How to play with great rhythm – 7 important keys

How to practise to make your playing rhythmically flowing and stable can be quite a conundrum. People often struggle to feel confident that they’re playing the correct rhythm and they tend to worry about going out of time. Often they resort to practising with a metronome and try to be perfectly in time but this just leads to more problems, tension and stiff unmusical playing. In this short video, I explain how to approach improving your rhythm and developing a strong sense of musical pulse and metre. Put these 7 keys to good rhythm into practice and you’ll find that playing with great rhythm can be easy and natural.

How to use an audible groove to sense the music’s structure

When music has some kind of accompanying figuration that shows the underlying groove, that can be a very helpful way to feel the rhythmic structure of the music as it unfolds. But you still need to consciously generate a strong matrix structure and know where you are within it at every moment, so that the music makes perfect sense – like a poem.

I’ve finally got my act together!

For many years, the way I have made music privately for myself and how I’ve shared it publicly have not quite matched. So now I’ve decided to stop hiding behind other genres and to share my improvisations, pieces and songs exactly as they are.

How to get a fluent sense of tonality

Tonality works according to some basic, solid principles that we can easily learn. But we must also use strong expressive intention which is based more on rhythm and cadence than theory.