In this chapter… The backbeat. Coming in sideways. Terry Savlon, Bovington and Tickly Under There. John Lee Hooker. The train wreck: the worst thing that can happen to you on stage apart from accidental death by electrocution. In the vast majority of the rock music of the last 60 years, there is a discernable backbeat. The drummer hits his snare drum on beats 2 and 4 in the bar. He accents these beats. These two beats stand out in the music. And it’s not just rock that has a backbeat: most popular music of the last nearly 90 years has a backbeat, regardless of genre. In jazz, blues, disco, death metal, dubstep, you name it... the 2 and 4 are accented. For some reason we as listeners love this pulse. As musicians, we hear the backbeat and it helps us to know where we are in the rhythm. If we were to make a mistake and momentarily lose our place in the music, we could immediately get back in to it by reference to the backbeat. It’s a fundamental element of rhythm in popular music. A very small number of amateur musicians however, do not feel the backbeat as keenly as the rest of us. Sometimes they will start playing on the 2 as if it is the 1, for example. This is known as coming in sideways. For many of us, coming in sideways would take a concerted mental effort. It goes against all our rhythmical instincts. It goes against the rhythm of the music we’ve listened to and danced to all our lives. For the rhythmically dyslexic... it’s no problem at all. Here are three short anecdotes about players I have encountered with varying degrees of rhythmical dyslexia. I tell these anecdotes in order to showcase the dramatic effect this affliction can have on the rest of the band: Terry SavlonTerry Savlon, was the singer in a band called Frog Zenith. This was a short-lived band that lasted all of one gig before splitting up. I was one of the band’s two guitar players. At some point during the second set of Frog Zenith’s one and only gig, we launched into a cover of Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. Terry suddenly came in sideways with his opening vocals. He either came in one beat too early or one beat too late, I can’t remember. Either way, the effect would have been the same. Ring of Fire has a fast “Boom Cha Boom Cha” rhythm and Terry had started singing on a “Cha” when he was meant to come in on a “Boom”! He had gotten the Boom and the Cha mixed up! Unbeknownst to Terry, this had the effect of an electric shock running through the rest of the band behind him. We were thrown into a state of disarray and confusion. We looked left and right at each other in panic, trying to decide how to remedy the situation. Should we all switch and follow Terry? Should we stay where we are, hold our breath and hope he self-corrects soon? In the end, two of us went Terry’s way and the other two of us stayed put. Now half the band were “Boom Cha” while the other half were “Cha Boom”. The overall effect was “Choom Choom”! The music was highly unstable and we were now dangerously close to being involved in a train wreck (i.e., the song coming to a crashing premature halt). Somehow, we miraculously survived and got back on track. It was a very close call! Meanwhile, Terry was standing at the front of the stage with his back to us, singing his heart out. He was blissfully unaware of the chaos that had just taken place behind him. Chaos which he had caused. He was instead deeply involved in expressing the song’s theme of all-consuming romantic passion to the audience. Quite how he could have been so oblivious to the strong backbeat of this song, I don’t know! BovingtonI knew an open-mic’er called Bovington. He played acoustic guitar and sang his own compositions: humorous novelty songs in the style of Pam Ayres (for those of you in the UK who are old enough to remember this poetess/singer/light entertainer). Like Uncle Tony, who I mentioned in an earlier chapter, Bovington was an older gentlemen who had difficulty knowing where a bar ended. He didn’t hear the backbeat in the music. There was no backbeat in his music. He simply changed chord whenever he felt the urge. And his urge rarely corresponded with the end of a 4/4 bar. Bars could be three-and-a-half or five beats long, for example. Bovington was allergic to counting. Also similar to Uncle Tony, Bovington loved the idea of having a band around him, instead of just playing solo. He wanted to hear his compositions fleshed out with drums, bass, keyboards and electric guitars. Alas, this was not possible. Nobody at the open mics had the telepathic skills to anticipate when Bovington would change chords. It was extremely difficult to play along with him. Incidentally, there is a very interesting recording of the great John Lee Hooker singing Red House, originally by Jimi Hendrix. It’s worth a listen, if you can find it. John Lee Hooker, who mainly performed solo, would change chords whenever he felt like it, just as Bovington did. He didn’t worry about following the usual 4/4 structure of Red House, even though he was playing with a band on this version. The musicians in this band were amazing. They were mind readers. Somehow they were able to anticipate John Lee’s premature or delayed chord changes faultlessly. How they did it, I will never know. DouglasDouglas was the bass player in a local hard rock cover band called Tickly Under There. He had a severe case of rhythmical dyslexia, but his band mates stood by him and over time he improved. In the early days however, it was possible for him to play a very strong riff, such The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army or Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, a quarter note out of sync with the rest of the band. This feat is nigh on impossible for nearly every other musician alive on Planet Earth. For Douglas, it was child’s play. Amazingly, after making this mistake, Douglas was able to maintain the same tempo as the others and yet remain a quarter note out of sync. Somehow, he didn’t immediately hear the disparity with the other musicians in the band, and he could continue pretty much indefinitely on this track. However, the effect was like a musical suicide bomber suddenly appearing on stage. It was so jarring to his Tickly Under There band mates, they would inevitably have to stop: A train wreck! How to deal with rhythmical dyslexia:If you are auditioning players for your band, it should be obvious quite soon if they suffer from rhythmical dyslexia. Sufferers can improve, but probably not quickly, so it’s best to say thanks but no thanks. If you feel you yourself have a degree of rhythmical dyslexia, you might try this. Listen to classic rock, jazz or pop songs and try to identify the backbeat. Clap your hands along with the backbeat. The snare drum is normally played on the backbeat, so you can listen out for that. It’s a big clue. Perhaps take some lessons with a music teacher (one who plays modern music: rock, jazz or pop) and ask them to help you to identify the backbeat in different songs at different tempos. The next level would be to set the metronome at half speed and try play short riffs or passages of music hearing the metronome click as beats 2 and 4 in a bar, i.e., the backbeat. Again, a good teacher should be able to direct you in doing this. The overall aim is to get you to reliably hear the backbeat of a song and be able to connect your playing to it. Rhythmical dyslexia is due to not keenly hearing the backbeat in popular music. It is a relatively rare phenomenon. The sufferer doesn’t hear the 4/4 bars as units which repeat. The rhythm for them is more a continuous string of notes without the organising factor of repetition. Those with rhythmical dyslexia are therefore more susceptible to losing their place in the rhythm and throwing the rest of the band into confusion. Very often, when a player comes in sideways or miscounts a bar and gets out of sync with the others, this causes a train wreck. The song comes to a sad and premature end, like a soldier being shot and limping on for a few more paces before finally keeling over. So, it is best to avoid inviting a rhythmically dyslexic player into your band. Chapter summary
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Blog: How to form a rock band. Also, how NOT to form a rock band.About this blog
These blog posts contain info I would like to pass on to my music students when they form their first bands and start to play live gigs. I explain more here in my first blog post.
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Mark Baxter, musician, music teacher, guitarist, bassist, drummer. English expat living in Belgium.
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