Advanced 7 Day Workout For Better Rhythm

A DIFFERENT APPROACH

This course is designed to be a follow up to "7 Day Workout For Better Rhythm", so I strongly suggest you take a week and work through it before you tackle this one. Because this is an Advanced Course, the idea is that you practice the exercises on your own without the help of the provided tracks, and without any external reinforcement of the pulse, like foot tapping, etc. It might be a good idea to go back to the original course and practice it in this way (without the help of the audio tracks) as a "warm up" for the advanced exercises.

ENHANCE YOUR LISTENING SKILLS

Practicing with metronome forces you to listen carefully and to listen to more than just yourself. The main challenge here is that the metronome will not be giving you the basic pulse, so you will be developing the ability to FEEL the pulse without any aural reference of it. This forces you to CREATE THE PULSE instead of following it, which is basically what we do when we perform without a click. These exercises will increase your musical awareness, which will help you become a better performer.

ONLY 5 MINUTES A DAY

5 minutes a day it's all it takes to complete transform your playing! As you progress with the exercises you will start to hear any rhythmic issues or inconsistencies, as a result of your enhanced awareness of time and pulse.

SINGING AND PLAYING (VOICE INDEPENDENCE DEVELOPMENT)

The main difficulty when trying to sing and play your instrument at the same time boils down to not being able to HEAR and FEEL the rhythmic relationship between the 2 parts (when you are by yourself) and it gets even more challenging if you are playing with other people or jamming to any type of backing track or metronome, because now there are more things to interpret and get in sync with. These exercises will help you develop the ability to accurately interpret what you hear and synchronise both your playing and your inner time to what you are listening to. The best musicians on the planet are able to play their instruments and at the same time sing or vocalise the music they are performing (melodies of tunes, bass lines, guitar or keyboard riffs, percussion or drum parts etc). Their main concern is not what they play, but the effect that what they play has on the music. Singing is the key element here, because your voice is the physical manifestation of your inner pulse or inner time. If you can ́t sing in time, chances are you won ́t be able to play in time. The more “in time” you ́re able to sing the rhythms and figures, the firmer the imprint in your brain and body of those rhythms, allowing you to play a relaxed, flowing time feel and pulse.

THE PROCESS

You will still have access to the audio tracks, sheet music guide etc, but the idea is to use it only as a guide to understand the exercise. The goal is to go through the exercises on your own. Once you have completed the exercises, you will write down the ones that you struggled with, because these will be your assignments on days 6 and 7. The main idea is to synchronize what you are listening (metronome), what you are playing (clapping) and what you feel internally (voice). On days 6 & 7 you will be working on the exercises you wrote down at the end of each session on the previous days, which should be the exercises you found most challenging. The idea is to work on your weaknesses until they become your strengths.