you think about all of the players that you have played with, the best players generally have these down pretty well.

Time

Every musician has a sense of time, however, some are more accurate than others, and nobody has perfect time everytime. People can brag that they do, but it is just not true, everybody’s mind will wander or get overly excited at some point in time and speed up or slow down. In fact, an ironic point is that (more often with inexperienced players) the better in tune the rhythm section is with each other, the more likely it is that the time will move and they won’t notice because they are still playing together. One flinches, the other reacts and the tempo moves.

Another interesting point about time is I think best described in a metaphor. If you are riding a horse and feeling and hearing the clippity-clomp of all of the footsteps, who has a better idea of when the horse starts running slightly faster or slower, you or the horse?

My answer is you, because you are more focused on listening and reacting than doing. So generally (when working with musicians of similar skill level) whoever is “doing” (playing) the busiest is going to be the worst judge of the time in comparison to whoever is listening and reacting to it

Time is something that must be felt internally, and is something that must be developed to be able to play with confidence and conviction. If you are tapping your foot to help keep the beat, at some point your foot or leg will probably get tired and the tempo may change in relation to that. You can still tap your foot, just make sure that the time is leading the foot, and not the foot leading the time.

A way to help develop more confidence in your time is obviously to practice with a metronome. But you can practice with putting it on different beats. An example would be to play the same thing 7 times

1^st time 1 2 3 4

2^nd time 1 3

3^rd time 2 4

4^th time 1

5^th time 2

6^th time 3

7^th time 4

If you have any programmable metronome or drum machine you can do a similar thing with measures. I have found that Garage Band works well for it.

1^st time 4 measures of time

2^nd time 3 measures of time and 1 of rest

3^rd time 2 measures of time 2 of rest

4^th time 1 measure of time and 3 of rest

5^th time all measures off

6^th time All measures on ….

The idea with this is to be able to keep your internal metronome going throughout all of the measures of rest and be able to land on the beat when they come back in.

Another thing that has to do with time, is time within a particular style, also known as feel. For instance, better players are aware of the differences between swing and rock, and latin and country and have the skills to adapt to it. Also they aware of more subtle differences such as the difference in the swing feel in between a swing version of Autumn Leaves, a rock swing such as Rock around the Clock, and a country swing in something like Crazy. One way to help develop your skill in this area is simply to practice with recordings of each of the styles and listen closely to try to match articulations.

Next installment will discuss the second T, which is Technique.