i've been working through some jam tracks from an online educational site, as i am wont to do. i like them because you can download a .pdf of the notation/tabs and really dig into them. now, i can't read notation, but i did learn how to read the rhythm of notation. that, to me, was much more useful and practical. i won't ever have to read but knowing how to decipher the rhythm will be helpful... and has been. 

for me the big breakthrough was a few years ago i had found a chart on someone's blog they had made for Interstate Love Song by STP. notation, not tabs, in case you were wondering. robert deleo is, in my opinion, pretty much the apex of rock bassists and  having learned several STP songs by ear, including ILS, more or less, i really took the opportunity to use the chart to really get a look at what we has doing. 

what i learned was i was approximate, at best. not at the pitches, but at the rhythm. as i had so often done i had figured out the parts, hit the high spots, and as long as it didn't sound wrong it was close enough. but the thing is, by that point in my studies approximate wasn't good enough, i wanted exact. so i began to pick through it, measure by measure, using my metronome. i literally spent days on certain measures making sure it was just right. because of the syncopations he uses i had a rough time trying to place notes, especially if they were coming in on the "e" of a beat. the pull of the downbeat was hard for me to over come. 

i worked on that one song for several weeks. i could check my notebooks but i'd say 3-4 weeks, easy. the song is not bananas hard or anything, but it takes some work if you want it to be exact. the takeaways from that experience were: being exact is what i want to be able to do, and being able to read at least rhythmic notation is extremally valuable.

i had mentioned in a previous post about the percussion book i bought called Check Patterns which i spent ever day of an entire summer working on. that book did wonders teaching me the basics of rhythm notation and i still occasionally use it to brush up a bit. but those skills have helped me on many charts, hashing out the rhythms to be able to nail the parts as written. being able to visually picture a rhythm definitely helps me be able to place them within the beat... sometimes i even will picture the rhythmic figure in my head while i'm playing a piece if i'm having trouble feeling where it belongs.

yesterday i took one of these jam tracks into Reaper and laid down my bass track. i though it was awful and it didn't feel right. i thought it felt sloppy and i was off on the syncopations. then i took a look at the wave form. 

audio wave forms
oh my. i'm a little bit on time. there was no click track, certainly no quantifying, nudging, or stretching to line things up on the grid. that's just straight playing, one take. now, i am proud of that, for sure... it's taken a lot of work with a metronome, often painfully slow, to get my rhythm in order. certainly being able to read notation has played a big roll in getting me to this point. certainly if I had never learned it to use in my practice my rhythm chops would still be a sloppy approximation.

maybe, though, being accurate was why i didn't like how the bass felt. maybe i thought i was "off" because i was playing too on top of the beat and maybe the music called for me to lay back a bit... that's certainly a thing to consider and certainly that's going to take a long time to develop. but in the meantime, i like being on the beat. it feels good when notes line up and hit at the same time or when those syncopations fall right in the middle. it feels tight and being tight helps me stay tight. the instant i start to drift i feel lost and uncertain and i don't like that at all.