Time In Music - Keeping The Beat

Good timing is a essential skill that every musician has to have. Anyone who does karaoke knows that the music doesn't follow you. You have to follow the music. Even if you're just singing in church, you know that everybody has to sing the same words at the same time. In other words you have to all sing together. As a local musician, I've played with musicians with varying levels of music ability. Most could stay with the beat and some would only occasionally lose it. A few, however, had timing so bad that that I just couldn't play with them. How does this happen? Usually, it's because they have learned to play and practice by themselves. How do you learn good music time skills? I will explore the the main ones in this article.

The number one way for a musician to develop a good sense of time is to play with others. You don't have to play with super professional musicians. Playing with others in any music venue will do. Here is a brief list.

1. Sing in a chorus.
2. Join a drum and bugle corp.
3. Play in a marching band.
4. Join any type of band or orchestra

When you play with other musicians. you have to learn how to play together. Obviously, musicians playing in a symphony orchestra have a good sense of time. They are highly skilled musicians. They can read music at the highest level. They don't just have to play along. They have to be able to come in and out at precisely the right time. If you've ever watched a performance, you may have been impressed by the cymbal player who comes in at just the right time after not being called on to play for almost the entire piece. At the other end of the spectrum, players in a drum and bugle core may not even be able to read music. Yet, because they play with others, they develop a good sense of time.

You don't necessarily have to perform with live musicians. Using karaoke, music minus one and jam tracks is another way to get the experience of playing with others. One type of playing that can develop bad habits is improvising by yourself. As a novice musician, you learn some blues scales and spend hours wailing away alone. Songs are marked off in measures or bars. Blues follows a twelve bar pattern. When you improvise alone, it's very easy to lose track of how many bars you have played. If you spend a lot of time playing alone before you develop a good sense of time, you could very well develop some bad habits. There are many kinds of jam tracks available including blues. With music writing software, you can even create your own. Spend your time jamming with experienced musicians or jam tracks and you will get that time sense that you need to be a musician.

Learning to read music is another way to develop a good sense of time. This is especially good if your just starting out. You need to start with simple songs. You need to count them out as you play. Most of us can sing the pop songs of the day and if you've been playing awhile, you may be able to play them too. The problem is that pop song, that we can sing or play very easily by ear, usually has complex melody that is very hard to read. As you count out simple songs, you will develop your sense of time. Gradually, you will find that you don't need to consciously count any more, You will have internalized your sense of time. You will be able to feel time. Actually, you will find many things in music that can't be counted. One example is the shuffle beat used with blues and other music from the thirties and forties. A shuffle beat is an eight note triplet with the first two notes tied. You can't play the shuffle beat by counting it out. You have to feel it. I'm playing the lesson song in this article "Saints Go Marching In" with a shuffle beat.

Having a good sense of time doesn't mean playing or singing the music exactly as written. Classical musicians of course usually needs to play the music exactly as written. They want to stay as close to the composer intentions as possible. Fans often won't accept rock music, unless it sounds fairly close to the original. Even the rock bands that created a song, when they go out on tour have to duplicate their released version. There are songs that we can interpret in our own way. They are folk songs, blues, country, ballads, and songs from the great American song book to name a few. Crooners of songs from the thirties and forties often played with the timing of the melody. They would hold notes longer than written and then shorten notes to catch up. Singers of today who want to copy that style still do it. It's called song styling. It makes the song your own. As long as you stay within the time framework of the song, you can play with the melody as much as you want.

Playing the melody notes for "Saints Go Marching In" is easy. Look at the numbers for the fingers in the picture. You can see that the right hand fingers are numbered 1 through 5, starting with the thumb as 1. Look at the keyboard picture. You see that the notes are the first five notes of the C scale whiich are numbered 1 through 5. Notice that there is a pattern of two and three black keys. The note just to the left of the first of any two black keys is always c. Just position your thumb over any c note and you can play the melody without shifting your hand position. It's best if you play from middle c. Middle c is near the middle of the piano or keyboard and will be at the same pitch as the melody in the video in this article. I've also given you the fingering numbers on the music. Even if you don't read music well, you should be able to find the notes for the melody of this song. This song like "Some Folks Do" in my other Hub is a do, re, me, fa, so song. Understanding songs in this way helps you to play them and also transpose them into different keys. As you will learn different types of songs use different groups of notes.

The basic timing for Saints has pick up notes. The count is 1,2, 3, 4, 1 Oh when the saints. This counting repeats through much of the song. I use an introduction at the beginning of the song. It's very common to use the last couple of measure of a song as an introduction. You can see how bad timing could come in. If you counted incorrectly into the three pick up quarter notes, your timing would be off. This song also has other held notes. People are more likely to go off time on held notes. They either hold too long or not long enough. That is why I choose this song to talk about timing. Also the chords are played with a shuffle beat feeling. This is a triplet with the first two notes tied. You have to feel it.

The music for Saints in this article is called a lead sheet; Jazz musicians and musicians who play the standards like to work from lead sheets. It gives them a lot more freedom. All they need are the melody and the chords. An arrangement would be written on the treble and bass clef. You would play it as written. When you play from lead sheets, you make up your own arrangement as you go along. For the chords, you will be playing the C in root position. The G7 and F chord are inverted so that you can play them by just moving a few fingers. The reason the d or fifth of the G7 chord is in parentheses is because you can leave it out and still get a good G7 sound. Practice the melody and practice the chords. Then put them together like in the video. You don't have to play the chords exactly as I played them but try to get the feel of the shuffle beat.