How to improve your rhythm

so I was reading this recent study which was gloriously conveyed to the public through shameless clickbait like this although I'm not really complaining a whole lot so it suggests that humans are better at perceiving timing mismatches in lower frequencies versus higher frequencies researchers found a much higher increase in something called mismatch negativity in the brains of subjects when they were presented with timing errors and lower pitched melodies versus higher pitched melodies this confirms something that we all pretty much already know and that's bass players need to have good rhythm and guitar players can get away with much crappy rhythm violin players even more so the question is is how do we get good at rhythm how do we not inadvertently trigger this mismatch negativity and others [Music] well it turns out that we're already pretty good at it in his book musica fili of the world renowned neuroscientist Oliver Sacks explains Galileo famously exemplified how good our internal clock is and experiments timing the descent of objects as they rolled down inclined planes having no accurate watches or clocks to go by he time each trial by humming tunes to himself and this allowed him to get results with an accuracy far beyond the timepieces of his era it wasn't until Galileo himself invented the pendulum clock where he had the technology to keep time better than our own internal clock I mean I don't know about Galileo but I certainly have really crappy rhythm well you're wrong actually you're actually extremely good at it no actually it's something that I actually struggle with well let's do an experiment shall we and actually before we do that experiment let's kind of do a meditation exercise because it seems like you're a little bit tense first I'm gonna need you to take a deep breath and count backwards from ten ten nine eight seven six I'm gonna try it a little slower ten nine eight seven six five four am i meditating yet is that the point of this no the meditation bit was just a framing device to get you to count backwards at different speeds let's take a look at the audio waveform of you counting when you're counting down quickly you're counting at a pretty steady 77 beats per minute we were counting slow it was out an equally steady 68 beats the minutes you see language is built upon cadence the internal rhythm of words and phrases if I were to talk with an irregular cadence it might sound really strange and almost unmusical fundamental information about what I'm saying gets lost in irregular Cadence's certain Cadence's are extremely regular specifically counting have you ever counted on metronomic ly it doesn't matter the language counting is always a regular phenomenon great so apparently I have amazing at rhythm sure doesn't feel like it well let me put this into some perspective when we musicians play music we measure units of time in fact we literally call them measures in a measure we'll divide time into individual beats and then from there we might subdivide those beats into even smaller units of time there needs to be extreme precision in how we divide the time otherwise it won't sound right or feel right this is the result of that mismatch negativity as a species though we're pretty good at this at least compared to comparable activities you could draw an analogy to a hypothetical scenario where every couple of seconds you would be required to draw a ruler length on a piece of paper just by eyeballing it from there just by subdividing it you would need to divide it into smaller subdivisions whether they are inches or centimeters it sounds like something pretty difficult but it's something that musicians do all the time just with fractions of a second versus fractions of a foot or meter interestingly we're not the only species that's good at this sort of thing and it may come down to our ability to make sounds with our mouths our ability to make mouth sound a 2008 study investigated snowball the sulphur-crested cockatoo early YouTube fame and by extension the ability of non-human animals to synchronize with a beat the study found evidence to suggest that animals that have the ability to create and imitate complex vocal sounds like humans dolphins parrots and bats have a natural inclination to organize time and synchronize their body movements with a pulse the study is quite fascinating because it suggests that our ability to feel time is even more fundamental than language it stems from our ability to vocalize so let me just get this straight what you're saying is that I have precise timing abilities because I can talk apparently that's great cool but how do i actually like apply this to making music and make that music feel good well by Counting while you play if you can count to four and make it sound natural you'll be in good shape for this we're gonna practice rhythm without the aid of a metronome scary I know but as Galileo proved our own internal clock can be just as useful we're gonna count to four as we play the bass line to journey's don't stop believin one two three four one two three four one two you know this might sound simple it's actually fairly tricky to do when you're first starting out you're gonna have to coordinate a lot between what you're saying and what you're playing I need to map out all of the individual notes and compare them to exactly when I am saying which number so for the first beat I both play a note and I say the number one for the upbeat of one the end of one I don't say anything and I don't play anything the second I say the number two and then I don't play anything for the upbeat of two I don't say anything and I don't play any further down b3 I say three but I don't play anything but the upbeat of three I don't say anything but I do play a note with downbeat of four I both say four and I play a note the upbeat of four I don't say anything and I play a note this process is fairly long and complicated and requires you to be very meticulous in where you place everything who knew that practice was actually work oh my god but once you have it down what you can do is you can focus on counting to four rather than playing music the more comfortable you are simply counting to four the more comfortable you will be playing the actual music now if you do this right there is an auditory feedback loop that will happen because as you hear yourself say the numbers 1 2 3 4 you're gonna naturally try and adjust the music that you're making to the natural cadence that you're used to hearing it's through this method that we can tap into the rhythmic potential of a human brain all without the aid of a metronome what if I'm like completely hopeless what if even this doesn't work for me so there's the study that came out in 2011 that profiled a test subject known as Matthew who allegedly had a fairly rare disorder he has what the researchers call beat deafness or the inability for him to sync his movements with music in other words Matthew has no rhythm clinically speaking Matthew could tap along with the pulse provided with a metronome pretty much just as well as a control group read his Matthew blues control however he utterly failed at synchronizing his movements with a popular merengue tune Elvis Crespo's suavemente [Music] very interestingly there is no impairment found in Matthews ability to speak language he could talk and understand language just as well as any other person now I'm not a cognitive scientist but I am a music teacher and based upon what we've covered so far in this video it doesn't seem like Matthew has any sort of inherent rhythmic deficiency but rather he just hasn't yet applied his knowledge of language to music this could be for any number of reasons but the power of that natural cadence of counting cannot be overstated you know how to count already you know how to speak your native language why not leverage those things to make yourself the best musician that you can be after all if snowball the cockatoo can do it you can too hey everybody thank you so much for watching my name is Adam Neely I have a new video coming out every Monday if you enjoy what I do please consider joining my patreon because it's to my patrons over at patreon I'm able to do this every week so thank you so much for watching and until next time

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 634,470

Rating: 4.9608126 out of 5

Keywords: how to improve timing, how to improve rhythm, rhythm lesson, timing lesson, music theory lesson, jazz lesson, rhythm trainer, rhythm practice

Id: qIfD7ZN5FYI

Length: 7min 58sec (478 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2017