8/19/2019 Rhythm Rules 6 Essential Exercises to Improve Your Groove - Copy

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the standards we were working on “with the metronome on two and four,” to get a better sense of

swing. Huh? I had never thought of that before. Getting locked in suddenly became much more

challenging, but also more fun. It got my groove playing to the next level and my feel got better too.

 As my musical tastes, abilities, and perspective evolved, I wanted to be able to manipulate time

better, so I started practicing my groove playing with the metronome pulsing the dotted quarter-note

and the dotted eighth-note. Now that was a real challenge! It really helped me internalize time, “feel”

a phrase better and generally be more aware of spacing while getting locked in. Let’s explore some

variations on this simple concept and dissect the benefits of these new time keeping methods.

Fig. 1 is a fairly straight-ahead strumming idea with the metronome marking beats 2 and 4. There is

suddenly twice as much space between pulses and therefore twice as much room for error—don’t

get discouraged if you have a hard time locking this groove in. To get a good sense of the spacing,

try playing straight eighth-notes while muting the strings until you feel really locked in. Then, move

on to the strummed chord progression and notice how different your groove feels against the new

pulse. The “two and four” pulse is like an internal backbeat to your own groove. Ideally, you want to

get to the point where you don’t have to listen for beats 2 and 4, and where you don’t “hear” it either.

If you are exactly locked in, your sound will take over the beeping of the metronome.

Each musical example will have two (or three) different sound clips. In this first one, you will hear the

example played first with a quarter-note pulse and then with a dotted quarter-note pulse. Again, get

those eighth-notes going first, then try the progression. Obviously the metronome now falls ondifferent spots, but it shouldn’t take long before you internalize the “original” tempo and predict

where those dotted quarter-note beats will fall. As the four-measure chord progression loops around,

the pulses will fall in different places until you loop it all three times. On the fourth time, the dotted

quarter-note pulse will line back up with the “1” of the phrase. Apply this same idea to all of the rest

of the examples.