How to theoretically explain good time feel?

[Hugo Gainly]

I was just using the stupid analogy that someone else used and you agreed with vehemently.

I was happy just to hear your opinions until this rather snide remark.

You seem to have a low bar for vehemence. I did detect agreement but not the stooping, or the depths. It's just an opinion.

I didn't say Love was analogous to time feel. You did. I used Love as an example of something that defies theoretical analysis and which no amount of practice will create. It's not Love you improve by practice, it's your relationship.

Can I add Martin Drew playing the drums for Peter King the UK altoist at 70bpm to the list of greats? I had never heard anything like it, it was almost like love.

[Bobby Timmons]

You can explain love bruh, that's ridiculous. The reason there are all kinds of circumstances for it is that it is an instinct. Like the instinct to eat. There is all kinds of food, there is all kinds of love. It's an instinct that evolved for procreation and bonding. How hard was that?

[Bobby Timmons]

@ ragman and Peter, you guys are out-of-control. Time feel was already explained in the necro thread. Now someone revives it and I have to dispel your crap a 2nd time?

This explains it. I'm sure more could be added to this concept such as polyrhythmic feel, but this is a huge eye opener if you have no idea what time feel is and think you either have it or you don't or all you can do is go gig etc.

[Hugo Gainly]

I think this is an issue that has been addressed before, in this case The Brand New Monty Python Bok..

[Bobby Timmons]

[Christian Miller]

That's the subject of technique sir! I've been targeting that since I discovered technique was a thing. Get drum sticks and a practice pad.

I don’t think it’s technique

EDIT: at least not entirely. There’s something going on that’s fundamental.

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[pamosmusic]

I was happy just to hear your opinions until this rather snide remark.

You seem to have a low bar for vehemence. I did detect agreement but not the stooping, or the depths. It's just an opinion.

I didn't say Love was analogous to time feel. You did. I used Love as an example of something that defies theoretical analysis and which no amount of practice will create. It's not Love you improve by practice, it's your relationship.

Can I add Martin Drew playing the drums for Peter King the UK altoist at 70bpm to the list of greats? I had never heard anything like it, it was almost like love.

Apologies if I offended.

Though it was an analogy. Otherwise why was it there, I guess?

[Christian Miller]

In my experience, bad time feel tends to boil down to one of three things:

1. They don't have a good grasp of the nuances of a style's rhythm. Every genre has their own little idiosyncracies, and amateurs and tourists struggle to pick them up. It takes lots of active listening and usually some trial-and-error to get it right.

For me, it took a tape of Lester Young, Charlie Christian, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Fats Navarro -- edited to just the solos, and listened to day and night for weeks on end. After that, I felt like I had jazz feel in my blood.

2. They aren't good at subdividing. For jazz, that usually means they can't feel the upbeats and they aren't good at feeling triplet rhythms in duple (it still blows my mind how loose classical musicians are whenever they see a triplet -- in general, jazz musicians are way more precise about it. But that's a different topic).

You have to get it from a conscious thought process (actively subdividing in your head as you play) to a subconscious one. Once you don't have to think about it anymore, your timefeel will improve.

Practice clapping in 4/4 while tapping your feet in half note triplets, really get it down, and watch your friends all say how good your time suddenly feels better.

3. Not talked about as much, but many times poor time is because of poor technique. Pretty hard to have a good sounding 8th note line if you can't play 8th notes cleanly. It becomes particularly noticeable on instruments like guitar, which are not at all well suited for bebop.

I do think you can analyze this stuff if you really wanted to. Analysis has been done on waveforms of jazz drummers, and they've found definite patterns that defy traditional notation. But for the practicing musician, immersion is going to be the more practical way to go.

That said, there are definitely things you can point out that make a huge difference in someone's timefeel: practical things like tap your foot on 1 & 3, pick the upbeats, correcting some technical flaw. Sometimes you can hear it, but you can't figure out how to translate it to the instrument. Things like that can be a lightbulb moment for the right player.

The triplets thing is nuts they just don’t go anywhere near being actual triplets and they always blinking accent the first one haha.


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[Bobby Timmons]

EDIT: at least not entirely. There’s something going on that’s fundamental.

I see what you're saying. I have that. My hands seem to fundamentally not want to effing do the right rhythms. That's why I'm into focusing more on harmony now cuz it's my strength anyway, but still workin at the rhythm.

Although I think you can still make progress if you target technique. The drum sticks and pad really help. It gives you more control over your hands and rhythm.

[rpjazzguitar]

@ ragman and Peter, you guys are ridiculous. Time feel wa

Very good video. Thanks for posting.

It contains a number of specific suggestions for how to work on time feel.

Notably, he really only credited one thing with quickly improving his playing. That was listening repeatedly to Jimmy Smith, The Sermon.

There were recommendations to put a slow click on and treat it as the second quarter note in a bar of 4/4. Also to drop beats out of the click. Things like that. But the one story about a quick success was the Jimmy Smith story.

I'm going to go with Jimmy Smith and see how that works out.

[Bobby Timmons]

You're welcome. The framework is consistency, precision, flexibility, subtlety. He's not suggesting osmosis as the premise of the video.

Consistency - keeping the tempo.
Precision - having a tighter tolerance for where the rhythms should correctly line up, not having some ahead and some behind, screwing up the evenness of the stream.
Flexibility - pushing or pulling for dramatic effect.
Subtlety - I think advanced command of time feel like implied polyrhythmic feel could be included here.

[rpjazzguitar]

Thought experiment.

You're the engineer on a session of master musicians who play a track with the best time feel anybody has ever heard.

You have each instrument on its own track in your DAW.

Somehow, though, the tracks get mixed up. Slid randomly, back and forth in time. It's all messed up. (In a DAW you can slide the wave form to the left or right, which shifts it in time). Also, the tempo got lost, so you have to figure out a tempo.

Can you slide each track back to where it needs to be - and adjust the tempo - to match the original time feel?

Or, could you use a set of mathematical rules to build, from scratch, a version with equally great time feel?

Problem #1. Can you get two people to agree on whether one time feel is better than another, if they're both somewhere in the ballpark?

Problem #2. The displacements from the click which may be involved in great time feel are tempo dependent.

Problem #3. As you were evaluating multiple versions, your brain would start to get overwhelmed and it would affect your critical judgement.

etc.

[pauln]

Theoretically this has already been done. Experimentally, samples of jazz playing were evaluated by listeners for time feel. Those samples were registered to normalized beat pace and rhythmically indexed for comparative analysis with respect to which were or were not heard as good time feel...

The result was that despite variations in players' beat width (leading and lagging), sounding up beats on time* was heard as good time feel.

For those who liken this to dancing, if you are swaying to the music, do the up beats occur when you are swayed one side or the other, or when you are in the middle between two opposite sways?

* where "on time" means with the drum kit, typically hi-hat

[rpjazzguitar]

Theoretically this has already been done. Experimentally, samples of jazz playing were evaluated by listeners for time feel. Those samples were registered to normalized beat pace and rhythmically indexed for comparative analysis with respect to which were or were not heard as good time feel...

The result was that despite variations in players' beat width (leading and lagging), sounding up beats on time* was heard as good time feel.

For those who liken this to dancing, if you are swaying to the music, do the up beats occur when you are swayed one side or the other, or when you are in the middle between two opposite sways?

* where "on time" means with the drum kit, typically hi-hat

i would like to read that do you know the citation?

[pauln]

i would like to read that do you know the citation?

Downbeat delays are a key component of the swing feel in jazz | Research Square
Our experimental study yielded the clear and significant result that soloists delaying their downbeats while synchronizing their offbeats with the rhythm section do enhance the swing feel.

[rpjazzguitar]

Downbeat delays are a key component of the swing feel in jazz | Research Square
Our experimental study yielded the clear and significant result that soloists delaying their downbeats while synchronizing their offbeats with the rhythm section do enhance the swing feel.

Thanks for the citation. Interesting study. If I've been able to extract a key bit, it was this. Start with two eighth notes and then make them swing eighths. Now, the first note lasts longer than the second note. Could be twice as long, but that varies with tempo and player. Find the right lengths for the tempo you're at. (this is specified as swing ratio and it's tempo-dependent, which can't be conventionally notated, unless you specify a tempo -- and then it might be too difficult to write -- I won't get into why right here).

Now, hit the first note a little late (like 30ms, which is audible) and keep the second note exactly where it was. According to these guys this is optimal swing -- on the average. Bear in mind that there was a lot of scatter in their plots.

If I understood it, the upbeat that they referred to, that is, the one that you're supposed to nail right on time, is the second of the two swung eighths (in the optimal swing ratio at that tempo) and not the second click of a metronome clicking 8ths.

It occurred to me to wonder, if a horn player tries to play right on the beat, how long does it take to hear the note. The answer seems to be that the note speaks in 3-10ms and it takes another ms/foot to travel to the microphone or listener. You can feel 10ms or a little more, but 3 is imperceptible.

[emanresu]

I'm the last person who should be "theoretically explain" this.
The problem is, I just cant shut up!

Most people probably can detect most things happening time-wise.. meaning we have the clock sitting inside us naturally. Pretty accurate already.
But trying to produce some music with good time-feel can be so messy. Dunno why, it is just sad. Sounds sad too.

Once the mess is sorted out, the same rock solid clock can be brought up, made "loud" in the mind, take one of the "bosses" seat in there - thats your time.
Feel comes from toying with the time-boss. That can be messy and random too for a while. Maybe the hands could be too clumsy, not sharp enough. Usually the mess comes from not really knowing the whays of the proper.. traditional feel. Once that one gets sorted out, you'll get the good time feel.
So, time feel kinda is two things. The boss type, kinda like a heavy bounce, and the.. little worker-bees, with all the nuances.

Deliberate toying, not like that "computer-humanized" junk.

[pauln]

brown downbeat delayed...

[pauln]

It occurred to me to wonder, if a horn player tries to play right on the beat, how long does it take to hear the note.

Musicians don't wait to hear the beat, we feel the beat pace and produce the note early so that it sounds* on the beat (if that is what is wanted).

* of course"sounds" from different musicians in different places have various propagation times. This is why maximum coherence comes from placing all the sources of sound together so that the variations of propagation time for each may be individually compensated - the result for all is coherence.

[Reg]

Don't make it more complicated than it is.

If you want to swing, mastering the triplet feel is key. Here's how to get started:
Triplet Feel Basics

In 4/4 time, you can subdivide using triplets:

• 4 quarter notes transform into 2 quarter note triplets. You'll have attacks on the 1st and 3rd quarter notes, with a rest on the 2nd.
  
• 8 eighth notes become 4 eighth note triplets. Again, the attacks are on the 1st and 3rd eighth notes, with a rest on the 2nd.

Enhancing the Swing Feel

To add more weight to your swing, subdivide one more time.
Larger Sections and Time Awareness

It’s also crucial to understand larger sections, forms, and phrases. For example, take a 12-bar blues form. You can organize it into 3 sections of 4 bars each. Focus on the implied target of the first attack of each 4-bar phrase, creating a repeating pattern of attacks.
This might sound complex, but start with the fundamental triplet subdivisions. Don’t overthink it!

[Stevebol]

I've been wondering about this and I think I get it instinctually but want to try to break it down. Also whenever I try to explain something to my teacher he freaks out lol. I know the jazz forum has no shortage of discussion.

To have expressive time feel it seems that some rhythms and phrasing have to be strict to the time to establish an even tempo, and some rhythms have to be off of the time to add expression. It seems if you do either all the rhythms off the time it sounds bad, or all tied to the tempo it sounds lame.

Also a thing I've been wondering about. Say you have a line that is off of the time for effect, say it's ahead. How do you visualize how to accomplish this for good feel? Say there's a starting point, an ending point, and also variations within the wave of notes - those have to be regimented too. A player who I think does this masterfully is Joey Defrancesco with his right hand. It's like a wave of notes that is off of the time but still strictly related to it.

Last question: do you think it's good for your feel to work some strictly slow, even, and legato practice to build up good feel during normal playing?

Can't say I blame him. Don't think so much;

[Reg]

I guess Steve's .. post of original post is about his basic questions ... how to create and use, " off time tempo or feel" and is working on this with slow tempos the best approach to achieve this skill.

I would say... it depends on your skill levels.

By that I mean, do you have an internal pulse that you trust?

Do you understand the concept of using rhythmic targets?

Do you understand the concept of how to imply those Targets, even when not actually played?

And maybe most important... do you understand... Sub-Dividing concepts?


Off time or expressive feel effects generally are still part of a rhythmic Pattern within a section of space or Time.

Working on these skills slowly or faster really doesn't make a difference if you have the technique.


Another detail that might be interesting is.... live performance time is just that, it's live and not a click tract.

We are talking about Jazz .... there are gigs where drummers have a click tract, recording sessions, shows or old school dance gigs etc...

Real time slowing down of the pulse is also an effect used to create tension and imply musical Targets. The trick is being aware when it's going on and ensemble being aware and knowing where your going. Generally someone cues.(joey)

[Stevebol]

^^^
I'll go back to Chit Chat now bye.

[Stevebol]

Eliane Elias to Peter Erskine:

"You Americans don't know how to swing samba; you all sound like TI-KA TI-KA TI-KA TI-KA."
I smirked and said, "Well then, how should it sound?"
She sang, "DO-goosh-ga, DO-goosh-ga, DO-goosh-ga, DO-goosh-ga."

From Peter Erskine's The Drum Perspective

WE suck at a lot of things but we're still good at football.
64 years old, born in Sao Paulo. Scared the shit out of me for minute. I never met her. My ex's all live in California.
Nope. Don't know her and don't want to.

Someone understands American music. Africans. This is the new wave;

My guitar lick for today ?? - YouTube

[johny_gtr]

Some people claim that older drum machines sound better because their tempo varies more than newer ones.
The TR808 is the Gibson L5 of the techno world.

I bet that their quite precise and all under <10ms. They sound "better" because ravers listen to 808 boomy bass drum and catchy 606 hats for over 40 years and its a golden standard like some years are waiting for archtop sound on every jazz guitar track.

Another point when some instruments played in the same time internal filter do their job and these drum machine sounds great together and in pack. Great example of 'similar' technics is Jim Hall playing: when melody/solo starts all chords comping goes behind and almost silent. It sounds like 2-3 guitars play at the same time. Stunning arrangement!