Finding The Pulse

What Is The Pulse, And Why Does It Matter?

The Pulse, as its name would imply, is the ‘heartbeat’ of the music. Just like your heart, The Pulse can differ from situation to situation, song to song, or even moment to moment. However, it should be consistent and steady for the most part. The Pulse of a song is the backbone for determining when everything happens in the song. It is fundamental to how we communicate rhythm. It is the unifying factor in having multiple musicians playing together in group situations.

How Do I Find The Pulse?

You’ve probably already done this tons of times without realizing it. Ever tap your foot along with a song? What about rocking your head back and forth? If your foot tapping or head rocking was consistent at the same pace it’s very likely that you found The Pulse to that song. And that’s how we can exercise our ability to find The Pulse of a song. Next time you’re listening to music try the following…

Step 1: Tap Your Foot

Tap your foot steadily to the song. Go off your best guess. To be sure you have a steady pulse, alternate your feet with each tap. You should now be tapping your feet: right, left, right, left, etc..

Step 2: Does My Pulse Make Sense?

There are typically 2 or 3 different pulses you can find in any given song. The simple way to test if you have an effective pulse is to ask 2 questions…The first is “Can I walk, jog, or run to this pulse?”. This is easy to test, stand up and march, jog, or run in place using your pulse as your steps. If you have the room try going back and forth a short distance taking equal sized steps (use your fingers on a table if you don’t have the room for this). If this can be done without speeding up or slowing down then you have a steady pulse.The only thing left is to determine if your steady pulse matches the song. We can take the walk/jog/run test from above and simply ask “Does the song feel like it is moving this fast?” If the answer is ‘yes’ then congratulations, you have The Pulse of your song. However if the answer is ‘no’ then you’ll need to try again. More often than not, if your first attempt is already in sync with the song you can try cutting the speed in half, or doubling it, then retrying these 2 questions.

The Next Steps

You should practice finding The Pulse to songs frequently to get better and better at it. We measure The Pulse by counting how many happen in a minute (beats per minute or bpm). If you have a metronome with a ‘Tap’ feature you can tap your pulse to see what its bpm is (BeatsPerMinuteOnline.com is a great online tool for this). Beyond this the next step is to learn how to take your pulse and use it to figure out what The Count of your song is.