I was thinking more about the meter of a drummer with whom I recently played and why meter is so very important for musicians to have. In particular, why it is a good thing for drummers to have in copious quantities.

For starters, I should probably make mention about some musical terms like "meter", "tempo" and "rhythm". Music is charted in a structure (called a time signature) that lists the how many beats are allowed per measure over what kind of note should be considered one beat (i.e. 3/4 indicates that each measure will have three quarter notes per measure, whereas 7/8 says that there will be seven eighth notes per measure).

Rhythm is how the all of the notes and pauses are organized in a set pattern. Individual rhythms expressions can span measures or can be contained wholly within a measure and while the rhythmic patterns may or may not be repeated throughout a song, they typically are regularly repeated.

The tempo of a song is how many beats elapse in a given period of time. A typical measurement of tempo is beats per minute (bpm). A measure with a time signature of 4/4 (four quarter notes per measure) at a tempo of 120bpm should take 2 seconds and the same measure at 100bpm should take 1 and two-thirds seconds. While neither ones of those examples may not seem like a lot of time, songs are tend to consist quite a few measures (typically three digits worth).

Meter is the length of one measure of music. In the first example, about two seconds.

Hopefully, that should satisfy the sticklers for vocabulary. Technically, this particular piece of writing is more about tempo than meter, but it has been my experience that most of the musicians that I encounter have tended to use "tempo," "meter," and "time" interchangeably when talking about a musician's ability to play at a constant pace.

Some of the people I have played with call me the "Meter Nazi." Typically, it's because I tend to point out exactly where in a song we either sped up or dragged behind. In fact, I used to think that I had good meter, until I started to study with Anthony. Then he sat me down with a metronome and had me play a few things, letting me know that I was pretty consistently rushing the 3rd beat of most measures that I was playing and most of the other beats in some of measures. My, that was humbling. Well, humiliating may be a more accurate way of putting it.