beat and groove

A beat is a repeated sequence of percussive effects. A groove is an extended engagement with time. It takes certain musical skills to construct a good beat, but that’s a job you can outsource to a machine. There’s a different kind of musicality at work in a groove: you have an extended and ever-negotiated relationship to time that develops through the course of a song. Stuart Copeland reminds us that when Ringo got demoted from being the drummer on “Love Me Do” — because the EMI people didn’t think he was good enough — he was allowed to play the tambourine. But, Stewart says, if you listen to the song you’ll notice that the tambourine is where the groove is. (Ringo really is the ultimate groove drummer.) I think what’s happened in music over the past few decades is an increasing over-emphasis on beats and a de-emphasis on grooves. This is one of the reasons why, so often, when people want a groove, they have to sample it — because the Roland beat machine is not going to produce a…