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metalhead -> Metronome vs vocal clock (Mar. 3 2026 7:16:24)
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Today I stumbled upon this tabla notebook from 11 years ago, back when I was 12 and used to learn tabla. When I looked at these weird phrases today, they instantly made sense to me.
Each of these syllables is played using different fingers and different parts of the tabla. For example, dhin, from what I can vaguely recall, was played on the larger of the two drums (for the unfamiliar, tabla has 2 drums: one small and one big) using the middle and ring fingers simultaneously, kind of exactly like how we play golpes. Except the former was done using the left hand.
It later occurred to me that I never played with a metronome or even knew what one was back then. You would imagine that a percussion instrument has to be practiced with a metronome. I didn't know much about rhythm and timing. But when I think back to my playing from that time, I remember playing decently and with good rhythm.
When I was learning tabla, our teacher would write these down, sing them for us, and make us rote-memorize these phrases until we could also sing them naturally. Only then would he teach us how to implement them on the tabla. Then he would make us sing and play on the tabla simultaneosly.
I realized the trick lies in the syllables themselves and probably why our teacher didn't introduce us a metronome. These syllables are quite fascinating. If you can memorize & sing them properly and fluently, you don’t really need a metronome. After all, how did people in older times develop rhythm when there was no metronome?
Take the second screenshot, for example; Ektaal - 12 beats, but once you memorize it, it becomes easy:
“Dhin dhin | Dha-ge ti-ra-ki-ta | Tu naa | Kat tin | Dha-ge ti-ra-ki-ta | Dhi naa”
If you had to rephrase it in western beats: 12 1 | 2& 3e&a | 4 5 | 6 7 | 8& 9e&a | 10 11 and sing it, it becomes easily challenging at faster tempos. Add to it playing an instrument simultaneously, it becomes even more daunting.
The first one, however, is easy to speak fluently at even faster tempos. And the crazy thing is, the first one does not need a metronome to space out the beats evenly. The syllables themselves do that trick.
To an American tongue, the first might take a while.
No question for today, just wanted to share this!
Images are resized automatically to a maximum width of 800px
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