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10 Obsessive Tips for Improving Your Rhythmic Abilities by Igor Saavedra
10 Obsessive Tips for Improving Your Rhythmic Abilities by Igor Saavedra… Believe me, I’ve done all this crazy stuff myself throughout the years…. well, I am a highly obsessive music student, and I accept that about myself!
1 – Always practice with a metronome… remember that most bass players don’t dedicate a lot of time to this, so to become a soloist or play on their own like a violinist does, you need to flow freely over the groove set by some other musicians. In my opinion, we became bassists to set the groove in a ‘band context’, and for that reason a metronome is the best available tool, even better than a drum machine, because it exposes all your mistakes so you can notice them and improve them.
2 – In relation to the last point, a very important ability to develop is to be able to find any tempo speed just by listening to it. The best way in my opinion is to use a metronome for checking. The more you practice, the better you’ll get.
3 – Whenever you walk any place use that awesome opportunity to practice establishing a steady tempo with your steps and singing your best grooves over it. I’ve been doing this since I became a musician; many times people around me think that I’m just another crazy guy on the street… and they are so right!
4 – One of the most important rhythmic abilities is to be fully conscious of “Time” in the sense of the length or duration of the musical elements. As an obsessive music student (don’t tell that to anybody), I practiced for years using a good Chronograph hanging on my chest so I was able to guess different durations of sounds and rests – e.g.: 1 second, 75 cents of a second, 2 seconds and 80 cents, etc, and sometimes I still do… I got very good on that, and believe me it’s a very useful ability.
5 – Practice dividing just one 40bpm beat in different fractions. I suggest dividing the beat in 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15, etc. Play four bars with each subdivision and then move to the next and so on, then go the opposite way. As an obsessive music student I’ve been doing this for the last 20 years and it’s amazingly useful!
6 – Practicing polyrhythms is a highly recommendable subject to address, but not in the way a drummer will do it, that’s distributing different subdivisions related to each other within your 4 limbs. What is useful for bassists is developing the ability to combine different subdivisions between the foot and the fingers. For example, tap your foot and at the same time play 5 equally distributed notes on your bass every four beats you play with your foot. The possible combinations are endless (7:5, 6:7, 2:3, 3:7, etc,). Believe it or not many rhythms we usually play are based on this concept, so it’s a very useful skill to develop. I’ve been practicing this stuff non-stop for the last 15 years.
7 – In relation to the last point, tapping our foot while we play is a highly recommendable skill to develop. What happens here is that the foot provides us objective and precise information about where the tempo is. You won’t only be able to hear it, but also to feel it. Also, it is highly recommendable to get used to practicing certain music styles like Shuffle, Swing, Be Bop and many Jazz related styles, placing the foot on beats 2 & 4, which will provide the real feel for those specific styles by accentuating the right beats. Tapping the foot while we play is an ultra helpful tool for developing our groove.
8 – A very simple exercise is trying to make the metronome “disappear” at different tempos. It’s really easy and fun! Just set the metronome at any speed you want and then clap your hands exactly at that speed. You can play over a table or pluck a string of your Bass, but the most important thing is doing it with such a precision that hearing the sound of the metronome becomes absolutely impossible. It’s very important to mention that the slower the speed the harder it gets to achieve that “virtual disappearance”. I’ve been practicing this myself and with my students for almost 25 years… it’s really fun and most important, when it comes to developing accuracy, it really works!
9 – When practicing, treat rests and sounds equally. Never act as if sounds are more important than rests. You can put that basic concept into real practice by trying all the possible combinations between sounds and rests across all the subdivisions of one beat. When you practice points 5 and 6 include this concept and point of view in your exercises. If you practice this a million times you’ll hear the difference in your playing!
10 – Never miss the opportunity to percuss! If you are eating, sitting on a park bench, watching TV, pushing the cart at the supermarket, etc, just put your hands on any close and available surface like a table, sofa, pole, thighs & chest (mainly yours ha-ha-ha), etc, and enjoy the magic of rhythm!
See you on the next…
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Photo: Self-portrait by Melissa Auf Der Maur
Melissa Auf Der Maur is a Canadian bassist who played with Tinker, Hole, and The Smashing Pumpkins. She released her own work and is a photographer with photos published in Nylon, Bust, and National Geographic. She released her ‘90s Rock Memoir “Even The Good Girls Will Cry” on 17 March 2026.
KB: Did you always want to be a singer-musician growing up?
I’ve played music my whole life. In school, I played trumpet and sang in a children’s choir, so music was always within me. My mother was the first female disc jockey on the Montreal airwaves; her record collection played a huge role in my inspiration and love of music.
KB: When did you start playing bass, and why this instrument?
When I was 19, the early 90s music explosion began to percolate in tiny clubs around the world. I was lucky to be a ticket girl at Montreal’s underground music club. In one year, I saw Hole, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie, and The Breeders – all had female bass players. That’s when the seed was planted. By the age of 22, I was the bass player of Hole.
KB: Which brands of basses have you used in your career, and which one are you using now?
The first bass that I learned on was a vintage Squier Precision. Hole was sponsored by Fender guitars, so I upgraded to Fender Custom Shop Precisions. That is all I play, but I have a cool vintage 8-string Greco that I use on recordings to thicken up guitar parts.
KB: What equipment do you use or have you used with your basses?
Ampeg SVT amps and cabinets, a couple of Sans-Amp pedals, and that is it.
KB: How did you become a member of Hole, and what is your fondest memory of that time?
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was helping scout a replacement for (RIP) Kristen Pfaff, Hole’s bass player. My band, Tinker, opened for them on the Siamese Dream tour, so Billy had seen me play and could vouch for me. Courtney trusted her talented friend, and that was it. I initially said “no thank you” due to my commitment to my photographic studies and the drama and chaos surrounding the band during the “Live Through This” album release. Courtney took it as a good sign that I said no, so convinced me to reconsider, and soon after, I accepted their invitation, in the name of helping put females in the male-dominated landscape of rock music. My fondest memory is every show we played as a mostly female band, symbolizing what a woman could do in a rock band. Every show had a purpose: get more women to play music.
KB: You are a photographer as well. What makes a great picture? Do you shoot in color or b/w?
I started shooting photographs at age 15. Initially only shot black & white and worked in the art school darkroom. In university, I took a color photography course, and shifted mostly and forever to that, because it was easier to process film on the road when I joined a rock band. I experimented with many cameras, point and shoots, manual, polaroids, medium format, and vintage finds. The trick to a good photograph is to shoot many and all the time – the magic is in the edit and selection process.
KB: Are there artists you would love to collaborate with or wish you had?
??I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some of my favorite musicians in my career. I would still love to collaborate with a new generation heavy electronic artist on an analog bass, heavy electronic drums, and synths collaboration project. Take me out of my usual zone, merging the past and future: my love of 80s dark new wave and new artists exploring that genre. It was very futuristic back then, and we are now, after all, living in the future. I am in the mood to play bass to heavy beats I want to dance to.
KB: What are your 7 favorite bass lines in music across all genres? And why these 7?
“Mountain Song” – Jane’s Addiction (love a rambling, rolling bass line – feels like the ocean waves)
“Black Top – Helmet” (was the first bass line I taught myself)
“Gold Dust Woman” – Hole from “The Crow 2” Soundtrack (it was my first bass line contribution to the band)
“Get Ready” – The Temptations (Motown just feels so good, because of the bass)
“Lucretia My Reflection” – Sisters of Mercy (makes me want to hit the dance floor and play bass simultaneously)
“Be My Druidess” – Type O Negative (full chord bass playing at its best by iconic, demonic, Peter Steele, RIP)
“Romantic Rights” – Death from Above (1979 – unique distorted overdriven tone, combined dance rhythm and melodic intelligence, all in one shot – also! Shout out to a bass & drum only band, which is awesome, and we should have more of, but the bass player needs to be a killer to fill that role.
KB: What are you currently up to?
Releasing my ‘90s Rock Memoir “EVEN THE GOOD GIRLS WILL CRY”. Visceral healing process, it was to get it out of me and write it, but I suspect the real magic will begin by putting it into the world and reflecting with others on what the magic of the ‘90s was all about. Powerful music decade that carried us into what is now a brave new world of digital corporate weirdness – may the past shed a light on our future. That’s my hope for this book release and tour.
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