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David Byrne has a very interesting new book called "How Music Works".

 

In it he says:

 

 

Sometimes a band that has played together a lot will evolve to where they play some parts ahead of the beat and some parts slightly behind, and singers do the same thing. A good singer will often use the "grid" of the rhythm as something to play with-never landing exactly on a beat, but pushing and pulling around and against it in ways that we read, when it's well done, as being emotional. It turns out that not being perfectly aligned with a grid is okay; in fact, sometimes it feels better than a perfectly metric fixed up version.


I think getting the "feel" right is probably the most important aspect of making a good record. It doesn't matter how good a song is or how well it's recorded if the feel's not there then the song will suffer.

 

I've always heard terms like "groove", "swing", "in the pocket", "on top of the beat", "behind the beat", "shuffle", and "syncopation". But not being a drummer I never really knew exactly what they meant technically.

 

Since I've been recording on my computer I think I'm now actually able to see some of these rhythmic characteristics that I've been playing with all my life but never actually knew what they were.

 

For example: When I was a kid I remember Keith Richards saying that one of the things he liked most about Charlie Watts was that he played behind the beat.

 

When I look at the recordings I make on my computer now I can see that the drum tracks are slightly behind the bass track.

 

So is that what they mean when they say "playing behind the beat"?

 

All my life I've just been telling drummers to play - "Booga Chucka, Booga Chucka".

 

You know like "Gimme Shelter".

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A single vocalist or lead player can get away with a bit of this, but don't let the rest of the band do this. Otherwise , the music will begin to fall apart.


Dan

 

 

It depends on what you mean by "this". Listen into the Nevilles tracks or the old Elvis band or Stax Records. They're all playing like that. But they know and feel how to make it work. Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson, Barry Beckett, and David Hood as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. They're all doing. it. But God watched over them.

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It depends on what you mean by "this". Listen
into
the Nevilles tracks or the old Elvis band or Stax Records. They're
all
playing like that. But they know and feel how to make it work. Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson, Barry Beckett, and David Hood as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. They're all doing. it. But God watched over them.

 

 

What I mean is that you can't have one person feeling it "ahead of the beat", while another is lagging behind , and another is on time. This will produce the same confusion as 3 conversations at once.

 

Dan

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What I mean is that you can't have one person feeling it "ahead of the beat", while another is lagging behind , and another is on time. This will produce the same confusion as 3 conversations at once.


Dan

 

 

I know what you meant. But listen to the old Elvis band. Those guys did exactly that. And... one guy would shuffle while the others played it straight. What I'm saying is, the very best of them do exactly that.

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Different styles of music have different concepts of what the beat is and where one should play in reference to the metric beat. I recall a ground breaking article in one of the audio or music magazines from the late 1980s or early 90s that actually measured and quantified how musicians play before and after the metric beat. I believe that article impacted the way people programmed their drum machines and sequencers after it was published.

 

I couldn't find the article with a Google search. Perhaps someone else can link to it.

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It's genre related. All musicians should hopefully understand something about the groove/genre they're playing, before they ever give it a bash or record the tune.

 

 

Here's a song featuring a behind-the-beat groove:

 

[video=youtube;bq4NhcfurgU]

 

And here's a song whose groove demands a Before-the-Beat, or anticipated treatment:

 

[video=youtube;HRLou_Ylzog]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLou_Ylzog

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Historically speaking, the term "pocket" originated in the middle of the last century with the occurrence of the backbeat, and implied that the backbeat, the Snare Drum striking the beats 2 and 4, is slightly delayed creating a "laid back" or "relaxed feel".


If the downbeat is exactly when the Kick Drum is struck, then the Snare Drum was very often played slightly later than the midpoint between two consecutive pulses from the Kick Drum. Musicians (and music listeners) were often times unaware of science behind this, but they had a term for it: "the drummer is playing in the pocket."

 

 

http://www.drummercafe.com/education/articles/in-the-pocket.html

 

Is the pocket similar to swing?

 

Is it reverse swing?

 

I always heard that swing was when the first half of the measure was longer than the second half.

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with regard to the beat & "swing" : as stated above ; it's all about the players working with each other

 

I tend to play guitar "ahead" of the beat. One drummer I worked with couldn't get that & kept stopping b/c he lost my rhythm. For whatever reason, he & I didn't communicate, even if he was a terrific drummer of & by himself. He needed a player who managed the beat more perfectly, I need a drummer who trusts his own time

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I know what you meant. But listen to the old Elvis band. Those guys did exactly that. And... one guy would shuffle while the others played it straight. What I'm saying is, the very best of them do exactly that.

 

 

Definitely - that's a magic combination when the right people do it. That was what IMO Ringo did for his band....he swings just enough, and the other boys - George especially - played straighter against that. I think of this analogy where that swinging drummer manages to levitate the feel, make it feel airborne. Or another analogy is that the swing puts the sand on the dance floor so even the white guys look like they move smoov:)

 

Thelonious Monk really played around with straightstick lines and sharp angles against a heavy swing. With him, it's so extreme it brings this aggressive, intense feel to his lines. I don't know much about John McClaughlin's influences, but he plays a really aggressive unswinging blindingly fast runs against a swing - so extreme I find it a bit offputting.

 

Another more subtle jazzer is Dave Brubeck who plays an almost baroque/classical straight runs against his swinging drummer and Paul Desmond's sliding, foggy sax.

 

I keep thinking of bands that do this - Chick Corea, lays down super precise, straight lines like a machine gun shooting pebbles at bells, against a swinging background. Although with his more fusiony stuff, the bass/drums also tended to play staighter - which is one reason I prefer him in his less fusiony modes. But he's good all the time, really -

 

So, yeah, I say yeah!

 

nat whilk ii

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Swing is that thing that girls' skirts used to do. The skirt lagging with a flip and snap back while the legs step off the straight beat. Yum!


nat whilk ii

 

 

I grew up playing classic rock type music and when I was a kid I remember having a hard time playing big band music like Sinatra. Did it swing too much for my young rock and roll ears?

 

I've tried to program swing in my computer but could never get it to work. Sonar has a swing function. When you look at the piano roll view you can see it moves every other note slightly. But it sounds clumsy and artificial to me.

 

Can a machine swing?

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One drummer I worked with couldn't get that & kept stopping b/c he lost my rhythm. For whatever reason, he & I didn't communicate, even if he was a terrific drummer of & by himself. He needed a player who managed the beat more perfectly, I need a drummer who trusts his own time

 

 

What good is it "being a terrific drummer of & by himself?"

 

I think a lot of today's musicians grew up with heavily quantised music where every note is on the grid. I've had the same problem trying to communicate a laid back feel to some younger guys I've tried to play with lately. They seem to want to rush everything and I'm constantly trying to hold them back. I think you either feel it or you don't.

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Definitely - that's a magic combination when the right people do it. That was what IMO Ringo did for his band....he swings just enough, and the other boys - George especially - played straighter against that. I think of this analogy where that swinging drummer manages to levitate the feel, make it feel airborne. Or another analogy is that the swing puts the sand on the dance floor so even the white guys look like they move smoov:)


Thelonious Monk really played around with straightstick lines and sharp angles against a heavy swing. With him, it's so extreme it brings this aggressive, intense feel to his lines. I don't know much about John McClaughlin's influences, but he plays a really aggressive unswinging blindingly fast runs against a swing - so extreme I find it a bit offputting.


Another more subtle jazzer is Dave Brubeck who plays an almost baroque/classical straight runs against his swinging drummer and Paul Desmond's sliding, foggy sax.


I keep thinking of bands that do this - Chick Corea, lays down super precise, straight lines like a machine gun shooting pebbles at bells, against a swinging background. Although with his more fusiony stuff, the bass/drums also tended to play staighter - which is one reason I prefer him in his less fusiony modes. But he's good all the time, really -


So, yeah, I say yeah!


nat whilk ii

 

 

Yes!

 

Listen to Page attack the riff of The Immigrant song. He's at least on the the beat. Perhaps a little ahead, and decidedly stinging in his feel. Bonham, however, playing exactly the same basic rhythm motive, is behind and heavy. A lumbering swing almost. For 8 very clear bars you have two different ways to feel the beat and together they sound like Led Zeppelin.

 

[video=youtube;nBmueYJ0VhA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBmueYJ0VhA

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Different styles of music have different concepts of what the beat is and where one should play in reference to the metric beat. I recall a ground breaking article in one of the audio or music magazines from the late 1980s or early 90s that actually measured and quantified how musicians play before and after the metric beat. I believe that article impacted the way people programmed their drum machines and sequencers after it was published.


I couldn't find the article with a Google search. Perhaps someone else can link to it.

 

 

Did this ever surface?!?!?!? I would really love to read that article...

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Of course, the real holy grail is tempo variation.

 

Here is one of the most satisfying pop records I know of, and the tempo is all over the place. There really are humans here who are trying to lovingly create a gift, tailor-made, to an audience. tempo is just another means to this end. To my way of thinking, all the programming we do on drum machines... is in pursuit of this kind of varied tempo warmth (unless we are creating tunelets for video games).

 

[video=youtube;CnZ9wOlDxG0]

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It depends on what you mean by "this". Listen
into
the Nevilles tracks or the old Elvis band or Stax Records. They're
all
playing like that. But they know and feel how to make it work. Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson, Barry Beckett, and David Hood as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. They're all doing. it. But God watched over them.

 

 

Do you mean like this one?

 

[video=youtube;PPRdWzTrnFA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPRdWzTrnFA

 

My first love was early seventies R&B music. The stuff right before disco started.

It was the feel of those records that had me hooked. A lot of classic rock had that feel also.

 

There was a thread a while back called what happened to my R&B?

Somewhere along the line it lost the feel. Where did it go?

The new stuff just doesn't do it for me. Even when the songwriting is good it just doesn't groove anymore.

 

When this Alicia Keys song came out I really wanted to like it. Good songwriting, great vocal performance but no groove what so ever. I'm not a drummer so I can't figure out exactly why it doesn't move me. All I know it has something to do with the over all feel.

 

Drums on top of of the beat? Over quantized?

 

Beats me.

 

But I'm sure the producer had some really good computer programing skills.

 

[video=youtube;rywUS-ohqeE]

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Do you mean like this one?

 

 

Hell yeah!!!

 

As a young professional bassist, my drummer took me aside. We were about to be signed to MCA. The common lore at the time was about how Springsteen had taken Max Weinberg aside and was given the talk by Bruce himself, of course paraphrasing, "Max, you gotta get your time together or you're out of the band. Love your drumming but..."

 

My best buddy and drummer took me aside. "Lee, you gotta work with a metronome and get your time shifts together or... the band, while wanting to keep you on board through this new adventure, have decided you'll have to go."

 

I was blown away. And I knew they were right. So I started on metronome therapy. Funny thing about metronomes. You don't have to be a slave. It's a LOT of fun learning how play with, around, up against, underneath, upsidedown from one. I took to it BIGTIME.

 

I became a time zealot and am still one. Time is not a grid. It is a home you can leave anytime. But you always know is there. And the more fun you have with it... the more you bring to the funk stew.

 

Speeding up, slowing down, rushing, lagging... it is all part of the party.

 

It's funny now when I hear young players reject the idea of learning to play to strict time. Unless you're born into it, the best way to learn grease... is to first get comfortable with strict time. And strict time, as we all know from hearing gridded records, in and of itself, does not sound particularly bad. Just... pedestrian. But hey, we gotta learn to walk like a pedestrian before we can dance. But dancing is the goal.

 

So now, today, I love playing with my old player buddies. Those that learned to dance. And even when now I produce, I try to instill quick guidance on how to. And even now, at 53, I still love reminding myself when tracking to dance. To play with the groove. To fence with the drummer. To then give in and lock. To be artful in the playfulness.

 

At least that's the way it feels to me. That Dr. John record is a prime example of part of my education then, and still.

 

GREAT CHOICE!

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Actually the spambots have been working overtime lately, but so at least your comment validates how much $%^&* effort I've been putting into getting of spam. I often spend an hour before going to bed deleting spam, and another hour when I get up.


What's worse is when you're doing a wholesale delete of 147 posts, the forum sloooooooooooooooows way down as the database gets searched and the spam removed. It truly sucks.

 

 

You need to dump some of your mods that keep pissing off the Blackhats.

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Great examples.

That Alicia Keys song is a masterpiece of songwriting and singing, her vocals are just superb, the chord changes and melody are unforgettable, and the hook also carries the message of the song. But I agree the "groove" is nonexistent, I would even say the programmed kick drum is lagging the beat, smearing and dragging the time even late in the song when the mood picks up. The drum programming has no "feeling", no musical interactions with the other instruments, by itself it could be called terrible music from a biased drummer's perspective. Of course a real drummer setting down a real tasty groove would have sounded better to some of our musicians' ears, and probably would not have harmed the song.

 

But another way to see it is that the dominating kick drum is literally the heartbeat of the song and its driving, mechanical, unchanging rhythm subliminally carries a big part of the message of the song. Heartbeats should be boring, without a hot "groove" or clever improvisational changes and fill-ins. The slightly delayed pulse actually sounds very physiologic and does resemble a heartbeat. Plus, the focus of the song is on the lyrics and the vocals, which are so outstanding that almost nothing else matters. If we had to criticize something, we could comment on her dancing, but that song stayed on top of the charts, the video has over 128 million youtube hits, it carries a positive message, who knows how many relationships it has saved, it is just a great song by any metric.

 

Now Dr. John's song is a whole other animal, great groove, beautiful rhythm piano, guitar, bass and drums all as tight as can be, a musician's delight. But it is hard to put Dr. John's vocals and Alicia Keys' vocals in the same sentence. And his message, while amusing, is pretty negative while hers is as positive as it gets. I would guess his song has saved fewer relationships than hers.

 

If you went to see them both in the same concert, which song would you going home singing?

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The drum programming has no "feeling", no musical interactions with the other instruments, by itself it could be called terrible music from a biased drummer's perspective.

 

This Stevie Wonder song uses an old school rhythm box and grooves like crazy.

 

[video=youtube;Ji2ma2mfyhU]

 

 

This Sly Stone song uses a rhythm box and is full of soul.

 

[video=youtube;l5SPqZFOhpU]

 

What's missing from the Alicia Keys record that these two songs seem to have? :confused:

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