Presented by Dr. Bob Lawrence
Jazz Piano Skills
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Link to Rhythm Exercise Demonstrated in Video
https://www.jazzpianoskills.store/youtube/rhythm-exercises.pdf
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Summary
In this conversation, Dr. Bob Lawrence emphasizes the importance of mastering the skill of time in music, particularly for improvisation. He discusses practical exercises to develop a command of downbeats and upbeats, and highlights the necessity of making time audible through various tools. Additionally, he provides resources for musicians to further their education and practice.
Transcript
All right, so you're working on your improvisation chops and you're practicing everything under the sun except the most important skill of all, right? You're practicing your scales, your arpeggios, your voicings, your altered scales, your pentatonic scales, your blues scales. If you're like all the students that I work with here at the Dallas School of Music, that's exactly what you're doing. And yet you neglect or you forget to practice the most important skill of all, which is the skill of time. And when I talk about time, I'm talking about just gaining a command. The downbeats and the upbeats that exist within each measure, right? The downbeats and the upbeats. So I'm gonna demonstrate an exercise that I do here with my students at the Dallas School Music. We start off, we take a measure, play all downbeats, followed by a measure of rest, followed by four more downbeats. We repeat that several times. And then we start swapping out each beat, working back from count four to count one. Start swapping out each beat placing an upbeat on each beat, right? So we'll start with count four and then we'll start and then we'll add counts three and four, then counts two, three and four with upbeats and then eventually counts one, two, three and four with upbeat. So the idea is that we start with all downbeats, we end with all upbeats, then typically at the end we'll put them back to back as kind of a compare and contrast, okay? So I'll play through it so you can hear it. I'm going to do it at a tempo of 120. I think the most important thing is that you use some kind of tool that makes time audible, whether that's a software application like Band in the Box or iReal Pro or GarageBand, or if you use a drum machine, fine. Or if you're old school like me and use a metronome, hey, fantastic. The idea is make time audible so that you can correctly assess how well you have a command of time, downbeats and upbeats, right? I'm going to play it at a tempo of 120. Again, you can play at a much slower tempo. You can play it at a faster tempo. I'm going to use a backing track. I'm going to play the entire exercise using a C dominant chord. You can play any chord you want. You can play any voicing you want. You can play a single note. Again, it makes no difference. The objective here is that we're trying to get a command of time, downbeats and upbeats. Okay? So here we go again. 120, you pick whatever tempo is comfy for you. I'm gonna play four measures up front just to kind of get used to the time, to the tempo. All right, we will start with four quarter notes on the downbeats. Always followed by a measure of rests. So you can assess how well you did. Wow, right? Now I blew through that rather quickly just because of the sake of time, but each one of those lines we would repeat over and over again until we settle in to where we feel like we really have a control of the downbeats and the upbeats for that particular measure, right? So again, you can pick any tempo you want. You can use any tool that you choose to use to make time audible. I would encourage you to always put a rest in between like I was showing you in the demonstration so that you can, I call it rest and assess where you can make any modifications that you need to make the next time through. It gives you time to think, right? Just don't just, don't keep just playing a rhythm over and over again. Build intentional rest in there so you can assess how well you did and what adjustments you need to make. Okay. If you have any questions whatsoever, feel free to reach out to me. My contact information is below. I'm going to put a PDF file of the rhythm exercise that I just played for you down below as well that you can access. Also, I want to encourage you to, if you're not already a member of my site, Jazz Piano Skills, I would invite you to join that. It's not just for pianists, it's for instrumentalists as well. All the skills we discuss and address are applicable for all instrumentalists. There's a podcast that you can listen . .