Developing Your Inner Timing & Pulse Explained

Many musicians often experience a sense of surprise and even horror when they hear themselves on a recording, primarily due to their timing. ("Am I really rushing that badly?") Learning to play with good time is critical to so many aspects of being a musician. Firstly, if you're a "rushin' draggin'" musician, it can be challenging to secure regular gigs. But even if you work alone and record music by yourself, you'll save a lot of time and editing headaches if you're able to record a solid track to begin with. In this musical lesson video course, Larry Holcombe breaks down the subject in a clear, focused way that's sure to improve your rhythmic feel by leaps and bounds! By the end of this musical video course, you'll be well on your way to playing in the pocket and grooving hard.

Videos
• Intro (00:37) - Larry welcomes us to the course.
• Terminology (16:29) - In this first video, we discuss what we'll be covering in this video series. We cover the terminology used, including pulse, groove, feel, syncopation, and swing.
• Main Pulse (13:49) - First up, we lock into the main pulse, counting and playing quarter, eighth, and 16th notes, trying to move between them without losing the pulse. We also attempt to stay in time while removing metronome hits.
• Dividing a Beat Into 16th Notes (06:13) - Next up, we divide a beat into 16th notes and explore each one in turn, giving us our basic rhythmic language.
• Building Awareness of the Subdivisions (12:04) - We go deeper next, taking a series of mini grooves through the bar and deepening our awareness of the musical subdivisions.
• Accenting Different Grooves Pt. 1 (16:24) - We continue experimenting with and internalizing mini groove motifs and moving them around while maintaining our own sense of inner pulse.
• Accenting Different Grooves Pt. 2 (19:32) - We start to build more complex rhythmic motifs next and again move these around the bar, strengthening our awareness of each one of the beat's subdivisions.
• Triplets (07:49) - We move onto triplet and swung rhythms next, integrating these into our rhythmic vocabulary. These form the building blocks for our eighth- and 16th-note swing rhythms covered in the next video.
• Eighth & 16th Note Swing (05:14) - Next up, we move onto eighth-and 16th-note swing, attempting to build our awareness of this important groove and express it in our music.
• Note Lengths (12:19) - Note duration is another parameter we can use to affect the groove, and we experiment with it in this video. We play with note durations ranging from a single 16th note up to a full bar.
• Randomized Groove Generator (11:04) - Finally, we demonstrate our groove generator included in the course. This is a random generator of rhythmic phrase combinations, perfect for practicing and overcoming writer?s block.