In this chapter we’ve gone back to basics on musical Rhythm, to establish a new, deeper relationship with The Beat. Through the exercises you’ve started to recognise, feel and even create duple and triple meter beats at a variety of tempos and with both simple and compound subdivisions.
What we’ve covered may seem simple—and conceptually, it is—especially if you’ve been playing music for years and tackling all kinds of time signatures and written rhythms.
But don’t let the conceptual simplicity fool you. The more time you spend focusing on, connecting with, and feeling this fundamental Beat in a variety of ways, the easier and faster everything rhythmic will click into place for you, and the more effective and expressive a musician you will become. It can’t be over-stated how transformational it is to go from a purely-intellectual understanding of musical time to truly understanding and feeling musical time deep within your body.
Now that we’ve laid a firm foundation with this framework of time, we are well prepared to explore all the possible rhythms we can build on top of it.