What is your "inner clock"?

beatdat

Senior Member
From what I've read and heard, an important part of learning how to drum is developing one's "inner clock", that is, developing an internal pulse that dictates or guides one's meter, tempo and time.

What I've been asking myself lately, and have yet to determine, is what is "my" inner clock? So I thought I'd ask my fellow forum members to chime in as to what your inner clock is.

Is your inner clock something you hear inside of your head (e.g. a pulse akin to a heartbeat, the tick-tock of an analog clock)? Or is it something visual in your head (e.g. a pulsing light, or like a bouncing ball following the lyrics on a karaoke display)? Maybe it's not in your head, but something that reverberates in your gut or throughout your body. Or, maybe it's something more complex, like visualizing an actual transcription of what you're playing as you play it?

And if you've been able to develop your inner clock, how did you go about doing so? Was it simply through constant and frequent repetition of playing to the point where you developed the "muscle memory" required to establish your inner clock, or was it also conceptual at times (e.g. not by only playing, but also by listening to others play, or by visualizing subdivisions while watching the seconds go by while looking at a clock)?

So, what is your "inner clock" and how did you develop it?
 
How do you walk down the street without falling over? It's a very complicated process when you break it down. If our timing is off, our gait is inefficient and we risk tripping... If the muscle coordination is off, we won't get far at all. We learn over time when we first start out, and it's not automatic. Our first steps are clumsy, we fall, we have bad coordination.

But we keep at it, and eventually, we can walk down a street literally without thinking about any of the mechanics, and that includes the rhythm and "timing" involved.

For music, it's the same. We need to study and listen to music as much as possible, we need to play music as much as possible, and we need to keep ourselves honest as we go by using metronomes and playing with other musicians so that we understand that the internal clock has a different function in a band setting than when we're in a vacuum.

I do personally sort of visualize music as I play, but not for purposes of time. Basically, if you have to pay that much attention to time as you play, you need to work on it some more and it's not always a quick thing to internalize. Like how some people can dance right off and it takes others years to learn. The important part, and what the term means is that you really internalize your own sense of time and pulse and you can focus your brain and efforts on making cool music... Time is just one aspect.
 
^^^^ Great explanation!

How many times have you seen non-musicians (and even some musicians) that can't find the beat of a song? After so much training and practice, most of us automatically pick out the beat within the first measure or so of a song. That's what makes jamming and improvisation so much fun!
 
For me its a lot like how I feel dynamics....its an internal sensation with a secondary sense feedback(hearing and how my body feels)
 
I wasn't born with a musician's inner clock.

I had to....and still am....logging in my hours and learning clock from a metronome.
 
Interesting topic

All I can really add is when I'm thinking of beats without any influence from anything else (pretty much every minute of the waking day) I have a bpm of around 90 in my head. Seems to be the tempo I internally hear.

Guess it's potentially pretty coincidental that's it's within a heartbeat range.

With any beat I 'feel it' and visualise it, sometimes imagine being sat behind a kit, other times imagining colours, other times feeling a pair of sticks in my hands and feeling the response of the kit.

Earlier I was on a boat at sea and I could feel a beat from the waves hitting the hull. Came up with some pretty cool ideas I'm looking forward to seeing how they sound on my kit.
 
To me the inner clock is much more than a musical thing. It's the tempo in which we operate everyday. Some people are incredibly laid back, happy to just groove, take their time and stop to smell the roses on the way. Others are in a constant state of go, everything is fast paced, completion is the goal, who cares who I step on as long as I get there. I think it can directly related to ones playing. Not necessarily what they play, but how they play. The feel, the little nuances, when and where they may or may not accent.

This is just my take on it, but I have never met a drummer that acted like a lunatic but was happy to play the same slow groove for hours on end, or visa-versa.
 
I've always had a pretty good internal clock-probably from my Mom's influence who played piano and records all the time-so I probably got it in utero before birth. I remember 1972-3?? listening to Alvin Lee "A Space in Time"-I was in high school and we had been talking about Albert Einstein and general relativity. My friends and I were talking about it-the whole notion that our 3-d world is really 4-d with time as part of the fabric blew me away (I was ignorant always thought we measure time relative to the sun so its all just a made up human concept and there really isn't time-(yeah weird). Anyways I realized how it all is linked up and started wondering is their a universal real-time clock and is music (as a 4-d concept) natural and cosmic-so does the universe have a pulse (apparently it does make sounds). We started wondering about does the universe affect us in making music (since natural sounds obviously do) and do we have a universal clock-so like environmental factors (epigenetic) affect our biology and we age with time-does universal time also affect us so we naturally make music that others can comprehend and appreciate-because we all share a universal underlying time no matter where we are in earth time (seems we naturally notice when out of time-seems naturally stark). Yep we were freaks-like some National Lampoon movie.Remember in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" tones and sounds in time were the language. So maybe really it's like Rainman counting toothpicks (we all apparently can do that)-we all naturally have metronome time just we cognitively screw it up and have to teach ourselves to get out of the way of our brain.
 
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I have a good clock from when the Speedometer in my Jeep CJ broke (decades ago)....

When the lines on the road go by at the beat of:

"Duke Of Earl", you're going 50mph

"Don't Stop Believing", you're going 55 mph

"I Think We're Alone Now", you're going 60 mph

"Born To Be Wild" , you're going 65
 
I have a good clock from when the Speedometer in my Jeep CJ broke (decades ago)....

When the lines on the road go by at the beat of:

"Duke Of Earl", you're going 50mph

"Don't Stop Believing", you're going 55 mph

"I Think We're Alone Now", you're going 60 mph

"Born To Be Wild" , you're going 65


...and Boston's "Foreplay / Long Time" ?
 
I think Dr. Watso has the most comprehensive explanation here.

For me, it took years of work practicing with a metronome, playing with others, learning songs, and listening to music. Now, it's purely just a feeling. Like Chollyred said above, eventually, picking out the beat became automatic. And by that time, it became possible to improvise around the beat and maintain the same tempo.

I remember reading something by Vinnie Colaiuta or Danny Carey where they said odd-timed rhythms are mechanical when you first start practicing/playing them, but eventually, you internalize their pulse, and 7/8 or 13/16 become more of a feeling than something you actively count in your head.
 
Yep Gruntersad proprioception-without it we would not know where are limbs were to coordinate our movement. The cerebellum controls coordination and timing of movements-it's an ancient part of our brain (apparently reverberating circuits as I recollect). Man don't get me started-I use to teach Human Anatomy and Physiology and the Neuro part is always the most difficult to organize and teach in a useful and manageable way. But it's sensory modalities and then motor that all musicians use to produce the sounds we call music-it's amazing really to me(like human development). I always think about how we also produce frequencies we don't recognize but other species can so what does it sound like to them? Birds have song and many animals are recognized to have consciousness so it doesn't go unnoticed. Studies show all kinds of animals can count, consciousness, use tools, many produce rhythmic song like insects, birds, mammals, timing has to have an ingrained component.
 
...and Boston's "Foreplay / Long Time" ?

Same tempo as "Don't Stop Believing"..

Lines are 10', spaces are 30'

119bpm * 40ft * 60mins all divided by 5280ft = 54.09 mph

I hear that runners (people who run for a hobby, without anyone chasing them) have a similar methodology where they know how far they'll run for any given song, and stack their running tunes accordingly.
 
Fascinating question.... I genuinely don't know. I have no conscious memory of ever even thinking about it - It's just there.
 
Mine slows down and speeds up :)

Seriously, I have started to notice that all the practice I do with a metronome has me "hearing" it even when it's not playing. I spend a lot of time practicing with a metronome set to "random mute." So as I feel any physical tendency to slow down or speed up, I can sense it and adjust as if the click was actually playing.

The physical tendency is interesting to me. I think that's an underrated aspect of the challenge in playing good time. We get into certain physical rhythms that are comfortable at certain tempos and I think that's what gives us a tendency to have certain tempos we tend to drift towards.
 
I have to be conscious of time and then I'm fine. Through the years I guess it wasn't a priority and at times I guess it suffered. I've thought about going to sleep with a click track but worry I'd wake up with a tic.
 
I have to be conscious of time and then I'm fine. Through the years I guess it wasn't a priority and at times I guess it suffered. I've thought about going to sleep with a click track but worry I'd wake up with a tic.

I have a clock in my room that makes a tick tock sound and it is very soothing when trying to fall asleep. I don't even notice it when I wake up and am trying to get myself ready for the day.
 
I have to be conscious of time and then I'm fine. Through the years I guess it wasn't a priority and at times I guess it suffered. I've thought about going to sleep with a click track but worry I'd wake up with a tic.

This exactly mirrors my own experience with time. I need to have the time circuit as the highest amperage circuit among all the other drumming circuits, because I never really paid it much attention. It went undeveloped for most of my life. Scary when you think about it, being a drummer and all...

This is still a conscious thing for me. I have to be vigilant in making sure steady time is Job 1 and priority 1, 2 and 3. I've even wondered about the sleeping part ha ha. But not the worrying part :) I never tried sleeping to a click.

Screw you honey, the click stays on lolo.
 
It's a metaphor somebody made up. There's no internal thing that automatically keeps musical time for you, or that you can just feel and have things you play on your instrument come out right. Obviously bodies are made to do things in rhythm, but I think it's kind of deceptive how that relates to musical time and playing an instrument.

As a professional player you're supposed to be able to play steady time at any tempo, on demand, regardless of what you're playing on the instrument, and how loud. It's not very natural, and playing off physics or just feeling it are not reliable ways to make it happen-- that only works under certain conditions. It really has to be developed as a deliberate, conscious thing.
 
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