Thoughts on practicing “feel”

Hey out there,

I am in the moment practicing playing 5 evenly spaced notes within a 4/4 bar – my goal is to be able to phrase freely regardless of meter and subdivisions.

For me these 5 evenly spaced notes sounds like very “laid-back” dotted sixteen notes.

This is useful in many musical settings – for one it would allow me to phrase more “laid-back” in a neo-soul setting, in which I would think of my phrasing like quintuplets.

This is a concrete way to practice “feel” – which in many cases can be a very vague subject. “Just feel it man”…

Here is a practice bass-line that i composed:

120 BPM

In the first repeated 4 bars I play along with the notated rhythm and keep a steady pulse with my feet. In the last 8 try to improvise with the 5-tuplet into rhythm.

My goal with this loop, is to make the sound of the 5-tuplet sound natural for me – so that I can think of this rhythm when I want to play “laid-back” phrasing.

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