I completely agree that we do not give enough attention to this, especially in classical training. I have played with a good number of classical musicians in pop/jazz environments and have been routinely amazed at how fantastically bad most of them are at keeping time when there is no conductor waving at them. This is because they have been trained to primarily externalize their sense of pulse and align it visually to a conductor, and they are impressively good at it. However, when it comes time to internalize that pulse as you must do in most other genres, they struggle. This is also one of those things that people tend not to realize they are bad at because they lack the very skill needed to detect the issue in the first place. It may become apparent when you try to record yourself and see how poorly your transients are lining up with the grid. In my case I had an instructor that pointed out how badly I was rushing my walking bass lines in a pre-jury run though, to my horror!

The instructor who made my aware of my rhythmic inability gave me the following exercise which completely changed my time/feel/rhythm ability. I call it the halving exercise and it goes as follows:

Put a metronome on at a given tempo, lets say 120bpm.
- Play something with the metronome, doesn't really matter what it is, perhaps the current song you are working on.
- Once you feel locked in, cut beat 2 and 4 so the metronome is only playing at 60, you play the same thing at the same tempo, but you have less metronome support.
- Cut the metronome in half again, you now have one beat per measure to stay with, metronome is at 30.
- Keep cutting the metronome in half and get to the point where you can land on a click that is only happening every 2, 4, 8 measures or more.

This forces you to keep better and better time, if you only have a click every 16 measures, every note you play will have to be very rhythmically precise or you will miss that click by a mile. My personal best is 1.7BPM where I was landing on the metronome every 32 measures, at this point you need inner peace as much as musical ability haha! If you get good at this, you will find that you have a great deal more control over exactly where you are placing notes. Fundamentally, the point of all this is not make sure the tempo of every song stays exactly the same and never push or pull, the point is that the musician can greatly benefit from having precise control over how they are making the music feel, its a big deal.

This is such a great question. For me I’ve always liked how ADSR on synths helps me understand the concept of a sound wave in my head (just an out loud thought). I have a little experience with playing with others, I’m a drummer and have slowly expanded my interests towards bass, guitar, song structure and production etc as I can’t help but feel having an understanding of all aspects of musical ingredients is such a useful thing to have. That said, I’m regularly reminded of how important rhythm is, no matter what I’m studying at one particular time and find myself grateful I started on the subject first.

Some of the most rewarding moments of my rhythm journey so far have been:

1. Developing my understanding of subdivisions by playing 1/4 notes (1-2-3-4), followed by 1/8 notes (1-&-2-&-3-&-4-&), 1/8 (triplets) (1-trip-let-2-trip-let-3-trip-let-4-trip-let) and 1/16 notes (1-e-&-a-2-e-&-a-3-e-&-a-4-e-&-a) at a confident/comfortable bpm. Set a click and loop the above for as long as you feel is valuable to you. Then increase by 5/10 bpm and repeat. NOTE: Start slow (80bpm).

2. Becoming comfortable counting out loud to any song you’re working on. I will regularly play a song I’m studying, listen to it in an intentional/active way, grab a pen and paper and count every bar of every section out loud, writing down the number of bars/measures per section and where certain beats are landing, e.g. snare 2 & 4. This will improve your understanding in more ways than you realise. At first you’ll feel so conscious, overtime this will lessen and in a relatively short amount of time you’ll no longer care! Haha!

3. Changing how I hear a metronome. Over time I have moved away from aiming at the next click and more towards hearing and feeling it as a pace, as it is (in my head) more about what happens around the click than the actual click itself. I think this approach allows you to let go of constraint, release tension (tension kills flow) and be neither rushing or dragging as you no longer see it as a target, more a flow/passage of space/time.

Hope you found this helpful,

P.S. Dotted 1/8 delays are incredibly fun!

Imma give you all props and pretend I read all of that.

@Ivan Maloletkin Haha it is a topic that I have thought about a great deal, so I tend to have a lot to say. You, however, have no obligation to read it 😎

@David Robinson Personally, my record is 112 measures: 1 beat at the start, and 1 beat at the end.

@David Robinson Yes! This practice you mention here - cutting the bpm by half I've come across from video of Victor Wooten.

@David Robinson I wanted to know how are doing it technically?
Do you use an metronome app that let's you program halved bpm change?
I found an app called Tempo that let's us programm BPM change by a number of beats, let's say decrease/increase by 15 bpm, not divide it or multiply tempo. have anybody seen (my Baby) it?

@Ryan Foley Yes, that's helpfu, i'll remind myself of this approaches! Thank you!

@Question Toothbrush I have done it a few ways. I use an app called Pro Metronome which is a well made metronome app in my opinion. You can set a slow tempo, like 30 bpm and make the metronome play 16ths, so its giving you 120, then you set it to 8ths and you get 60, then back to quarters and you are at 30. After that you can use the app to take beats out, so get rid of 2 and 4 then you are at 15bpm, then take out 3 and you are 7.5bpm.

Another way I have done it is to make a tempo map in a DAW and play along with that. If I want it to be automatic so I don't have to stop playing and fiddle with an app, I do it this way. Most DAW's will let you go super slow too, so it works well.

Indeed, rhythm is more important than pitch. It's what structures the song and the audience will hear timing errors more readily than they will hear pitch errors.

Practice with a metronome, of course, because even if you want to take a rubato approach, you first need to feel the time in order to stretch it. Or if you just want to play by feel with others, you still have be able to listen and follow the groove that you're hearing from others. If you can't follow a metronome with it's clear, unchanging cues, you sure as heck won't be able to follow others during live play with its more subtle cues and shifting rhythms.

But you should also be breaking down interesting rhythms that you hears and trying to figure them out, especially syncopated, funky rhythms that encourage you to subdivide the beat. Cultivate a habit of count-singing -- 1-e-and-uh-2-e-and-uh for subdividing into 16ths, 1-and-uh-2-and-uh for subdividing into triple meter, etc. You want to get to the point where you have an internal clock running in the background of your mind, subdividing the beat. The nice thing about this is it can be done whenever or wherever you are listening to music. Why is this so funky? Let me count-sing it a bit. Oh, they're hitting on the 'uh' of 3, anticipating beat 4 by a 16th.

Yes if you are not playing in time, technically all the notes you play are wrong.

So technically, if you play in time and miss 50% of the notes you are twice as accurate as 0%.