This is an example of time internalization, or the ability to keep steady time based on an internal sense, and not needing something external to do it.

17 years ago, the night before leaving a spinal cord rehab where I was being healed from an injury that involved a broken back and loss of my left leg, I played for the first time in 2 years and realized I wouldn’t be able to kick the floor to keep time anymore, that all my talk of having good time was going to have to be put into action: one leg was gone, the other paralyzed.
At first it felt strange to not use an external thing to keep the time. I quickly realized it takes faith and confidence to let time happen by itself, at it’s own pace, unhurried. It’s almost a Zen thing: simply allow time to happen.

Try this:

Play a favourite groove on your bass, without imagining a drummer or click track.
For many of us the key to making it sound really alive is to imagine playing the groove with a drummer, or, if the style of music warrants it, imagine a click on 2 and 4, or clave, if playing latin. Play the groove again and imagine a drummer playing with you. You should be able to hear, and more importantly, feel the difference.

So here is my charge to you:
Choose a favourite song on your iPOD. Have the volume set so when the head phones are removed you can’t easily hear the music.

Let the song play midway through the first verse, or chorus, mid-bar even if need be, and simply remove the head phones and continue the song in your head. For me, the key is to feel the real pulse of the music in a comfortable and matter-of-fact way, where I can feel the time passing without fighting the tempo. You can even go for a short stroll through your house, hearing the music in your head, feeling it in your body, then come back to your MP3 player, pick the head phones up calmly, and see where you are. There is a story I remember hearing about a drummer in my region. He was teaching at a jazz camp. He sat under a tree with the newspaper, his drumsticks, and a metronome w/ear phone. On the slowest tempo possible, he read the paper and play with the click. He removed the ear phone and continued playing, while reading the paper. When he put the phones back in awhile later, he was still in time. You wouldn’t know him, but his name is Anil Sharma. This story has inspired me since I heard it in the late 1980s.

Some tempos are much more natural than others. On the metronome I find there are some “in between” tempos that are harder to feel. I find them harder to relate to for some reason, but the key is for me to get to know them like a familiar face. I find when I know that my tendency is to speed up or drag at certain times, I can do the opposite and correct.

Different musicians have different ways to accomplish this. I usually use subdivisions. If the metronome is clicking 40 beats per minute (bpm), I will divide it up and feel a note in the middle of the clicks, or in other words, I subdivide the quarter notes in to eighth notes. On some tunes I will subdivide in broad triplits, much like John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones played.

Give it a try! It can be a fun way to gauge how good your sense of internalized time is, and give you immediate feedback on some things you can work on to improve this sense.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at paul@paulvienneau.com or leave a comment here.

This is a short bass line I wrote based on a Db9 chord, which is based on the Db mixolydian mode, with a touch of Db blues scale thrown in too. The subdivision is 16th notes, the metronome is clicking on 2 and 4.
Check out my other lessons, articles and videos at www.playbassnow.com, a wonderful website devoted to helping you become a better bassist.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here.

Time happens in here (chest) and out here (the air). It’s not here (taps foot) or here (bobs head). These are external expressions of an inner dialogue your heart has with the music. If someone steps on your toe the pulse of the music isn’t diminished and the time doesn’t stop. I watched a Carol Kaye video years ago where she said you must “pat your foot” to keep time. For me, the pulse I feel inside is a hundred times stronger than any toe tapping I could ever do. I feel the time like a little tap in my chest when I play.

When I was younger I played with a drummer everyone said was great. I had a hard time playing with him, and at that point in my
development I thought I was right about where the time was all the time. I thought he was guilty of the most heinous of crimes- he had Bad Time. So instead of loosening up and finding middle ground with him, I stomped the floor with my foot to try and show him where the time was.

My first gig almost 2 years after an accident that put me in a wheelchair I was having trouble because I couldn’t stomp my foot. All my talk about feeling the time came down to having the faith in myself that I had good time, and that it was inside me and wasn’t dependent on any external force or sound. I decided on stage that night, the night I left the hospital after almost 2 years, to let myself feel the time where it lived- inside me. Twenty years later I feel a kind of closeness and intimacy with other musicians when we are feeling the time like this, together.

If you walk in on a room of musicians playing, mid-song, you pretty much immediately find the pulse or the heartbeat of what
they’re doing, right? There’s a saying that time is like a river. Walk for five miles and the river is still there for
you to dip your toes in. You walk in that room and the pulse is right there in front of you, plain as day and real as the nose
on your face, the second you feel it.
For me the point of having the metronome click 2 and 4 is so that I am responsible for more of the time, and by doing so I have to
be able to internalize and feel the time, as opposed to needing some external source for it. Have the metronome click every second
bar. Every fourth bar. The pulse is still happening at the same time.
It sounds difficult: put the metronome so it clicks at 40 beats per minute.
40 is 80, is 160. To me the distance between two clicks is like a clothes line. If I hang a red shirt at exactly half the distance
between beginning and end, I have subdivided, visually, the distance. I hang a red shirt halfway between the red shirt and the
beginning of the line, and another red shirt between the original shirt and the end of the line, I have visually divided the
line into four equal parts.

The goal is not to try and anticipate the click, or try and catch it as it happens, or guess when it will happen. The point is to
free yourself from the click and simply *let time happen*.
We’re all human. The best musicians have some “drift” in their playing. With good internalized time, when you become aware of
the drift, you merely “tighten up” or “loosen”, and you will usually drop right back into the click. Try this as an exercise the
next time you practice with a metronome:

Set the click for 40bpm. After listening for a few clicks, to get a feel where the subdivisions are, find the pulse halfway between
the clicks.
If each click is a whole note (4 beats), play a C major scale in half notes over the click, so that for every click you will
play 2 notes. Be calm and allow yourself the leeway for making “mistakes”. This is a learning process. Everything that helps you
on the road to developing this sense is not a mistake, it’s an opportunity to learn and grow as a musician.
So, you feel the subdivisions between the clicks. You’re playing confidently, you’re at one with the metronome. You notice you’ve
played a note just before the click. Without panicking, let your pulse out like a fishing line on a pole. Loosen up so that
you will naturally hit a bit later next time. You learn to intuit the amount of give or take when you’re early or late, but
it’s a beautiful feeling to really get inside the time, and feel that next beat, when you’re *right there* with the click.

Now, the metronome is not your bandmate. Just as everyone has a different sense of humour, musicians will have differences of opinion
on where the pulse is. Music is a collaborative art. A beautiful dance between musicians that the audience gets to observe and
hopefully be moved by. On the bandstand it doesn’t really matter who is “right”. It matters that the musicians feel the pulse
together and tell the story of the song. Sometimes you’re right, and sometimes you just have to find a way to make it work.

The goal is to make it work, no matter what. All the practice at home is just rehearsal for your performance. It’s a lifelong
process, a journey where you develop a relationship with music and musicians.

Having good internalized time is the ability to subdivide pieces of time without needing an external indicator.
When my internalized time feels shaky, I tend to feel the need to fill my lines with extra notes and finger sounds, so I have
an external representation of the time. For example, in between playing the normal parts of my bass line I will feel like I have to
play something in the spaces to audibly subdivide the beat. I became aware of this when I was 18 and was in the recording studio
for the first time. The producer, who is a great bass player, brought my attention to the fact I was adding auduble clicks and hits
without playing notes. In a live situation, such as a duo gig with a guitar player, I will sometimes choose to add some audible
subdivisions for effect. But generally, you want to avoid these things. And back to the point of this lesson- playing audible
non pitch subdivisions do nothing to help your sense of internalized time.

It takes a certain amount of confidence and faith in your sense of internalized time
to LET GO and allow time to happen all by itself.
But it’s a very rewarding and exciting point in a musician’s progress when they realize they don’t have to worry about the
time when they’re playing, that they

just

play.
When you listen to your favourite music try and listen for the real pulse within the music. It’s not beat-by-beat. It’s in broader
feelings. When I listen to drummer Elvin Jones with the John Coltrane Quartet, from the 60s, I hear big broad swinging triplets
that go over the bar lines and give me a feeling of floating over the music. Check out Live At The Village Vanguard, A Love Supreme,
Crescent, Live In Seattle etc. The drumming of a musician like Elvin Jones has influenced the way I think about and approach all
types of music, not in a narrow stylistic way, but through the philosophical ideas of playing the song, playing the music, and so
on.

For me it’s all about making a connection with the music, the musicians, and the audience.
I hope some of this can help you look at the job of playing bass in an expanded way. We have the best job in the world!

If you have any questions, comments, or would like to discuss anything, please email paul@paulvienneau.com or comment here on
the board.
Thanks!

I’m preparing a video to go with this and my first lesson, Metronome Practice 1.

What the metronome will do as a tool in your musical study and practice, however, is help you develop a better internalized time feel .

Let me be honest here. I learned to play by playing along with records and cassettes. I used a metronome much less than I played along with albums. By doing this I got to “play with” some of my favorite drummers, like David Garibaldi, Paul Brochu(of UZEB fame), Neil Peart, Phil Gould, Carlton Barrett, and many others. Playing along with anything that keeps steady time will help you develop this sense of time. I will talk more about internalized time in my next article.

For now, here is a very good technique for using the metronome to help develop a “swing feeling“.
When I say swing feeling I’m not talking about the literal “hokey” Dixie Land swing. I’m talking about a certain lightness of playing that all the great musicians I know possess. When I have my students use a metronome to practice scales I have them use this technique:

Set the metronome to click on 2 and 4. So, if you are counting out loud, the metronome will sound when you say “2” and “4“. You could set it to click every quarter note(on 1,2,3 and 4), but that way you are being “given” every beat by the metronome. When you start off with just 2 and 4, it reinforces the swing feeling. In most types of music the emphasis is on beats 2 and 4. The rock and roll backbeat is one example. The reggae “one drop”, if counted in half time happens on 2 and 4. In jazz, the drummer while playing the ride cymbal will close the hi-hat on beats 2 and 4 because he is telling us the song has a swing feel.

So it can be said that beats 2 and 4 are the heartbeat, or pulse of most music.

When you have to be responsible for playing beats 1 and 3 without an audible click, you start to feel these beats, which is an important first step in developing a strong sense of internalized time. Of course for starting out, use a slower tempo so that you can play everything comfortably, and move the speed up a few clicks as you progress. Walk before you run.

If you were playing a C major scale, with the clicks on 2 and 4, this is what it would look like, using the notes with an asterix as the notes that sound on 2 and 4:

C    *D* E   *F* G   *A* B    *C*

At first this may feel wrong or foreign. Soon though, you will begin to feel this subtle accenting, and your playing will start to swing a little more.As I come to grips with recording video with my laptop I will record a video lesson demonstrating this technique, and different ways to use to it.

One difference you may start to notice is in your walking bass lines. Instead of having a bass line that doesn’t seem to propel the song, or help inspire the soloist, this subtle pulse will begin to hrlp you take a more important role in the music as an active contributor to the overall feel.

Bass is a wonderful instrument. I’ve been playing for over 30 years now. I hope the information I’ll be sharing in these articles and videos will serve to inspire you to see the real beauty that lies in our instrument. As bassists we are the heartbeat of the music.

If you have any questions or would like something specific covered, please leave a comment.

Thanks, it’s an honour to get to contribute to this fantastic web site.

Paul Vienneau/  Halifax, Canada

paul@paulvienneau.com

www.youtube.com/user/paulvienneau