Learning
How I learned to stop worrying and make the click sound good
The past week1 I’ve been trying to learn a little more about the mixing part of recording—this is one area of the music-making I do that I’ve been deliberately avoiding for a while as I know it a) obsesses me to no end and b) frustrates me to no end. But I’ve been feeling a little more encouraged lately, and I’m here to tell you why!
Basically, in short, I realized that I should approach learning to mix more like I approached the last major stumbling block I had with recording music.
The one single greatest leap forward in terms of recording music for me—or maybe less of a leap forward than a getting out of my own way—was when I figured out how to actually play with a metronome.
I think the problem arises for me when I think, for some reason, that I already know how to do something, when in fact I’m missing a piece of fundamental understanding. In the case of the metronome, I had never struggled to keep time with a click. I would occasionally get off if the click wasn’t loud enough or if I was playing something particularly difficult, but on the whole I was able to play to it well enough to express whatever I was trying to play. It was intuitive to me and I never needed to practice that.
Then I got a little older and started to try to make music in bands, and some words like “groove” and “feel” started to get thrown around, and before long I realized that while I could keep time with a metronome, my feel2 was basically terrible. The only way I could play, the only way I had ever played, was a sort of edgy, ahead-of-the-beat pocket, which worked fine for songs with faster tempos, but totally completely sucked on anything that was meant to be slower and groovier. I was writing lots of songs that seemed like they would be pretty good if I could just record them, but when I tried recording them everything sounded terrible—I could play a guitar part fine, as in I could play all the notes/strums/whatever at a consistent tempo, but there wasn’t any groove. Stacking up parts with overdubs didn’t feel at all like a band playing together; there was no glue.
So I set out to fix this, which turned out to be a long, hard, lonely road to basic musical competency.
I tried practicing a lot of things that didn’t really help me, and did a lot of soul-searching. I thought I was doomed and that I would never figure it out. And then at some point deep into COVID lockdown I wondered what would happen if I set the metronome to 60 BPM (or even slower) and just tried to keep time with it (tapping two drumsticks together). I found for whatever reason that I could do this for ten minutes or an hour, or two or three hours and not really get bored. I’m sure the circumstances helped with this—it was meditative enough that it worked to soothe my lockdown-induced anxiety a bit.
I did that for maybe a few days before I started noticing something interesting, which was—and I’m trying to describe this as well as I can—my listening and my playing were beginning to separate and become independent of one another. Previously, I hadn’t really been able to hear what I was doing while I was playing well enough to adjust the way I was playing on the fly, but at such a slow tempo it was impossible not to notice changes and inconsistencies in my playing from measure to measure, and I realized with a little effort I could sort of subtly “pull back” on the reins of my internal sense of the pulse whenever I felt I was drifting away from the pocket, and re-center myself further behind the beat without overcorrecting and sounding overly sluggish.
I think some people naturally have this ability to listen deeply and independently, and intuitively make these tiny adjustments while playing. I’ve definitely known some people to have that kind of sense of groove without necessarily having metronome-perfect time. I think it’s fairly well established that if you play with a lot of really good musicians all the time you’ll naturally start to pick up on what they’re doing (I haven’t had the good fortune to get to do that more than a few times in my life), which is (IMO) why people who come from families or communities of great musicians tend to be quite musically adept themselves.
For me, I had to figure this “independent listening skill” mostly by myself. Which is definitely not the best way to learn. If I could do it all over again, I would try to play a lot more music with people in a room a lot earlier in life. Nevertheless, I thought it might be worth sharing how I did manage to get there in the end.
I think the major breakthrough was realizing that if I can learn to listen independently to what I’m playing, while I’m playing, I can listen independently while I’m playing to what someone else is playing.
So here it is, the most valuable lesson I learned from the metronome: as a musician playing with other musicians, especially if you are part of a rhythm section, your task is to make them sound good. Don’t worry about what you’re playing; instead, bring your attention to the rest of the band and find ways to play that make whatever everyone else is playing sound like the best thing that anyone has ever played. You are the glue! If the rest of the band sounds bad, whatever you do, don’t blame them—just try to make them groove.3
How do you learn this? In my case, by pretending the metronome is my (somewhat oblivious) bandmate, and trying to make the lifeless, 60BPM click groove somehow, by pushing and pulling around on the beat until the two—my instrument, and the click—become one. Not listening to what I’m playing specifically, just how what I play affects how the metronome “feels”.
When I record now, I almost never have issues of feel, regardless of instrument, and if I do it’s more about a lack of facility on the instrument (e.g. my fingers can’t move that fast!) than it is about my sense of time, and all I have to do is slow down and learn the specific part really well. It’s now pretty easy for me to learn a riff and figure out the nuances of groove and emphasis that help to sell the musical idea, even if sometimes it takes me a little while to practice it.
Anyway, this was perhaps most difficult single learning curve of my life. Now I’m trying to figure out mixing again, which might be as much of a challenge or more, and I’m not sure I’ve even remotely figured anything out. There are a lot of pieces, none of which I feel I understand wholly—EQ, compression, monitoring, etc. I was feeling the familiar feeling of doom, which made me wonder how I got past this last time.
I think it was this (and I sincerely apologize for going off the rails into the language of self-help here): I surrendered to my curiosity. I stopped letting the “playing with good feel” be a matter of ego and wanting to achieve musical greatness, or whatever, and just let the wanting to know be the primary motivator. I stopped caring about being a “good musician” and just tried to identify what it was exactly that I wanted to know, and then found a (not very straightforward) path to uncovering it. Which paradoxically did eventually lead me to becoming a “good musician”—at least in some other people’s estimation (I think my own estimation has gone down now, if anything!).
I think this is an easier way to approach things you want to learn. The mistake I was making for a while (and a therapist probably could have told me this) was viewing any failures along the way as reflections of my (lack of) self-worth. But if I truly put aside the idea that I’m going to “get good at” something, it paradoxically becomes possible for me to learn.
—
Okay, sorry, I hope that was maybe interesting. I hope you’ve had a nice holiday. I’ve been trying to put this kind of thing into writing for a while in the hopes that maybe it’ll be useful to someone, and I’m not sure that I’ve succeeded here, but at least it exists.
While I was looking for answers on “how to improve your time feel” and other dubious internet searches I came across a lot of different musicians’ perspectives on the subject. In every case I mostly wished I could ask questions about how they had learned and how they had figured this stuff out. So this is my weird attempt to help anyone who is looking for those same answers.
It’s another subject for another day, but I find it very strange that this sort of rhythmic education—which is, IMO, way more important than sight-reading or music theory—is only taught, as far as I can tell, in the highest-level, most privileged conservatories.
Sorry I missed posting on here last week, by the way. I habitually put off writing these posts until the Saturday before they go up, so on the rare week that I pick up a shift at work on Saturday the blog usually falls to the wayside. I make no promises that this won’t happen again, but I agree with you, it would be nice if I could do what’s known as “planning ahead” for those weeks so we can have a consistent schedule around here.
With apologies to the musicians reading this: “feel” is essentially how your playing relates to the internal pulse of the song, whether you’re pushing slightly or pulling back, or sometimes both in different parts of a phrase, in order to make a piece of music “groove,” which is to say to generate the kind of indelible lift that makes people want to dance or nod their heads or whatever. Some people put this in terms of “rushing” or “dragging” like in the movie about the kid who plays drums, but I think those are confusing terms and frame things in a very negative light, as in, “you must avoid rushing and dragging and keep things on the straight and narrow, the one true path,” where the truth is, for most working musicians, anything but. Also, have you ever met anyone who is actually consistently dragging rather than simply rushing a critical part of the phrase and thus making the rest of their notes feel unmusically sluggish?
You may think there are situations where a truly terrible band cannot be salvaged by the efforts of a single musician. To which I will say that may be true, but I’ve seen it happen before in some pretty unlikely scenarios, in one case with an exceptional fiddle player instantly gluing together a whole crowd of amateurs and in another case by a guitar player sitting in with a band whose drummer had only just learned to play. I can’t claim to be on this level even remotely; in both of those cases the musicians had at least a couple of decades’ experience on me. But it’s something to aspire to!