A song - music - keeping the beat

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A song - music - keeping the beat in one's head

Please know that I do not have a gift for music at all.

I can fake a song or so in a very limited way on a piano using a simplified piano fake book and converting the written music into movements of both hands on the piano keys.

This attempt at piano playing I can only do visually, that is, take away the written visual music song book and I simply cannot remember completely how the song goes at all (due to imperfect attention/imperfect attention span/working memory/long term memory).

If you have the ability to sing a simple song, for example, Do-Re-Me by heart and keep a steady beat, how does your musical mind work?

Do you see all the words in your head as well as create a kind of mental metronome in your head and then combine the two together to produce the song?

How fixed are the words and music to the songs you sing - like do you tend to feel they are carved in granite or something/written in pliable clay or what?

How do you do it?

I'm a pretty good drummer for someone who's been self-taught for 10 months.

as far as the metronome is concerned i am not really conscious of it but it is definitely there. sometimes i will tap my foot for time but the signal to pluck or strum is not to do with the foot tapping really. It used to be though.

i can only keep time because i have practiced with a metronome. probably not enough but definitely passable. When i practice with a metronome i will try to make sure my foot is in time with the beat. sometimes when i play with a metronome i get into the zone where you are anticipating and waiting for every beat. That is the best way to do it i think because there is a delay between you deciding to strum hit whatever and it actually happening. (80ms i think) somehow when you anticipate it it allows you to easier anticipate it.

I have a hunch that the beat of your heart can influence your playing. this is a big assumption but i kind of thought that subtle increases in tempo that often occur in more aggressively played or loud passages where the player is physically exerting more so perhaps their heart is beating faster. this is just a guess and probably wrong

so you can play the songs from written music? that in itself is really quite a musical skill and i think that is potentially more useful than being able to play only without sheet music

I have had a "gift" for music my whole life. I can play guitar pretty well and I am working on the steel guitar now. I can't read music. I can't even imagine doing it. It just doesn't work for me.
Its hard to explain how I keep time. I dont really hear it, I "feel" it. I know where it will be. I can't count the beat to save my life.
I prefer to improvise so nothing is set in stone for me.
I don't know the names of chords or scales most of the time. I give them names in my head. For example I was playing with some guys and they told me the song was in a major key. I dont know what makes a key major, but I know if I play something "happy" sounding everyone is pleased. ( minor= "angry").
The guitar I picked up pretty fast when I was young. It's much harder learning steel guitar at 35. But I love it.

i can't describe precisely how my musical mind integrates or retains musical thought. while idle, i have musical hallucination. music is always playing for me. i've only recently begun to analyze that for what it is. i now suspect that mind uses that same channel when i am involved in anything musical.

it is an intuition, this is the best approximate explanation i have. most people have "people & feelings" intuition and thus learn how to relate, read/repair emotions, or engage the process of building friendships. my mind has sonic intuition and music is what keeps it running at peak.

Arrrrgh! No offense, but I'm the guy who complained a while back that there aren't enough intelligent posts in Art, Writing and Music forum. Finally, we get a great post about MUSIC, and it's not there. *Whimper ~ sob ~ sniffle!* I hope this will be moved there? Please please please!

To your question:

I used to think I had good rhythm because I could feel it while listening to a song, then I tried playing one I wrote (my first song), and recorded it. I was right. I can tell when rhythm is on beat or off by listening, but the odd thing is, I couldn't tell while playing. When I listened to the recording, my rhythm was horrid!

So, I got a metronome, but I couldn't keep to it. No idea why, it just didn't work. I could not stay on beat with the stupid thing to save my life. Then, I remembered years before that I had auditioned for a band, and jammed with the drummer for almost an hour, and had been able to stay on beat with him really well. As it happens, I had borrowed the metronome from a drummer, and told him about my problem. He sold me a drum machine he had. I did much better with that, but learned very quickly that playing with a drum machine is very different from playing with a human. Drum machines are unforgiving. They are keep PERFECT rhythm. Humans do not. No matter how good a human drummer is, they always vary a little in and out of tempo. The best don't vary by much, but they do vary. Drum machines DON'T, so if you get off beat by even a little bit, it can't adjust to you like a [really good] drummer can. So if you use a machine, you're forced to learn to keep perfect rhythm as long as you're using it.

It took me quite a while to learn to keep time with the machine, but simply by trying over and over, taking breaks, sometimes for a couple of days, I eventually got better.

Practice is everything!

For me, it wasn't intuition at all. I wasn't very good at all until I spent a lot of time practicing. Singing though, is a whole different story. When I first sing a song I write, my singing is very mechanical. All the words on beat, and as tightly to the rhythm as possible, but there's a reason for that. I only do that the first time I sing it, because i may have more tracks to add to the song with other instruments. I want the words there as a guide so I know when each verse, chorus and bridge are going to end before they end. Sometimes it's hard to tell where those markers are with just the basic instruments. The words help with that, and having them all right on beat helps keep the instruments added later on beat as well. If I sing off beat, it can be distracting, and can cause me to go off beat with the added instruments.

Once all the instruments are in the mix, I'll redo the vocals, but this time is when I usually start playing with the tempo of my singing, starting some words early or late, and maybe slurring some together faster than the first time, or slower. Doing that gives the song a more natural feel, a more human feel. I may do the same kind of thing with the added instruments too, like lead guitar, or whatever.

Getting to the point of being able to play or sing while feeling the rhythm took a long time. It took first listening to a lot of music, then, it took playing a lot until I could play almost "subliminally." What I mean by that is being able to stay on beat without counting, or paying conscious attention to the drums. You have to get to the point where you can LISTEN to what you are playing instead of thinking about where your hands need to be and what they need to do to play. Singing is the same. If you're still thinking about what the next words are in the song, you aren't LISTENING to the words you're singing, and not really listening to the music either. You have to know that song so well, that while you are singing or playing it, it's as if someone else is singing or playing it. When you get to that point, you'll realize you are FEELING the rhythm, rather than thinking about it.

Every hear old jazz musicians talk about "feeling the groove?" That's what it is. Once you feel that groove, you aren't thinking anymore. You're just doing it, almost automatically. You've got to get to that "place" before you can start messing around with off beat phrases and varying tempos.

In short, it's not intuition. It's not mechanics. It's not theory.

It's MAGIC!

But the magic doesn't happen without a lot good old fashioned work (blood, sweat and tears) first.

I bet you've heard stories of child prodigies who sat down and played perfectly their first time. They do exist, but they are one in ten million. And those stories of famous musicians who made deals with the devil or dropped acid and suddenly became virtuosos? Pure bull! None of them are true. Blood sweat and tears first. Then you get MAGIC!

pgd, and all, I hope you don't mind, but I've requested this thread be moved to the Art, Writing and Music forum. We need more discussions like this down there. Well, I do anyway. I'm starved for them!

i have a jukebox in my head that is always playing something.

i could call up the song (if i knew it well) and press "play" and have a reference for the song.

can't explain it any better than that .. it is not always in the right key. but if i have sheet music to advise me (or listen to the actual song to verify the key) i could change the key to the correct one in my head and imitate it.

this is how i play by ear.

aside from perfect pitch [now less than perfect in my old age] and some musical whistling facility, i have absolutely no musical talent, but mightily respect musical talent in other people. my question is why so many musically talented folk look down their noses at folk not so similarly gifted?

?

not my experience

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MrXxx - That's fine. It's ok with me to have this thread (A song - music - keeping the beat) moved from here, General Autism Discussion forum, to the Art, Writing and Music forum.

Thank you all for your answers. Appreciate them. - pgd

I keep the beat with my teeth, a habit my dentist strongly disaproves of. I keep my mouth closed when I do this. It is quite audible inside my own head (everything that happens in your mouth is) but I've never gotten any weird looks so it must not be audible to others. It's not just clacking my teeth together. It's very subtle and I can do complex rhythms because I've been doing this since at least preschool. This concerns my dentist because after all these decades it is wearing the enamel pretty thin.

"All rock gets faster"- one of the musicians from the Clash when his bandmates were concerned that many of their songs were considerably faster at the end than at the beginning.

I've never sat down with a metronome and my favorite recordings to verify this. I believe him. It's one of the things I love about human drumming versus machine drumming.

I have to listen to the song played correctly and internalize the melody in order to "get it". My stepdad is a pretty good guitarist (he performs and stuff) and he always encouraged me to do rock and such on guitar but I just didn't have that kind of music and rhythm in me. I've studied piano since I was 8 and am reasonably skilled at it and I'm taking violin. I usually have to have sheet music to play and stick completely to classical music because anything else seems to be like a foreign language. I had a hard time learning rhythm. It's still the hardest part of playing for me.

maybe you're luckier than me in this respect, but all my life i have noticed a clique-ishness regarding talented people only associating with other talented people, with the artistic types [musicians, graphic artists/painters, actors, dancers et al] most heavily segregated from non-artists, in terms of artists not socializing with non-artists.

i feel excluded from any group of people, so maybe i just wouldn't pick up on that.

i find other artists to be unusually accepting of quirky and antisocial (or asocial) behavior, and for that reason (and common interests) i like them. but i wouldn't call myself cliquish, nor the ones i've known, as they've mostly been introverts.