I had a minor insight yesterday. Thinking about the 1 as the PEAK of a phrase that everything centers around, rather than the start of a phrase that things come after.
You hit the 1 hard, then for the first half of the measure, you’re moving away from the 1. But then you turn around on the 3, and the second half of the measure is all building towards hitting that next 1.
Came to me watching a lesson about building walking bass lines after watching the PBS documentary on Funk.
Not necessarily a universal thing that should be THE way to approach bass lines, but definitely a valuable concept that will be A useful way to approach lines.
I wish I had video of my college jazz professor (also my upright private lesson instructor).
He’d talk about rhythms being circles and the 1 to him was the bottom of the circle.
He’d do this lumbering dance (he was a big guy. Probably 6’2", maybe 230?) where he’d hold his arms down low, fingers locked, and just revolve them around a little circle shape, dropping them low on every down beat and kinda chanting out rhythms.
It was great.
And that circular view of rhythm (kind of like you described above) is a neat way to see it.
I’m a car guy, I was kind of imagining it like a lobed cam shaft. Only the cam has a number of lobes equal to the beats in the measure. The 1 will always be biggest. The 3 will usually be medium. All the others will be smaller.
