Helping Musicians with no Sense of Time

This is something that’s popping up a lot more frequently among young students these days. There are a lot more people out there who have no sense of time/pulse/whatever you want to call it, and to be clear, I’m not talking about someone who’s rushing or dragging when playing music. Rushing and/or dragging is a very normal thing for human musicians to do; it’s a tendency that needs to be fought against, but it’s a normal problem to have.

I’m specifically referring to musicians who cannot tap any tempo in time whatsoever. I’m sure you’ve met someone who, when they were asked to clap/tap/play a simple rhythm like 4 quarter notes in a row, managed to mess it up nearly every time. I was not a stranger to this when I was a student, but when I started coaching brass instruments at different schools, I was very surprised at just how many students had this issue because it was a lot more than when I was growing up.

How to Fix this

Funnily enough, I found the solution to this when I was looking for a metronome watch. I stumbled across a video review of the Soundbrenner Pulse vibrating metronome (not a sponsor), and there was a piano player who had made a review on it. I can’t find the original video, but he mentioned having a student who had absolutely no sense of time when he played; he played the right notes in the right order, but trying to tap your foot along with his playing was impossible. The teacher ended up tapping on the students’ shoulder while he was playing and surprisingly, he started playing in time.

I started doing this with the students that I had, and it worked like magic. For players that were very young/not very good, I would just have them play quarter notes and tap quarter notes on their shoulder while doing this; I also found that doing this for more advanced players - including ones that didn’t really have many tempo issues to begin with - helped them learn tricky rhythms a bit faster. If you can tap on a student’s shoulder while playing with your other hand, that can be especially helpful. If you do this over the course of several weeks/months, the student you’re working with should have no more tempo problems.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been in a rehearsal and someone was having serious problems with tempo. There’s always the awkward [incredibly long] moment where the director tries to fix it, but they just end up getting frustrated. They try everything, but especially metronomes. From my experience, a metronome won’t help people who have no sense of time at all.

Why Does This Happen?

I don’t remember where I got this from, but it makes a lot of sense, so I’ll say it here: people who have no sense of pulse generally lead sedentary lives as a child; they didn’t move around all that much in their developmental years, so their mind-body connection, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t that strong. Metronomes won’t fix the problem they have, but tapping on their shoulder does because it’s an external, physical stimulus that they need (at first). That’s also why I linked the “metronome watch” by Soundbrenner; if you’re reading this and you have this problem with timing but don’t have someone to help you fix it, I think that watch will work wonders for you.