steviejr92
Authorized Vendor
I like your approachable steps. I think I’ll take it easy like this for a bit. My brother told me the same almost.For improving rhythm, I have two suggestions.
First: play a steady stream of slow quarter notes in sync to a long delay with one repeat (ie, each time you play a note, it should line up perfectly with the repeat of the previous note) and just chill there for a minute. Then try to slowly (over a course of a minute or two) and gradually speed up until you’re playing at double the rate of the delay; you want your tempo to smoothly increase so you go out of sync with the delay, and then sync back in— not to flip straight from quarter notes to eight notes. Chill out there for a bit just metronomically locked into the delay for a few minutes, and then repeat that process until you’re at triple the delay time (triplets) and finally 4 times the delay time (16th notes), and then work back down, slowly falling behind back into triplets, then eights and then quarters. I can try to record an example of this at a later point if it doesn’t quite make sense, but it helps to both lock in tempo steadiness and strengthen your independence from a metronomic beat. It’s sorta like an exercise on the concept of phasing as popularized by Steve Reich, though that’s purely coincidental and something I realized much after I came up with this exercise.
The second exercise is more deliberately Steve Reich based, and it’s one I started doing for fun after I realized the Reich connection to my first exercise. It’s simply this: take a looper pedal, and play an ascending whole tone scale from a note of your choice, to the rhythm of Steve Reich’s ‘Clapping Music’ and just get that loop going. Now, over that loop, play through all of the clapper 2 permutations of the rhythm from a whole tone scale a minor third up.
Also being present in what im doing…not just throwing myself at it but paying attention as to why I’m messing up.