How To Improve Your Groove
I (Isa) told Lauren that I would write you all a blog post about groove. I have a lot to say about groove, I thought! But as soon as I started writing, I thought “Oh no. Oh god. What on earth possessed me to try to do this.”
What exactly is groove?
Groove is such a difficult concept to pin down in words. And I already knew this because I try to talk about it on a regular basis! I talk about it with my bandmates, with my students, and with my musician friends, and we often find ourselves struggling to articulate what exactly we want to say. Groove is mysterious. Groove is what makes music and people dance. It’s visceral and physical — you feel it in your body. In folk music, in particular, I think groove is especially interesting because it can be so subtle. The basic elements in a lot of folk styles are fairly simple, so it can be hard to figure out where exactly the groove lies.
A while ago, I sat down on my porch to play some old-time tunes with a friend. He’s an incredible electric guitarist with a really solid ear. And yet as we worked our way through some tunes, with me playing fiddle and him playing my acoustic guitar, he started getting frustrated. “My feel isn’t right,” he kept saying. And he was right! The boom-chuck rhythm and the chords were all there, but the groove was slightly off. And because the basic mechanics of what he was trying to do were so simple, and so easily accessible, I had a really hard time explaining what exactly he should change. (It was still a good jam.)
Ultimately, what I told him is exactly what I will tell you right now: You just have to listen to a lot of music, and play and play until it starts to feel right. Play along with recordings you love. Lauren, on this very blog, has a ton of great tips on how to jam without a partner. If you’re able to, play with people who are better than you, and focus more on listening than on playing. You might feel intimidated and ponder quitting this devilish instrument altogether (I surely have), but you’ll learn a lot. I have found, in my teaching and in my own musical life, that figuring out how you want to sound becomes a lot easier when you’ve really taken the time to internalize the music you love. When I started studying with Lauren in high school, my technique was an abject nightmare, but my groove was pretty good! This was in part because I’d spent many, many hours playing along with recordings of Bruce Molsky and Rayna Gellert in my bedroom. So find the music that makes you bob your head, swing your hips, move your feet, and dig deep into it. Cheesy, I know. But it’s the truth.
Want a technical approach to groove?
Now let’s take a more technical look at how to groove as a bowed string player. The first thing to remember is that groove lives in your right hand. I recently heard a great story about a Québecois fiddler named Jean Carignan, in which another fiddler asked him how long it would take to learn to play as well as him. He raised his left hand and said “about ten years, if you work hard,” then raised his right hand and said “the rest of your life.”
In order to play with great groove, you first have to have great time. When I say “time,” I’m referring to your ability to keep a consistent tempo and fit each note into a rhythmic pulse. Now I’m about to say something you won’t like: it helps to practice with a metronome. It’s the “dark leafy greens” of practicing music. I truly wish it wasn’t this way, but it is. If a metronome feels too soulless for you, there are also many kinds of backing tracks you can find online (or make your own backing tracks while listening to a metronome!) that will make your playing feel more musical while still giving you a rhythmic grid to stay in line with. The goal is to be able to feel the music’s pulse underneath everything you’re playing.
Once you’ve got solid time, then you can start digging into the subtleties of groove. A lot of fiddle tunes would not look particularly groovy if you were to write out the melodies on sheet music, but in the right hands, played in the right way, even the simplest tune can groove like mad. I am fascinated by fiddlers who can do this. Like, for example, this video of Brittany Haas with Lauren herself nodding approvingly in the background. How is it so groovy?? HOW??!!
Where can you find groove on your fiddle?
In my opinion, when I’m looking for where groove lives on the fiddle, I often think about bow pressure and accents. By varying your bow pressure, you can accent certain beats, bringing a sense of motion and feel to what you’re playing. Fiddlers even vary their bow pressure within each note, often digging in as they attack a note and then letting it taper off. Look at this video of Tatiana Hargreaves and Jake Blount. The groove is insane. (The banjo is doing at least 50% of the groove work, obviously, but I’ll focus on the fiddle for now.) A lot of that, in my opinion, comes from subtle variations in bow pressure that emphasize different beats. Some notes are hit hard, with a bit of grit, and some are “ghosted” or barely played at all. Many notes have that attack and release that I mentioned. Many old-time fiddlers also make heavy use of up-bow pulses that help subdivide the bar even further.
Slurs can serve a similar purpose. This video of Bruce Molsky features a lot of slurs that cross over beats and bar lines, and it’s a fairly characteristic style for a lot of old-time fiddlers. In many fiddle styles, not just old-time, three-note slurs are often used to place rhythmic emphasis on offbeats. The melodic emphasis (which pitches are “featured” in the melody) and the rhythmic emphasis (which beats are emphasized by the player’s right hand) are sometimes in tension with each other, which is part of what makes this so complex and groovy. You can still groove without using many slurs, though! This video of the Cedric Watson trio (start at 50:53) features a more heavily subdivided bowing style that is typical of Creole and Cajun fiddling, with a strongly emphasized backbeat. As you can see, this style features a lot of individual bow strokes with few slurs. To me, it’s almost akin to strumming a guitar. It’s also incredibly groovy.
If you want to get really advanced and nerdy, we can talk about playing on the front versus the back of the beat. This was a concept that took me a long time to even start to understand! I thought, but isn’t there just one correct place where the beat is? The answer, in fact, is no. Some musicians play slightly ahead of the beat, pushing it forward and giving it a sense of momentum and urgency. Others lay back, keeping things chill and sexy. When I’m accompanying fiddlers on guitar, I’ll try to shift my rhythmic feel depending on how they play. Some of the best, grooviest bands in the world make use of both at once — the bass player pushes forward, and the fiddle leans back. The kick drum is square in the middle of the beat, but the snare drum is slightly ahead, and the guitar is slightly behind. Some very cool grooves can come from this kind of deliberate rhythmic tension. Crazy stuff!
Here’s the thing, though — a lot of players, myself included, aren’t always thinking in this much minute detail when we play. Over time, you just learn to feel it, and that isn’t something you can learn from any teacher or blog post. (Though the JamWithLauren curriculum does have an entire bonus module on groove that addresses many of the things I mention in this post!) You will learn to groove by listening a lot and playing a lot: playing with a metronome, playing along with recordings, playing with other musicians. Listen to the groove, and try to feel it in your body. Your hands will follow.
Happy Grooving!
Isa
Editor’s Note: Isa Burke is an exemplary example of a well-rounded musician. She can ‘get the job done’ and do the job well if you’re looking for fiddling, singing (front woman or harmony vocals), bad-a** guitar solos, songwriting, or articulating thoughts on paper, like this post here. You might also be familiar with her stellar band Lula Wiles. If not, do yourself a favor and join both Isa and LW’s mailing lists.
xoL
