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I have noticed that truly great players have a sense of groove to their playing that separates them from the merely competent players.
The question is, after you've done enough homework with scales and arps and technique etc etc etc etc, if you still don't have that intense swing to your playing, what can you do to acquire it?
I don't know, but I absolutely certain it is not the usual technical stuff -- great players can swing playing a major scale against a major chord at a moderate tempo playing quarters and eighths. It's not about chops, it's not about mastery of scales etc. It may have to do with rhythmic vocabulary.
I know people who have it who never use a metronome -- and people who practice with the metronome constantly and have bad time. Maybe a metronome helps -- I don't know -- but maybe not.
But how do you work on it?
I have only one semi-useful answer. I try to play, as much as possible, with people who have it, hoping it wil rub off.
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08-15-2018 11:32 PM
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Playing with people who got it is very important. But even besides that, you just have to become very groove- conscious from the beginning.
I worked on it, by default, by playing in rock, funk, ska bands, where I always had to lock in with the rhythm section. If I couldn't do it, I would be kicked out of any band. Improvisation skills don't mean much in those settings, maybe just a bonus.
I think if I was born black and in that culture, I would be learning it from playing in churches in gospel bands.
I bring everything I learned to jazz. No matter what pickup jazz bands I'm doing gigs with, the most often compliment I hear 'you guys sound so tight!'. I have a mindset of a guitarist functioning as 'the rug that ties the room together' haha. Then even if there's no drummer, the groove is provided.
Improvising is another thing, though. Tons of work needs to be done, but rhythm guitar is what gets gigs to begin with.
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The 1st time my soloing got a happy reception and comments was after having lots of fun with metronome. I guess there are also useless or.. "wrong" ways to practice with it but when getting it right, it's a blast.
Nowadays my "groove" surely goes away if there's still some doubt left in a tune. It's hard to keep it sometimes anyway and I totally agree with OP "... sense of groove to their playing that separates them from...". The stars seem to keep it no matter what, and playing whatever.. anything.. some single stupid triad even. A thing to envy and admire.
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I also recommend that one 'get their groove' by playing music that is harmonically fairly 'basic' since this allows one to focus on the groove and not the changes. I improved in this area by playing two chord vamps with a piano and bass player, for a long stretches. This helped me 'lock in' and I was able to apply this training when playing jazz standards with more complex changes.
Originally Posted by Hep To The Jive
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Listen to a lot of music that grooves the way you aspire to. Practice playing with a metronome and with CDs. Work on rythym as much as possible. A lot of the jazz guitar groove has to do with the ability of playing notes and runs in a staccato manner, but not everybody plays that way, especially modern players.
A big part of that groove you are talking about though, I think it just comes from playing all day, every day for years..
Combination of finger muscles, flow on the instrument, connection with the music, technique.. I was watching a Tuck Andress video recently, he talks a bit about walking bass, then he proceeds to play with such a great groove... 
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A European pro who used to post here answered a thread on "things you wish you'd known when you were younger" with three words: subdivide, subdivide, subdivide.
Struck me as odd at the time, but I've come to agree with him, just from my own humble experience. The best way to tighten up quarter notes is to practice playing eighth note triplets or sixteenths, depending on your time base. Play all eighth note triplets for a period of practice each day, and you develop more precise technique . It's like your pick and fingers can "hear" smaller/faster and actually articulate at that lower level. you start to hear better when you listen to the greats playing as well. Great players like Wes have all of their releases /slides and other articulations occurring on very specific subdivisions. They're always hearing a "level down" , even if they're just playing quarter notes. Great singers place all of their articulators /diphthongs etc. on specific smaller subdivisions of the beat.
In sports psychology it's aiming for a smaller target. "Try to see the seem on the ball" etc. Aim for the pin prick center of the target rather than the whole center piece.
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You need to be subdividing all the time.
There is a method to it, you embody the subdivisions.
Sounds complicated but it isn't. When you walk you must lift your foot before placing it, so that is the instigating movement, then the foot comes down.
Everyone can tap their foot as they play to some extent. The guys who don't have to think about groove have it embodied and the real easy way to do that is to lift your foot on the last subdivision before the beet.
This is the extra dimension that moves your sense of time from downbeat to upbeat. If you practice say bluegrass fiddle tunes and feel the eight notes as sixteenth notes and LIFT your foot when the metronome clicks and drop it where after where you want the beat to be you HAVE to subdivide. Because the subdivision literally becomes embodied when you practice like this after a few months of very slow practice with the metronome it will start to be completely relaxed, natural and easy.
The other great benefit is that you will notice you will be less likely to tense up as you will be using your whole body and not stiffening as you focus too much on your hands.
Go for a walk or a run and count a rhythm to yourself internally or, if you find a nice quiet stretch where you won't feel self conscious, even better out loud. You should notice your whole body start to come in line with your count, your foot will lift on the third triplet if you are counting triplets and land on the one. Maybe it will be different for you, go and see.
Another more direct and prosaic way is to drum hand to hand (lrlrlr etc) every subdivision as you sing what you want to play, go as slow as possible and notice EACH INDIVIDUAL SIMULTANEITY, if you are slow enough and really paying attention you will notice that there will be DISCRETE points where coordination breaks down and you 'stumble'. These are the gaps in your perception of rhythm, look for the simultaneities and AS SLOWLY AS POSSIBLE iron them out.
The hand's won't work if global coordination is not taken care of.
This is also the best way to avoid pain.
D.
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spent about a year doing this every time I drove in morning - on the steering wheel etc., while waiting in traffic. You learn that strict alternation works pretty well even for eighth note triplets etc., and beyond that, you begin to understand that that same alternation is easily applied to pick direction etc. certainly makes triplets less mysterious. Originally Posted by Freel
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Cool Matt. Try the walking thing too. Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
You see walking is a whole body activity and every human in learning to walk and negotiate obstacles and choose a path develops hard wired neural architecture and whole brain modes of operation to keep the whole body moving smoothly and capable of adapting and choosing new routes each time.
As much as possible we want that to be the case whilst playing the guitar, a whole body activity and if it becomes so we can borrow that neural architecture to help us out and solve problems for us.
A little attention as to the rhythmic placement of the 'lift' of the foot with regard to subdivisions may seem tedious but we get all that subconscious power for free when we raise the bar for foot tapping just a little.
Only if we really take our time though.
D.
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Different username? What I'm remembering was several YEARS ago actually. Originally Posted by djg
Anyway, glad to know you're keeping tabs on every word...
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Man, Dortmund was my bud. Short, pithy, genius statements. What did you do with him? :-) Originally Posted by djg
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There ya go....
Originally Posted by djg
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I appreciate all the replies. I lost track of the thread for a while, but just got back to it.
I'm trying to work on it at the moment by finding a way to comp samba in 2/4 with articulating every 16th, tapping on 2 and swaying in time as I do it.
Don't know how much it will help.
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No worries. Originally Posted by djg
"There ya go" is a local colloquialism which is probably completely lost in text form. Nothing like "there you go again"for example. It's a non committal throwing-in-with type of statement. Doesn't require agreeing/disagreeing with the other party.
So when my crazy father in law starts in with his political conspiracy theories, I don't want to start a DEBATE, nor do I want to actually AGREE.
So, it's: "There ya go....".
:-)
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There ya go again.
D.
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Bloody hell what is it with all these aliases? It's doing my ****ing head in.
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The problem with answering this question is that it implies that you imagine you have great time. I know that I do not, but I have got a LOT better... And have worked on it very hard. OTOH those with great natural feel will NOT be able to advise you how to develop it. For them it is completely intuitive. So FWIW: Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
The metronome is a tool of diagnosis at best. It cannot give you good time or a sense of groove, but it can tidy things up. Some teachers even advise not using it. Great jazz time is certainly not metronomic, nor great soul or funk records.
(ATM I use it to lock in awkward tempos. I listen back to recordings of gigs, find tempos that have shifted or don't quite sit, and play along with that tempo until it feels natural. Not really rocket science.)
Others have mentioned subdivision, that's great. UPBEATS are the big thing. Practice feeling upbeats both straight and swung (the distinction is subtle at up tempos) and make sure that you are placing upbeats consistently in any line or scale you practice. It may help you to accent them at first, but the aim is evenness.
Playing along with records is something that is very helpful but neglected as advice sometimes.
It's better to play with a great band. But you have to be listening to them, and understand what is happening musically.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
Too much screen time. Weather is great in Glasgow today, I'm going for a run before the child in me starts hating me even more. He takes it out on the internet.
D.
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I think I just had a mini-breakthrough! I was trying this raising-the-foot-on-the-"and"-just-before-the-one thing while listening to a few tunes. I was enjoying the music and it did seem more of a whole body thing than usual with me.
Then I listened to Moose the Mooch, Charlier Parker. I usually find the head of this a bit tricky to "parse" - but by paying attention to that offbeat just before the one, it suddenly came into focus. I also realised that the drummer is really emphasising that last "and" of the bar in almost every bar. It was really really obvious (even a bit unsubtle :-)). How could I have missed that before!
So, thanks to Freel for the little hint. I'm looking forward to listening to more stuff with these new spectacles on.
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this will sound a little OCD or just a little dumb, but where ELSE can you raise your foot? I mean, if you are going to pat on the downbeat, you have to raise your foot before that. So by default, you will raise your foot between two down beats, i.e. an upbeat. On a very slow tempo, that might well come at the end of the interval between, but once you are past, maybe, 120 bpm, is it really possible to be thinking of 1-duh-duh-duh-RAISEFOOT-2-duh-duh-duh-RAISEFOOT 3... Originally Posted by geoff23
In the end, at most tempos above a ballad, I don't see what's going on with raising the foot on the upbeat since there isn't anywhere else to raise it.
I know (seriously, not kidding) I'm missing something here.
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In general, when things are going a bit wrong, people lift there foot too soon and arbitrarily with no rhythmic intent, then they hold it with tension, lastly instead of LETting it fall they PUSH it down and very often early.
The result is that they tend to not hear clearly, push the beat, fail to subdivide and make it hard for the people that they are playing with to feel good.
That tense holding has a knock on effect on the hands, believe or not, and the effect gets bigger and bigger till we are stiff.
It's not good, I know. I couldn't believe how I was shooting myself with my foot until I noticed. I think I was trying to work on a Mark King bass line and getting nowhere, I integrated the foot lift with the last quaver of each beat and worked real slow and it got trivially easy real quick.
Mark is a drummer and I guess he was used to quadrilateral coordination exercises.
One guaranteed sign that you are lifting early is the tendency to speed up. Another is that people seldom compliment you, even when you think you have played well.
D.
D.
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For me, it is about simply putting attention on the raising of the foot. That's what did the trick. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
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What about raising your foot on the third triplet? I would imagine that as being better for swing feel?
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Foot tapping is an interesting thing.
One teacher made a point of looking at feet and commenting on what he called "good foot".
I find that, when I'm reading syncopated lines, tapping my foot really helps. But, I notice that some of the horn players, reading the same (or more complex) lines, don't tap at all. One really good player alternates his feet. Some do a heel toe thing.
One bassist I know constantly harps on my foot tapping, insisting that I should tap at half speed, or less. His point is that too much foot-activity hurts groove. This makes sense, but, I play with a long time pro kb player, locally famous, who taps even faster. His foot is just about vibrating and he grooves hard.
There is a video of three greats, maybe Ellis, Kessel and Pass, and each one is tapping differently.
I can't ever recall seeing anybody raise their foot on anything other than the upbeat. I can't recall anybody lifting on the third note of a triplet. Maybe I missed it.
I do sometimes see people whose feet seem to move seemingly randomly -- no obvious connection to the time. It's odd looking. I suspect that this is a predictor of poor time/groove. I don't recall seeing anybody with great time do that.
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That would be me. I alternate btw feet randomly, sometimes heel - toe, sometimes the other way around, and over even meter I often count in 3 - 5 - 7 ... -13 tupplets, switching randomly from beat to beat. This is not a joke. My playing in time is. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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