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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160526125017.htm

I should have been clearer, I meant, nobody plays a musical instrument rhythmically without training, or plays it well, or plays rhythmically complex music well, without training.That’s pretty much what it says here:

“Although training and attention are not necessary for picking up rhythm, they do help. Professional musicians have been shown to be better than normal people at predicting notes in a rhythm based on the rhythm they recognised in an excerpt of music. This ability was its strongest when the musicians were concentrating hard. Bouwer: 'My results show that, to a certain extent, the sense of rhythm is a fundamental brain process that develops unconsciously. However, training may well help you to make predictions based on the rhythm. This is useful when playing music or dancing.'”

Yes, I can believe that there evolved in humans an ability to recognize rhythm, as it says in the article.

This article explains that people more accurately detect the rhythm of low frequency notes than they do high frequency notes:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4104866/

I think part of the reason is that we feel the low frequency notes with our bodies but I’m not sure they’ve come to that conclusion.

I started playing bass a year ago and it is so much fun and it anchors and uplifts the music. Playing bass is about making other musicians look good.

Larry, thanks for the link! I am trying to understand how the results of this study are combined with the practice of using metronomes with high sound?

Well, metronomes are cheap little gadgets which cannot play low frequency sounds. We can still follow the rhythm of higher frequency clicks, just less accurately. We could KickStarter a low frequency metronome, lol. I think the point is that, in music played by bands and orchestras, the rhythm is kept by low frequency instruments. Nobody gives that job to the piccolo, haha. Nobody can follow the beat of a piccolo.

Not piccolo - snare! IMO, there is a confusion between rhythm and pulse. In marching band, the pulse of a walk is really set by the bass drum ; however, it is for the common people. Performing music requires a much more precise mastering of timing (as one frustrated academic musician said: “Ah, these jazzers with their hypertrophic sense of rhythm!”); which requires the metronome to turn from the marking of pulse into an integral part of the attack of corresponding sounds; and it practically requires high register sound.

It’s easy enough to be confused when the terms rhythm and pulse are used interchangeably, as they are here:

“The results show a low-voice superiority effect for timing. We presented simultaneous high-pitched and low-pitched tones in an isochronous stream that set up temporal expectations about the onset of the next presentation, and occasionally presented either the higher or the lower tone 50 ms earlier than expected, while leaving the other tone at the expected time. MMN was larger in response to timing deviants for the lower than the higher tone, indicating better encoding for the timing of lower-pitched compared with higher-pitch tones at the level of the auditory cortex. A separate behavioral study showed that tapping responses were more influenced by timing deviants to the lower- than higher-pitched tone, indicating that auditory–motor synchronization is also more influenced by the lower of two simultaneous pitch streams. Together, these results indicate that the lower tone has greater influence than the high tone on determining both the perception of timing and the entrainment of motor movements to a beat. To our knowledge, these results provide the first evidence showing a general timing advantage for low relative pitch, and the results are consistent with the widespread musical practice of most often carrying the rhythm or pulse in bass-ranged instruments.”

So, help me out, how are you differentiating rhythm from pulse? Is not the pulse determined by the rhythm?

I think we’re talking about how humans transmit the pulse or rhythm to each other and I believe that there are deep reasons why bass instruments are given that task. I don’t divide music by class. Jazz ensembles have bass players and drummers, don’t they?

I like to think that one bass note is worth four or eight melody notes, lol. I got the root, you can go noodle around up there on your melody but I’ll still be down here with the root. If I play the wrong root note, it changes the chord, haha, so be nice to your bass player.

Some people think the bass is boring but I have found it to be deeply satisfying. My new motto is, fewer notes, more fun.

Charlie Haden spoke about his love for the bass and how he felt that it uplifted the music and that there was something missing when the bass was not there. That’s what I found when I started playing my big contra bass guitar in a classical guitar trio. I became the double bass. Of course, the name double bass comes from doubling the bass line, just at a lower pitch.

This is a beautiful tribute to Charlie Haden:

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=332544960

As for the snare drum:

https://youtu.be/6VbaEBAxvWo

everybody can lock in with that! Hahahah.

And, oh, if you want to see and and hear my monster bass guitar, go here:

https://youtu.be/8nz-fzzy6pE

where it is being played as a solo instrument. It’s real purpose, in my opinion, is for ensemble playing and so I’ll be playing it in a guitar orchestra, as silly as that sounds, lol. That’s not me playing but that is my actual guitar.

Coordinating plucked string instruments is very difficult, so it’s going to be a challenge.

Just create a loop of a bass drum in a DAW and voilà!

Indeed. Create some loops with a piccolo or a snare drum and see how it feels to keep time to those instruments. Experiment!

There’s metronome phone apps and a nice selection of small inexpensive digital metronomes. Unless you have a precise drummer or base player at your disposal, learning to use a metronome helps us learn how to keep the correct tempo, which is ultra important in learning piano. It took me months to learn how, but I drag mine out nearly every time I play.

That depends on the band, and the music.

In Latin music (salsa, afro-Cuban, etc), "the beat" is often kept by a guy playing "claves" -- two wooden cylinders (sometimes fiberglass, now) that give a _very_ high-frequency "click" when you tap them together. (I've never measured the frequency; I could, if anyone cares.)

That sound can cut though an amplified ensemble. It's high enough in pitch (and short enough) so that it's not harmonically significant.

Ha - ha! For me, this is an experiment with almost forty years history ! Until that time, the traditional wooden metronome -pyramid, was familiar; however, when I started playing in pop ensemble, we began to use the electronic click during rehearsals; moreover, the equalization setting in the amplifier was shifted to higher frequencies. In the work routine in my workshop on the general pulse, I ask the drummer to mark it only with bass drum; for more accurate rhythmic work - only on a closed high hat, i.e. the highest sound in the drum set.
In addition to all this, with age, the human ear becomes less sensitive to the boundaries of the sounds of the lower register, which requires the amplification of high frequencies (the boundary of which also descends with time).
So there is a theory, and there is practice !

My answer to Larry: the acoustic properties of piccolo (a soft, unstressed attack) practically do not make this sound useful for working on rhythm: however, the electronic combination of snare + piccolo is definitely yes!

When I play along with a metronome I have no problems with holding notes for the correct lengths. But then when not using one I some times notice my dotted quarter and whole notes are getting shorted. So I go back to counting to myself and that works, except I don't want to be counting all the time through whatever I'm playing. To cut back on some of the counting I've started counting only the dotted quarter (1-2-3) and whole notes (1-2-3-4). Is this a bad approach? For reference I'm at the beginner book 1 level.

Counting 1 - 2- 3 for a dotted quarter is not a good idea.

The reason for this is that in 4/4 time a quarter note gets one beat, as your whole note example demonstrates, so quarter notes are "one" and "two" and "three" and "four".

To count a dotted quarter note, you are actually adding a half of a quarter note to the note, (or an eighth note in counting), so you have to divide the quarter note in half, thus the quarter note is now known as "one and". The One is the first half, the and is the second half.

The dot is actually on the next beat, so it is counted as "two". But is is only the first half of that beat. The other half is known as the "and" of beat two.

So if you then count a dotted quarter as 1 - 2- -3 you are changing things so now that quarter note which should be "one and" is now "one two", and the dot is "three", but the real beat three is somewhere else, not part of this note.

This will misteach you to count the beats with the wrong numbers.

Start by counting the whole phrase or piece as "one and two and three and four and."

Sorry if this sounds confusing, it is better IMO to draw a numbers "one and" etc over the notes and write in the beats. If you cannot figure it out, ask your teacher to show you.

rocket88, Thanks for the reply. Sorry, I made a mistake in my post. I meant to say dotted half note (not dotted quarter), thus the 1-2-3 count. I appreciate the suggestion to write in the beats on the score as I hadn't considered doing that. It'd be a good visual reminder at least.

Also not the best option - specific counting dotted quarter into the bar will have 7 variants :
one -and -two, two -and- three, three- and- four , four-and-1.
And-two-and , and-three-and , and-four-and .
. Again scratching the left ear with right hand.
If rhythmic pattern not in the swing feel, where the basis of eighths is triplet rhythm (for which English is ideal), it is better to use an Italian word of three syllables , f.e. : Numeri (numbers ).

Yes there are seven variants, and counting the dotted quarter as a stand-alone entity can be very challenging.

However, if you count the entire measure or piece "one - and -two and, etc" you can plug the dotted quarter into the counting of the measure wherever it occurs, and the dotted quarter will then be as you say, counted out as one of the 7 variants, but in the flow of that style of counting as they play.

I have done this innumerable times with myself and with many students students and it works beautifully.

An additional help is to writing above the staff the numbers "one +" above the notes that correspond.

Here is an example of working with a student on Hoochie Coochie Man by Willie Dixon . The student reads the notes, but attempts to perform the rhythmic side of the notes through the counting distorts the rhythm and tempo to such an extent that it becomes unreal (I did not even try to record it).



The picture completely changed when he began to sing with the text, following the model of the author himself. You can make sure that he has a normal sense of rhythm, although there is not enough repeated recitation technique on one key.

https://soundcloud.com/jazzman1945/hoochy-coochy-man

Numeric counting is used only to determine the groove and tempo , and the starting position of the phrase.