a singer with rhythm problems

If you want a motoring analogy, take the trained driver and blindfold him and see how far he gets around a track he knows.
In that scenario the visual cues are our backing track and/or click.

In all seriousness, I'm pretty sure a lot of them could complete a familiar track...

I keep reading this, and I'm not quite sure if you are joking or not. :p

I would lay a hefty sum that even a robot, pre-programmed with all the "right" moves would crash. It is basically chaos theory. Minute errors escalate exponentially. As for humans, Myth Busters did an interesting experiment blindfolding people and asking them to walk in a straight line. They conducted the experiment in a field and used GPS to plot the results. It was crazy. Folks were looping all over the place in a remarkably short distance.

Anyway, to your main point about the singer learning to walk before he can run. I consider three possibilities.

1. It is early days, and I am slow at learning how the words fall. (There is no absolute right and wrong. The composer himself may change the arrangement half way through writing the song. We do have to familiarize ourselves with what the composer has settled on.)

2. I have learned how the words fall, but I keep forgetting because I am not feeling the groove. (The operative word here is "feel". I don't think that a groove is something that a singer calculates using halves and quarters. For me, groove and metronome just don't go together.)

3. I know the groove and I can remember it, but my technique won't allow me to reproduce it. (E.g breathing may be undeveloped and the singer comes in late because he is out of breath, or is too slow on rapid interval changes.)

They are all three different. I don't know how much of it can be addressed with a metronome. 1 and 3 could happen to someone with a good sense of rhythm.

Actually, thinking about that, as a kid, I just could not follow the rhythm of classical music. I would watch people wiggling their heads and waving their hands to some mysterious signal, and I would be sitting there, lost. Somehow I eventually fixed most of it along the way (thank god for Tom and Gerry cartoons. :p)
 
I keep reading this, and I'm not quite sure if you are joking or not. :p

It's tongue in cheek, sort of. I'm not sure there's a need for an analogy at all.
Maybe some of you guys think the OP is exaggerating, and maybe he is, but I have worked with people who literally dropped whole beats consistently because there was just no awareness of grouping at all.

Now, anyone can make a mistake. Taking a complex drum part, for example, of course it's easy to play some difficult fill and come out the other side off the beat, but you know,
but that's usually more to do with physical limitations or not having the part mapped properly in your head yet.
Either way, it would usually be acknowledged as an error and you'd try again.

Sure, that can happen with singing too, I guess, but there's no real point in talking about swing and feel and groove with someone who can gradually lose an entire bar over a few minutes of a fairly straight forward song, you know?

OP, is it as bad as that?
 
I have worked with people who literally dropped whole beats consistently because there was just no awareness of grouping at all.

OP, is it as bad as that?

I'd like to hear from Alvin G on that, too. How inaccurate is the singer's phrasing? (We know it is awkward to fix.)

I would be a bit more worried about a singer who was dropping beats inconsistently, as oppose to consistently. I may have missed your point, though, if, by consistently, you mean often. If the singer is singing different things on different takes, without realizing it, then,....... o buoy!
 
Indeed. What will kill a sense of movement and drama is not the ability to sing to a metronome, but the musical inability to tell a story with the lyrics.

The way you've written it, you know you're playing with words. :cool:

The question was not about the ability to sing to a metronome, but the need to sing to one. (You tried to turn a negative into a positive). A metronome can help with not speeding up over the course of a piece of music, for example, but, in my opinion, it doesn't help people who don't feel the groove, find the groove. In fact, if they hew too close to the metronome, rather than the moment of the music, it won't sound good.
 
The question was not about the ability to sing to a metronome, but the need to sing to one. (You tried to turn a negative into a positive). A metronome can help with not speeding up over the course of a piece of music, for example, but, in my opinion, it doesn't help people who don't feel the groove, find the groove. In fact, if they hew too close to the metronome, rather than the moment of the music, it won't sound good.

The OP's problem was stated as: "I find that he is lack of rhythm and timing, which means he don’t know when a bar is end or when is the 1."

This doesn't sound like a singer who doesn't feel the groove. The problem seems to be more deeply seated than that. The singer hasn't developed an internal rhythm to which he (or she) can apply a feel. Their anticipated or delayed entries are not artistic expression, they are mistakes through not being able to count internally. The singer needs to know what a bar is, where it starts, and where it ends. Getting them to work with a metronome is a reasonable action to take. It's a technique used successfully for many years. There are, of course, singers who don't need this. They have both a strong internalised rhythm and the capacity to work round this for musical expression. The OP's singer doesn't sound like one of these.

If the singer (any singer, in fact) has any ability, a metronome is not going to stifle their creativity. And if it does, then I would not be convinced that singing is the best career choice for them.

Now, I could be wrong. It could be that the OP's problem is simply a singer who doesn't have feel. But it sure doesn't sound like that.
 
Back
Top