This does for RHYTHM. what IFR does for harmony

@martinmr The Rhythm Code book is more pop oriented, but still right in line with Galper’s Forward Motion book. Both are great for getting away from what music notation implies about rhythm.

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I’m always puzzled by how poorly explained and how little rhythm is discussed. To me rhythm is the heart if all music. Literally, the beating heart. There is no music without rhythm. But, our thinking brains like to focus on notes, chords, harmony, and ignore the underlying stuff.

What the guy said in the video really resonated “rhythm first”, “think of the rhythm and put notes to it”.

Also, what he briefly mentioned about imitation, “make it sound like this”, made me think of my ear training practice and trying to learn to play by ear.

I’ll have to check out his book now.

The book is quite expensive, so been watching sone more of his videos …

This one reinforces what I’ve been aiming for with my ear training.

Thanks @martinmr for putting me on to this guy. Been watching some more videos, here’s another good one about practicing What is practice/What to practice

Jazz is not really my thing, but what he says applies to any genre, listen a lot, sing stuff, and when you can hear it loudly in your head take it to your instrument. “Feed your ears”

Art is about teaching you something about yourself you didn’t know before.

@mem. You can find galpers book on his website for $17,halgalper.com. Or you could do a Google search for HAL GALPER FORWARD MOTION PDF

For historical reasons that’s sort of what I do automatically, since for the best part of 60 years rhythm was the one bit of music I knew I understood! It’s only recently I discovered that I’m not really tone deaf & thus I can explore pitch too. :smiley:

@mem Here in the UK even ‘used’ copies are expensive (where I looked they were higher priced than ‘new’ !).

Here in the UK the Kindle price is close to the equivalent of that.

I’m happy to read novels, biography & certain types of technical book (e.g. Bible Study) on an e-reader but personally I find that for music books & most other technical books I still much prefer a hard copy. It’s nice to note that the hard copy of Galper’s book is spiral bound. :slight_smile:

Edited to correct typo (is corrected to in).

Do you still get access to the audio files when you buy the hard copy?

This was the first video of his that I saw and it blew my mind. Not sure how expensive the book shows up for you, but I would say the book is worth having. What’s in the videos covers just the first couple of chapters in the book.

In my endeavour to try to learn tunes by ear, I try to listen and break down the melody into phrases. A lot of the music I like is usually a kind of call and response structure. So, I’m not thinking of bars/measures, but beats and phrases. Not sure how this aligns with what he describes as melodies ending on beat 1, have to ponder over this one.

Strong melodies resolve in strong beats might be a better phrasing. Playing on the weak beats creates tension that needs to be resolved. The coming strong beats act as an attractor that the musician looks for to resolve the tension they created, which is where the name forward motion comes from.

Thinking of 4/4 time as 2/2 makes it clear that the strong beats are 1 and 3 and gives musicians the freedom to swing and have their own individuality while remaining coherent because they have agreed on when they will resolve the tension their interplay creates. At least that’s how I understand what he’s saying.

This makes sense to me. A lot of the music I play and listen to is essentially music to dance to, with a strong pulse. This corresponds to where you would tap your foot. In a 4/4 tune, you would not tap on 1,2,3,4 but only on 1 and 3.

Another Hal Galper gem

“All practice is ear training, all performance is playing by ear”

That’s my impression. This is a quote from the description on Amazon UK

This is the only jazz method book to offer an interactive website where you can take each exercise…

Love that @mem

+1 to that @martinmr . This guy talks a lot of sense. I’ve ordered the book… :slight_smile:

Let us know how you get on with it. I think the audio files are all online, the PDF version has links to them. I presume, getting the hard copy, there will be directions to find them.

That is my presumption too @mem. The book has been dispatched & ought to be here is a few days.

I opened a new thread because this resource also covers harmony, but I just remembered a useful resource for learning rhythmic patterns: Resource for practicing rhythm and tonal patterns

Just arrived. No time to do anything (even just skim through) yet, but I can confirm that very near the front of the book it includes a description of how to find the web resources - presumably exactly the same resources as for the PDF version of the book?