{"id":230,"date":"2011-10-02T18:01:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-02T18:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/02\/the-great-jeff-berlin-metronome\/"},"modified":"2017-06-18T03:48:52","modified_gmt":"2017-06-18T03:48:52","slug":"the-great-jeff-berlin-metronome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/02\/the-great-jeff-berlin-metronome\/","title":{"rendered":"The great Jeff Berlin metronome controversy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This has been floating around for some time. His observations are mostly good, but I don&#8217;t happen to agree with his conclusion. Watch the video, and I&#8217;ll give a few thoughts about it:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9z6g7vBXboA\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>His major points seem to be:<\/p>\n<p><b>1. Learning new things is not and should not be done in time.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Discarding the rhythmic element- as he is basically suggesting- is one way of learning new music. I don&#8217;t believe it&#8217;s the only way. I follow the jazz musician&#8217;s view that rhythm is primary and the notes are secondary- &#8220;get the rhythm and the notes will follow&#8221; is the philosophy. I&#8217;ve developed some strategies for taking things not quite out of time which I&#8217;ll be sharing soon. At any rate, in African-influenced musics (e.g. American music) <i>the rhythm is the thing<\/i>&#8211; lose that and you&#8217;ve lost the fundamental idea.<\/p>\n<p>He seems to be arguing against the idea of learning new material with a metronome <i>from the very beginning<\/i>, which I certainly wouldn&#8217;t recommend either. I&#8217;m sure there are some bad teachers who do that- in fact I kind of get the feeling this is just an infight with some adjunct faculty at MI (or with MI students&#8217; teachers back in Iowa).<\/p>\n<p><a name=\"more\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>2.\u00a0 &#8220;Latin&#8221; and rock musicians &#8220;never&#8221; used metronomes.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>This is such a sweeping generalization (he explicitly states that he&#8217;s referring to the entire continent of South America and the Caribbean) that there is no need to refute it, is there? Metronomes have been around for some time- they&#8217;re not high technology unheard of in the Afro-Latin world. Certainly the well-known musics of that sphere have metronomic, pulse-oriented time. This also leads one to wonder just what the difference is between playing with a metronome vs. just another musician who has better time than you. You&#8217;re still following an external source.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also worth noting many rock musicians were not able to cut it on their own records, hence the extremely active careers of studio musicians like Hal Blaine, Gary Chester, Earl &#8220;the metronome&#8221; Palmer, and many more.<\/p>\n<p><b>3.\u00a0 Not all time is metronomic.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Certainly classical musicians must have a very flexible concept of rhythm to play that music correctly and to follow a conductor- European music tends to follow more vocalistic rather than pulse-oriented time. Competent musical education addresses that.<\/p>\n<p><b>4.\u00a0 Good time comes from knowing music, from knowing parts.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the conclusion of his demonstrations with his camera operator. It&#8217;s an important point, but I don&#8217;t understand why it is supposed to exclude the metronome. One thing that he did demonstrate with the &#8220;Mission Impossible in 6&#8221; thing is that, contrary to what he implies, understanding rhythm does not start and end with knowing parts.<\/p>\n<p><b>5.\u00a0 Accomplished musicians can use a metronome to &#8220;remind&#8221; them (in his example) not to rush.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>He doesn&#8217;t say what he believes is an acceptable level of accomplishment for metronome use- his examples are of a beginner learning a totally new piece of music- who he says should not use a metronome- and a world-class musician, for whom it&#8217;s an acceptable tool. Where&#8217;s the cutoff?<\/p>\n<p>I really think this is a matter of sloppy communication and maybe a little sloppy thinking, combined with (I&#8217;m guessing) a combative personality. Berlin is a great electric bassist and a smart person, but a lot of smart, accomplished people have crackpot ideas. This is not even particularly crackpot; his premises are basically sound, he&#8217;s just locked himself into a conclusion that I don&#8217;t believe they support, and which happens to bother a lot of people. If you can ignore his more dogmatic assertions, what he says is worth thinking about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This has been floating around for some time. His observations are mostly good, but I don&#8217;t happen to agree with his conclusion. Watch the video, and I&#8217;ll give&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[499],"tags":[308,223,93,224,11],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practicing","tag-jeff-berlin","tag-metronome","tag-music","tag-practice","tag-practicing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1421,"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/1421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pdxdrummer.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}