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by biggieshellz
1277 days ago
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I agree with you on the vast majority of this, but I think it's a bridge too far to put intonation above feel unconditionally. You are correct that keeping time (what an engineer would call "maintaining a common time base between transmitter and receiver") is necessary to play together with other musicians. But what musicians would call "feel" is what an engineer would call "phase modulation" -- whether a note is ahead of the beat, on the beat, or behind the beat; and by how much. Especially in Black American music (jazz, blues, soul, R&B, and a bunch of pop that's been influenced by those styles), there is a lot of crucial information there beyond what is conveyed in the "gridded" rhythms that are conveyed in Western musical notation. If you are not aware of this, you will still have problems playing with other musicians. From personal experience, it is anxiety-inducing to play with musicians who are ignorant of their beat placement and as a consequence have what an engineer would call "jitter" -- their timekeeping is correct on average, but on each given beat, they might be a little bit ahead or a little bit behind. You can play with a metronome for ages and never realize you're doing this wrong, as you're not consistently rushing or dragging, you're just inconsistent. |
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I agree wholeheartedly, but I actually lump this in my head under "rhythm" rather than "feel". One of the reasons that black musicians tend to have on-average better <"feel" for you, "rhythm" for me> is that they often have spent a lot of time physically dancing or playing live gigs at church/with their adult friends, and had to learn how to place notes just by hearing other people do it. This is a more effective method for training feel/rhythm than showing someone note durations on a sheet of music and telling them to figure it out themselves.
I think the way to correct the bad "feel" habits you're talking about is to play a lot with talented, on-beat musicians who will correct your playing in rehearsal. They will also assign you parts that you can handle that serve the sound of the band, rather than serving the intentions of the composer per the sheet music. Another issue that young western musicians have is that they most often play with other players at about their skill level, which stops them from being able to quickly learn good habits from better musicians.