For a working bass player, time is money. That is, when you can keep good time and people learn about it, you'll find the gigs come rolling in…and your regular band will see how valuable you are to the overall groove. But how do you learn to have good time?

I'd say, Time as Mantra.

What does this mean? It means that along with remembering the chord changes, the arrangements, and the notes, you also keep the concept of time in the front of your consciousness while you're playing. Right up there with your thoughts about where the chords are going, you should be thinking, "Where is the time now? Are we staying steady? What are the others doing?" Most simply, time becomes your mantra.

But first, a caveat: You can't keep time all by yourself. If the whole band doesn't make a commitment to steady time, it's not likely that a bass player can make it happen alone. Until the whole band accepts the mantra of time, the bass player may be able to keep things together to a degree, but if the tempo get out of hand for the others, there isn't much you can do. To keep time in place when the others begin to run away is a noble cause, but the music just ends up sounding dragged down until the others decide to join you in the mantra.

I've been doing an acoustic blues gig for a few months, playing upright bass along with a harp and a guitar. These are guys I've worked with for a decade and all along, they've had a tendency to rush the tunes (but having a drummer has helped). This constant pushing leads to many songs accelerating with each verse. For example, a laid back start to "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" turns into a lope, and then a jog, and finally, we're all begging for…um…mercy…as we wrap up the song.

The question pops up, then, how does this speed-up happen? I hear four main things:

1. Eagerness to start the song. As the tune gets counted off, there's a bit of excitement and the mantra gets forgotten. Within a few bars, the tune takes off, especially with an introduction that has lots of notes in the melody. In many cases, the tempo gets negotiated and becomes steadier, but by then it's too quick and too late to make a change.
2. Cutting the corners. Imagine you're walking around the block with a friend. When you get to the corner, rather than sticking with your friend and following the sidewalk, you walk across the corner on the grass. To keep walking together, your friend has to speed up a bit to catch you, and then you both hold that pace. In your hurry, the mantra leaves your mind. Without a conscious effort, it doesn't return.
3. Ripping into the solo. Solos are a natural place to speed up. The soloist is keyed up, the audience is watching and the adrenaline is flowing. A flurry of notes ensues and they're pushing the beat to boot. The song proceeds in a mantra-less condition.
4. General excitement. The audience is into what's going on. The band wants to up the intensity to match. Part of that intensity, unfortunately, turns into speed. It's a natural outcome, but the challenge of the mantra is to develop intensity while keeping time in place.

So how do you learn to work with Time as Mantra? The first thing is to make a commitment to time. As timekeeper, your buy-in becomes a must. But you can't go it alone. Talk about time with the other musicians. Get them to join in with you on the tempo mission. Realize that your group has some tempo problems and vow to fix them, one gig at a time and taking pride in small victories over the tempo demons. Here are some things my group tried once we acknowledged the problem.

1. Metronome practice. Try a little session individually with your metronome, setting it for four beats per measure with an emphasis (or "ding") on beat one. Play some of your tunes and see where you depart from the metronome. (A friend once joked that he returned a newly purchased metronome because it had problems speeding up and slowing down.) See if the problems surface more with slow, medium or fast tunes…or with certain rhythms.
2. More metronome practice. This time, set the metronome for just the second and fourth beats. An easy way is to adjust the speed to half of what you're playing the tune (for 110 bpm, set the metronome to 55 bpm, etc.). Be sure to turn off the emphasis on the first beat, so that both clicks sound the same. This can be hard to get in sync with at first. One way is to hear the clicks and count them as 2 and 4, then filling in the 1 and 3. Imagine the metronome as a snare drum. As you play, see if you end up with the clicks in place or if you beat the metronome getting there. (It's also possible to get behind, so that the metronome arrives first.)
3. Program time into your brain. Start imagining those metronome clicks in the background. Tracking the 2 and 4 are especially important. Hear the imaginary clicks whenever you play.
4. Practice the mantra as a group. When you've become comfortable with keeping time on your own, get together with the group. Repeat the mantra and vow to keep time in place as you rehearse. This can be both embarrassing and humbling when one of you gets out of sync while the others stays put. (Soloists can allow more space in their lines to hear the beat and get back on.)
5. Recite the mantra at the start of each gig and at the start of each set. Until everybody can make the time mantra part of their playing, it just won't work. Help the others remember that time is everybody's responsibility. Avoid getting into negative vibes when you fall off the wagon, tempo-wise.

Here's a somewhat nasty trick we tried to help get a better sense of time as a group. No drummer involved, so timekeeping fell on me, the bass player. We set up a recorder with a room mic, one of the all-in-one workstations that including the ability to play a metronome while recording. We set the metronome for a song's tempo, announced the speed before we started playing and then I counted off the song. The trick? I wore headphones so that I could stick with the beat while the others tried to follow me. The problem? When somebody began to rush, the bass sounded like a slow, sick elephant that was lumbering behind the herd. But we started to hear where the problems were occurring.

The idea of time as mantra was something I'd stumbled on twenty-plus years ago but didn't recognize back then. There was a drummer I worked with who had a great sense of musicality. Before he joined the band, I used to hope he would be the drummer when I played at the local blues jam...his snare work on shuffles was fantastic and he taught me a lot about dynamics, too. When he joined my band, though, he was into a bit of substance abuse and was maybe a little bit bored with what we were doing...he began to rush the beat and every song would speed up.

At one gig, the guitar player walked up to me before we started. "Do whatever you can to hold him back," I was told. For the remainder of the time the drummer was in the band, my playing required dragging the beat, which can, incidentally, be a drag to do and had a long-term impact on my playing. Eventually, the drummer left for a cruise ship gig. But a year later, he was back and he was so relieved to be off "The Lust Bucket" that his time was great. We weren't able to lure him to the band, though, and soon the drummer was off to L.A., where he got into the blues scene and ended up recording with a great harmonica player/singer, including one album that received two W.C. Handy Awards.

He'd finally picked up time as his mantra and it paid off!