Rhythm Tales

Overcoming rhythm problems -- case studies

Over the course of decades of teaching fiddle, I have helped many students overcome obstacles to their sense of rhythm. In my view, rhythm is as natural as a heartbeat, as easy as the regularity of a walking stride. Sometimes, though, people have presumptions about music that invade and get in their way.

Other times, people can have a physical reason for rhythm troubles. Two of the most interesting situations of this kind came to my attention during the same week, when I was the main teacher of a fiddle course, and got to know all the students better than I might have with weekly lessons. One of them, Ruth, never complained about having a problem but she always rushed when she was playing with people. At home, she was the leader of a fiddle performing group, and it puzzled me that she seemed to lack an anchor for her beat. It wasn’t good for her playing or for her group.

I had recently read the beginning of a curious book called A Soprano On Her Head, and decided to try out one of the lessons that author discussed. I asked Ruth a very bizarre question — did she crawl as a baby? She told me that in fact, she did not. The family story was that when she was very little, she had crawled up to an oven, reached out and burned her hands, which put her off the whole idea of crawling. She figured out how to go straight to standing up and learning to walk.

It turns out that our sense of rhythm is developed by cross-crawling — this is when a toddler crawls by coordinating right hand with left knee, and left hand with right knee as they move. As strange as it may seem, I asked Ruth to practice cross-crawling. Amazingly, it had an effect on her sense of rhythm. She began to anchor her beat more, and she felt better about it. I had the sense that if she kept working on cross-crawling and stayed aware of her beat, she would stop rushing, and become a better leader for her group.

The same problem presented itself that week with another student. Christine was a harp player who, although she performed regularly and even recorded with a small band, she asked me to help her because she had trouble with music in 4/4 time. Now, 4/4 time is so common that when I heard her struggling with such basic timing, I decided to shoot in the dark and ask her too about crawling, and, like Ruth, she too had an unexpected story about how she had skipped over the step of learning to crawl properly when she was little. The same solution worked for Christine as for Ruth. She practiced cross-crawling and gained a more solid confidence in her timing by the end of the week.

A different but also unusual rhythm problem surfaced one time in a student who most of the time kept a fairly good beat, but was never sure about it. Timing is not approximate; it’s either right or wrong, so if someone’s timing is blurry, there’s a problem! Fortunately, we all have a good innate sense of timing — as I said, our walking pace is generally extremely regular. So a blurry sense of timing is a symptom of trouble.

Carol’s rhythm was especially shaky when we stopped at a trouble spot and tried to count out a measure or two. Counting is a technique that is useful when needed, but not as music teachers might make it seem. It helps musicians to count when they need to know when to come in, and allows us to dissect a troublesome passage of music and analyze where the notes are really supposed to fall. Often a musician will go over the counting of a problematic measure enough times to absorb the rhythms, and then will play it without having to stop and count anymore. In fact, most musicians do not count numbers when they play; they feel the beat, often physically, as they move their body, or legs, or tap their feet.

This physical motion, as opposed to counting, proved to be what really helped Carol overcome her rhythm problem. One time when we tried to fix a trouble spot and count out the beats, she gave up. It actually made things worse.

We discovered that when we counted numbers, as in “1, 2, 3,” Carol could not help picturing the words “o-n-e, t-w-o, t-h-r-e-e” being written in the air around her. She was visualizing the spelling of the numbers instead of feeling the beat! When we stopped counting altogether and she moved to the beat with her body, by marching or stepping or swaying, she had no trouble keeping the beat.

Phil had a different type of problem. He was a pianist who played a fair amount of dance music but had a lot of anxiety about keeping the beat, since the piano is often looked to as the guardian of the tempo in a dance band. When we worked on his playing and tried to anchor his sense of timing so he could avoid rushing, I found out that, like many beginners or players who lack confidence in playing with others, Phil was laboring under the illusion that everyone else played faster than he could, so he just played as fast he could and hoped to match them. As is the case with many beginners in this situation, he was not only able to keep up with the others but overdid it and played too fast. The problem was, he didn’t trust his own sense of beat, and assumed that if the group didn’t play together, it must be his fault for not playing fast enough. Once he realized that speed was not actually the issue, that he could not only play fast enough but could play too fast, Phil could work on feeling the correct beat for himself, and settling into it, instead of unwittingly pushing everyone else to play too fast.

David, also a pianist, had a different reason for pushing his band to play too fast. He kept a metronome on the piano, with the sound off and the flashing light on, so he made sure he played on the beat. What he didn’t pay attention to, though, was the internal tempo. Between those nice metronomic beats, he was rushing the offbeats. When the offbeat chords were played too soon, it implied that the next beat was going to come sooner than it should, and it made his bandmates rush the beat, even though David was technically on time at the beginning of each measure, right with his metronome. That metronome proved to be a distraction that kept him from actually listening to and communicating with the other musicians. David learned to keep better time by feeling the beat overall, rather than focusing on hitting the metronome beat on the nose. Timing is all about the relationships of beats — if you give the impression your beat will come sooner or later than expected, you convey to others that you’re speeding up or slowing down. It doesn’t matter if you are technically following a metronome. It’s best to really feel that beat within yourself throughout the music. A metronome is a tool to give you a tempo, or test whether you’re keeping a beat, but not as a crutch to follow as you play.

One of the more amusing incidents regarding beats had to do with Harry, the 72-year-old beginning fiddler that you may have read about, in my post “Music is Time.” Harry gave himself two years to get good at the violin (a pitfall of older beginners!), and he decided that getting good at it meant being able to play all the notes correctly. When he came into a lesson one time to play a tune he’d been working on, he ignored all the quarter notes and eighth notes and played everything the same length. His explanation? “I didn’t want to waste time!” It’s good he had a teacher; cognitive studies have shown that learners are usually the worst judges of how they’re doing and even of what they should be trying to do. Harry was not aware that notes with a beat is not music, any more than letters can add up to words, phrases, or ideas unless we include spacing, punctuation, or the timing of a spoken voice. Harry just wanted to “get good” at playing, but being “good” is in the eyes of the listener. All we can really do is “get better” — enjoy the process of learning and improving. The lesson Harry learned was that the top priority in playing music is the timing, not just playing the notes. The notes have to belong somewhere and lead somewhere, if our listeners are to follow what we are trying to musically tell them.

Anchoring the beat involves incorporating it into our bodies — the head alone cannot be trusted to keep a beat; it has too much else going on, and is too easily distracted. In another post, I’ll talk about some of the ways we can feel the beat physically, and drive our music with clear intentions. For now, I hope these stories are illuminating, or at least entertaining!