THE ART OF TIMING AND HOW TO GET IT
Want to bring more expression into your music? Then join Dr Milton Mermikides as he provides a fascinating insight into timing, or how ‘placing’ your notes is vital for feel.
Where you place your notes around the beat, is crucial to how you sound. Milton Mermikides dissects this thorny subject for guitarists.
Music notation is an extremely useful tool as it reduces the immense complexities and variations in the ‘sound domain’ (with all its infinitesimal molecular vibrations) into the important musical parameters of pitch and rhythm (with some dynamic, timbre and expression information thrown in). This makes it a highly economical way of storing, communicating, reproducing and conceptualising music. It allows us to quickly and efficiently capture musical ideas, transfer them between people who can read music (even if they don’t speak the same language) and across time from moments to centuries, a time capsule of musical intent.
From a contemporary perspective, comparing the hugely disparate file sizes of a music notation document to (even a file compressed) audio file will give you some idea of the level of reduction involved. In order to achieve this remarkable economy, much of the sonic information is rejected in order to prioritise a few features. More specifically, conventional notation presents notes as existing on a ‘grid’ of specific pitches (almost always 12 in each octave), and rhythms on a similar -albeit more finely sliced -grid of discrete points. With this system anything that falls between ‘important’ points on the grid may be considered any combination of inaccurate, approximate, tolerable or loose.
The musical reality, however, is that experienced listeners can hear and perform with greater resolution than the notational economies of conventional rhythmic units, and there is a universe of musical expression ‘between the cracks’ of standard notation – and conventional musical knowledge. This mismatch between musical importance, and notation and terminology, means that this powerful aspect of expression is talked about loosely and confusingly – if at all – even by its greatest practitioners. A student may very understandably struggle to understand why a line may be described as ‘swinging’ even if the quavers are straight, or why ‘tight’ is good and ‘metronomic’ is bad; why ‘behind the beat’ works but being late doesn’t. Fortunately, these rhythms ‘between the cracks’ – also known as microtiming – have started to be addressed directly and helpfully – by players such as jazz great Charles Mingus, drummer Stanton Moore, guitarists Pat Metheny and Guthrie Govan.
Furthermore, the advent of digital technology has also allowed us to investigate and recreate this wonderful area of musical expression with greater awareness and insight. Still it is relatively unknown, and this article aims to bring you the latest research in an accessible and immediately practical away, first by breaking down some of the main elements of rhythmic feel and then presenting some studies in the style of great ‘feel players, which show how various tweaks of the parameters can make amazing music however ‘simple’ it looks on the page. Microtiming research is convoluted, contextual and complex but I’ve found it really helpful to invent four basic concepts: Swing, latency, weighting and duration. These are simply defined but combine for fantastic results. Remember that these are very rarely notated (or if so very approximately) so are concepts to be aware of despite the written notation.
Swing: (See Figure 1 p32) This is the ‘asymmetry’ of the beat, basically how lopsided it is. Jazz quavers (eighth notes) are conventionally notated and conceptualised as ‘triplet quavers’ and occasionally as dotted quaver (or semiquaver, 16th note). However, triplet quavers are actually most common in a 12/8 ‘shuffle’ rhythm, and are surprisingly rare in 4/4 even in quite traditional swing music (for example, Django generally swings less than a triplet swing). It’s more helpful to imagine a smooth continuous dial between straight quavers (let’s call this 50% swing – the beat subdivided exactly in two) and a continuum of swing values (what Guthrie Govan calls a ‘dimmer switch’) to a light swing (say ≈51-55% where the second quaver is
ANYTHING THAT FALLS BETWEEN ‘IMPORTANT’ POINTS ON THE MUSICAL GRID IS CONSIDERED INACCURATE, TOLERABLE, APPROXIMATE OR LOOSE