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One of the things many music students find challenging, is the ability to evenly perform rhythms combining odd and even subdivisions. Music schools and teachers have a certain way of teaching how to do this, which runs contrary to the whole core nature of what rhythm is all about. Music teachers teach students about even and odd subdivisions, they give names to the subdivisions (triplets, eight notes, 16th notes…) and they have students practice rhythms and subdivisions while conducting the beat with their arm, and/or with a metronome. The main issue with all of this: is that all of this is cerebral activity. THINKING! The core nature however of what rhythm is all about, is: Physical! After all: it is called "time-feel" and "rhythmic feel" for a reason. When was the last time you ever heard a musician say that you should "think" the groove? Because rhythm is something you feel, the more physical you make the practice of rhythm, the lesser time it is going to take you to master it. However: the more cerebral the approach to learning rhythm, the more it alienates the student from the nature of rhythm, which is based on flow, motion, intuition, or in other words: physical activity. There has to be a better way to practice this than sitting on your butt, listening to a beeping device (called a metronome), intellectually trying to estimate how to fit in 2, 3 or 4 notes within the space from one beep to the next beep. Well… there IS a better way, and it incorporates something very natural… something we do all the time: walking! You see:one of the main difficulties when practicing with a metronome is that it is really challenging to “estimate” the distances between the beats. It is already hard enough trying to process the rhythmic subdivisions you’re trying to perform on each beat, let alone adding the difficulty of trying to estimate the distances in time between the beats on top of that. However: you have been walking your entire life. It is safe to say that you know when your foot is going to hit the ground, before it happens. Now unless you’re John Cleese, or you’re a member of Monthy Python, or you have some medical condition that causes you to have 1 leg that is longer than the other, it is pretty safe to say that you probably also have an even step when you walk. (Check out John Cleese in this Month Python video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZlBUglE6Hc to see what I mean.) So what better way to practice rhythmic combinations, than during a walk, using your footsteps as your metronome? Your rhythmic practice cannot get much more physical than that. Students who do this exercise, generally take much less time to master combinations of odd and even subdivisions, than students who practice this with a metronome. The working of this concept will be explained with graphical notations in the next article. Author's Bio : Vreny, is a patient and an enthusiastic teacher in California. With 17 years of teaching experience, he offers the best guitar lessons in california. His life's goal has been to make the world a fun place to live in, sharing his love for music through education.
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