this obviously refers to all musicians, but i was wondering what you all have to say about this.

its the issue of time. i practice with a metronome frequently, as i should be doing. but then once in awhile, i decide to turn my metronome off, and unfortunately, my time just gets thrown out the window. i was wondering if anyone has ANY input on how one can improve his/her time. i would really appreciate it.

thanks a lot.

Hi, I remember being criticized for my time keeping at college and I solved the problem after much stress. First of all you have to identify the two main problem areas.

1. The first and most important area is the perception of the "time", which can be helped immensly by working on singing (with phonetics) the various subdivisions of the pulse whilst playing a passage...

2. The second area, which is so often only discussed by drum set players, is the nature of "physical time keeping", where you may struggle to play a line "in time" because you are making a motion with your arms or legs which conflicts with the nature of the rhythm. This is a very common problem in the bass drum foot of a drum set player.

For example... in a jazz swing groove, where the player doesn't realise that he/she is raising the foot pedal "as if timing the stroke" in 4/4 8ths or 16ths, where the hands are moving in triplets...

I find that marimba players, who do little else apart from the marimba, often lack the internal clock of a player who is used to playing "groove" based music, either as a drum set player or hand percussionist...

Don't throw your metronome away, just practise subdivision....

Hope this was helpful...

TA

Breathing / controlling body pace as a preliminary exercise (=being calm); e.g. one breath per stroke..., then eventually get the slow strokes together with some (very slow) metronome tempo.
This takes a while by doing it shortly every day, but should work.