How many milliseconds off the beat is rushing/dragging?

[Hep To The Jive]

Not as frequently as I should. Only recently started playing to the click in the DAW and recording my guitar about 3 months ago. Previously, I played along with recordings to get the feel of players.

Now, that I'm putting everything under the microscope so to speak, I can see where my tendencies to rush/drag are.

I use circular picking, and my upstrokes used to be super unstable. They rushed, and all subsequent downstrokes and upstrokes of a line get played a lot earlier. It's a challenge using this picking technique because it requires good thumb-joint mobility. I've only picked up this technique in February last year.

Circular picking employs economy/sweep picking while changing strings, and this is also a place I tend to rush because I get a bit too excited.

So far, these 2 problems have created the greatest unevenness in my playing which ultimately pushed me way ahead of the beat. I spent a few months correcting them, but I might over-corrected.

Now, it's just so difficult to find the beat and play within a ±10ms margin.

This is a bit bizarre, it shouldn't take that much effort to feel comfortable with metronome. That technique you picked up a year ago, why did you change from whatever you 've been doing before? It might be the culprit that affects your timing, it does sound like a weird technique.. The 'circular picking' is not a natural way to pick, unless you've been doing it from the start I imagine. Maybe consider a different technique that feels more comfortable for you, and see if your timing has improved?

[deacon Mark]

Do you actually think about his stuff as precise? I would say Wes was way behind the beat but it never occured to me to measure since it all worked out. Kessel seems to be a bit on top of it and at times drives me nuts with that way he can play.

So it is scientific? I am lost.

[Christian Miller]

Scientific research on the subject exists but having read the papers I would say it's a small literature, based on small data sets, and mostly done in particle physicist's lunchbreaks.

Somehow without scientific research jazz musicians have been killing it for over a century.

[Hep To The Jive]

Do you actually think about his stuff as precise? I would say Wes was way behind the beat but it never occured to me to measure since it all worked out. Kessel seems to be a bit on top of it and at times drives me nuts with that way he can play.

So it is scientific? I am lost.

Wes was behind the beat? i thought the opposite, tbh. Where are the scientists when you need them?

[Christian Miller]

Wes was behind the beat? i thought the opposite, tbh. Where are the scientists when you need them?

I'm not sure we should encourage them to measure art.

[deacon Mark]

Wes was behind the beat? i thought the opposite, tbh. Where are the scientists when you need them?

Yes, he did many times but obviously that changes from depending on the tune and such. Just listen to him play Besame Mucho in 3/4 time. He is way behind the beat and I guess that is where my ear hears his great sense of swing. Listen to West Coast Blues again behind the beat most of the time.

[Mick-7]

I'm not sure we should encourage them to measure art.

Alas, too late, they've sicked AI on it.

[Christian Miller]

Alas, too late, they've sicked AI on it.

Don’t use naughty words. AI is a PR term used by bandits.

LLMs are a black box. So they ain’t measuring nothing.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Hep To The Jive]

Don’t use naughty words. AI is a PR term used by bandits.

LLMs are a black box. So they ain’t measuring nothing.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

He's right though. I was thinking the same thing, you can't escape the progress, everything will be measured, in miliseconds...

It'll be literally no country for the old man.

My name is also Anton btw

[RLetson]

Don't know about DAW stuff as part of the generation of music, but it sounds to me like a dandy analytical tool for refining our understanding of what's going on with music. All those conversations about what constitutes "swing" or "in the pocket" can include data from already-existing exemplars. What was Wes really doing in this or that performance and how does it line up with audience-side responses/characterizations? How do the members of a rhythm section establish the time-feel for an ensemble? What is a bass player or drummer responding to when they push or pull the time-feel?

I find theory and measurement interesting, but they seem to me to be posterior to what our ears and eyes and such receive--good for putting something particular and concrete under our attempts to describe how and why a performance gets to us. There's an inevitable push-pull between knowing-how and knowing-that, but the heart of the art is in doing-that, whether we can put names to the various sub-thats that constitute the whole experience.

(Good god, I've become Romantic in my old age, after a lifetime of rational/systematic analysis of art. Not that I'm giving up on my descriptive vocabulary or taxonomies or historical tracking, but if it sounds good, it is good.)

[brent.h]

Ok im unplugging from Logic and going back to practising with my amp and metronome.

This whole thing with the DAW is getting too unnatural.

[MiniMerckx.22]

Always be sure the your guitar is louder than the click. If you are playing and hear the click...you screwed up. Listening for the click to guide you is the worst thing you can do and your precision will be far worse than what you do naturally, even if you "need to improve" your time.
I learned this the hard way.

[brent.h]

Always be sure the your guitar is louder than the click. If you are playing and hear the click...you screwed up. Listening for the click to guide you is the worst thing you can do and your precision will be far worse than what you fo naturally, even if you "need to improve" your time.
I learned this the hard way.

Totally agree. My time has gotten slightly better when I don't try to follow the click. The trick is to be responsible for the internal counting, not rely on sth outside of yourself. What I do now during practice is I have the click once every bar or 2 bars. When I'm feeling like I need more of a challenge (esp comping), have the click sound out every 4 bars.

[Aiq]

I was in a clinic and Mr. Martino was asked how he practiced time.

“I don’t. You breathe, you walk. Time.”

My time breathes in orbit around the subatomic vibrations.

[nbevan3]

This question is more for those of you who regularly record yourselves with a digital audio workstation like Logic Pro (or anyone with decent audio engineering knowledge).

When looking at grid in the DAW, what is the margin of error when it comes to the micro-timing of one's playing?

I first started recording myself some months ago, and I saw that I was constantly 30-40 milliseconds ahead. Since then, I've learnt to relax a little and now I'm anywhere from on the beat to 30 milliseconds behind the beat. (My notes are a bit more even now, thanks to the metronome too.)

Is there like a specific number that screams, "You're playing sloppily! Fix your time now!"? What has your experience been?

If you are "that far out" at all tempos, are you sure it is not a latency effect from your DAW? It does not explain the "ahead of the beat" question.

[rpjazzguitar]

In the track-sliding experiments I did a few years ago, iirc, I found the following.

Samba groove sounded best when the bass was on the click. Somebody has to define where the center of the beat is.

The drums sounded good about 13ms ahead. I was working with a single drum track, not separate tracks for different drums. Presumably, a more detailed analysis would address kick vs snare vs hihat and so forth. For example, what is the best timing for kick and bass?

When we put the drums right on the click the track sounded, relatively speaking, lifeless.

Guitar and piano seemed to sound best with some variation around the center of the beat, but this was hard to establish.

At a finer grained level than the above, there is also the issue about exactly how to place the 16th notes in 2/4. Samba, like swing ride, is not played evenly. That is, grooving samba 16ths are not all on the click. And, the correct placement is tempo-dependent, so you can't even write it out in conventional notation.

We tried, due to a DAW error, to have the drums 50ms ahead. Everybody who heard that thought it was wrong.

My impression is that you can start to feel things somewhere around 10ms and you can clearly hear it by 20 or so (can't recall exactly).