Keeping Time When Playing

[ausdag]

a pendulum would work, except that unless is was driven by a spring, like a clock, or you played in vacuum where there'd be no air friction to slow it down (and no airwaves to make a sound so timing wouldn't matter anyway), your playing would slow down during the course of the tune as the pendulum slowed down.

Actually, I've found that since I've been learning Highland piping for the past two and a bit years, my UP timing has improved greatly. The discipline of GHB piping has taught me to really hold back and not speed up on all the bippitty-bips as we UP pipers are prone to do...as long as i don't allow all the other aspects of GHB to influence my UP piping.

[MTGuru]

a pendulum would work, except that unless is was driven by a spring, like a clock, or you played in vacuum where there'd be no air friction to slow it down (and no airwaves to make a sound so timing wouldn't matter anyway), your playing would slow down during the course of the tune as the pendulum slowed down.

Actually, no. A pendulum won't slow down. Its period is a function of its effective length, and remains constant if the length is constant. But an undriven pendulum loses energy due to frictional forces, which causes its amplitude - the width of its swing - to decrease. Eventually it will get to the the point where the swings are so small that they're no longer a reliable visual cue. But if it lasts long enough for whatever it is your playing, in theory it would do the job.

Of course, I could joke that maybe the physics is backwards Down Under, but I won't ... or maybe I just did.

[ausdag]

I stand corrected. Down Under pendulums included

[billh]

Jeez guys, just learn to tap your (left) foot while playing!

I know some folks had foot tapping caned out of them at a tender age, but lots of great musicians do it.

Personally I think it's better than a metronome, since the aim is "good" or "steady" rhythm - which is not quite the same as "even" rhythm. If you do use a metronome, be sure not to have it click on de-stressed downbeats, unless you aim to sound like a machine. In reels and double jigs I think even two clicks per bar may be too many - this is a problem since many metronomes won't go slowly enough for practice at one click per bar. Like most pipers I have had to work hard on my rhythm; I have tried a metronome but found it more of a hindrance than a help, whereas slow playing and foot tapping have helped a lot.

I also think that attending some set dancing classes helped, despite the fact that I never managed to do much more than "walk through" the sets. It's dance music, after all...

regards

Bill

[djm]

Try wearing a kilt, even if it's just a bathtowel in while hiding in your bedroom. The swing and sway of it has all the rhythm you'll ever need to learn.

djm

[MTGuru]

The alternative is to grow your hair long like Máiréad Nesbitt, and flip it from side to side as you play. This not only guarantees perfect timing, but also drives Celtic women and men wild with delight.

[Christian Tietje]

To use the metronome doesn't hit the point. It is the tool to check and test, not the solution to avoid the problem.

My experience is that most of the times I miss a timing - which fastens up the tune - the reason is, that a difficult note or ornamentation comes out to short or even not at all. My solution when playing for others is only to start and play tunes which I am sure about. To test it you can do a safe tune in any speed, to be able to speed up and to speed down even although the playing of other musicians, to be able to play very slowly and even very fast. A good path to learn is to play in an adequate speed with extra prolonged beat notes, which anyway for pipers is nearly the only possiblity to emphasize a rhythm.

Christian Tietje, Seligenstadt, Gemany

[jqpublick]

Jeez guys, just learn to tap your (left) foot while playing!

I know some folks had foot tapping caned out of them at a tender age, but lots of great musicians do it.

Personally I think it's better than a metronome, since the aim is "good" or "steady" rhythm - which is not quite the same as "even" rhythm.

A friend of mine pointed out to me one day that although I was playing well, and tapping my foot, these two events didn't always line up. I would speed up my toe-tapping to line up with bits I could do well and either slow down or ignore the toe-beat (there's a german word for it, I'm sure) and play around that. Since then I have watched myself and others do the same thing.

I think keeping the beat in another part of the body -head bobbing, toe tapping, what have you- is great and really very necessary because without internalized rhythm you are lost without either the metronome or another, steadier player. This externally driven rhythm can lead the player into 'following' the beat, which means they're coming in late, which in turn will slow the tune down or defeat the 'rolling' feel of a tune, but when practising the ornamentations we use, I tend to ignore the beat in order to facilitate my ornaments, which spoils the tune.

In the interests of full disclosure, I play drums semi-professionally so rhythm is rather critically important to me. Having said that, metronomic playing can often ruin a tune if that tune wants to be played differently. Each tune is a series of statements of varying lengths, and each of those statements has a flow of its own; occasionally those 'flows' diverge from the metronomic rhythm. An old friend suggested that I think about most tunes as a kind of call/response pattern. He suggested that thinking about tunes as a conversation -between lovers, between friends, between enemies- would help with both the understanding of how the tune wanted to be played and with the rhythm that tune is 'supposed' to be played in. I think of phrases as sentences, and a full tune as a conversation. Doesn't always work, but it's an interesting guideline.

I also find (though I'm still not fleet enough of finger to do this consistently) that microtiming in piping is everything. When you place a note is as important as what tuning you use to play that note, perhaps -dare I say it?- more. We can't really vary volume without spoiling tuning, but where the note lies..... . Play a reel with your playing just slightly ahead of the beat and you have a completely different feel than if you play the note dead on the beat, or slightly behind. Once again, I think it depends on how the tune wants to be played. Oh, and personal interpretation, of course. Which comes with thinking about the tune I'm playing and allowing myself freedom to do what comes to me to do. Which battles against the need to stay metronomically on..... someone tell me why I'm doing this again?

So what I'm saying here is that I've done best by practising ornaments and new tunes to a metronome ( and old one I want to brush up on/double check ) but that when it comes to actually playing and not practising the metrognome goes to sleep and the joy of the music comes to the fore.

To use the metronome doesn't hit the point. It is the tool to check and test, not the solution to avoid the problem.

Exactly!


The metronome is not the tune. Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.



Well, that's enough from me for a while;


Mark

[Christian Tietje]

To come back to Wannabe-Pipers question: You will never overcome this barrier completely and forever. Every new tune, technique or half a year of not playing the pipes will face you to the matter again.

If you master and can manage some tunes really good, listen to other players while you both are playing them especially when they try to speed up the tune. Keep on playing "laid back" like in jazz music, don't let them force you to speed up. Slow down consciously!

For a long time I played together with a musician who always slowed down tunes. That made it sleepy, boring, like a handbrake during driving up the hill.

One of the answers is Mark's: Every tune has it own life, it's melody - call and response. Only when you're able to play every single note fully aware and not the tune drives you then you can avoid the problem.

[Murphdasurf]

Actually, I've found that since I've been learning Highland piping for the past two and a bit years, my UP timing has improved greatly. The discipline of GHB piping has taught me to really hold back and not speed up on all the bippitty-bips as we UP pipers are prone to do...as long as i don't allow all the other aspects of GHB to influence my UP piping.

I think this comes from the advent and popularity of band piping, where a chorus of pipers
are expected to keep the same time. Every down beat in Highland piping has some sort of
embellishment attached to it. Doublings, birls, throws, taorluaths etc. And each one of the
embellishments have a specific point in which the down beat is expected to fall. Usually this
is the highest pitched grace note in the "move". The high G grace note in an E doubling for
example.

Whether this is something that is repeated in Uilleann piping is not as obvious.
Does the down beat fall on the first note of a cran or the last?

[waymer]

I think you all have missed the obvious conundrum that comes with bellows blown pipes. The bag wants air from your bellows and it never wants it "in time" with the tempo of the tune. Most pipers play other instruments (whistles, flutes and gasp... Bodran) and seem to be able to play at the proper tempo with no "piperitis" so why when they strap on the pipes do they suddenly seem to lose the ability to play in steady rhythm? The bellows!
Oh and I have no idea how to fix the problem so you are on your own

[Christian Tietje]

to Murphdasurf's comment:

And each one of the embellishments have a specific point in which the down
beat is expected to fall. Usually this is the highest pitched grace note in the
"move". The high G grace note in an E doubling for example.

You're right! That gives a great hint! In the last years I learnt to cut down from the Back-D on every beat as long as the tune moves in the lower octave. That for sure gives a very steady rhythm!