Episode 37 - A Clap, a Slap and a Stomp
Hello, musically curious people 👋
What actually is musical time?
This episode kicks off 2026 with the first four days of my “12 Days of Listenmas” mini-series — all about pulse, groove, and how our brains latch onto patterns (sometimes brilliantly… sometimes unhelpfully).
Then we jump back to Wilton’s Music Hall (January 2025) for a live guest spot from Aluá Nascimento — Brazilian percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, and former STOMP cast member — starting with a trumpet + pandeiro duet and expanding into body percussion, Afro-Brazilian rhythm traditions, and the wonderfully low-tech joy of making music out of whatever’s around.
In this episode
A practical listening upgrade: pulse vs rhythm (try it while walking)
“The pocket”: groove as micro-timing, not just the pattern
Why your brain is basically a pattern-hunting drummer
Shared time / entrainment: why humans sync up (and why it matters)
Live at Wilton’s: trumpet + pandeiro
Aluá’s story: capoeira roots, Afro-Brazilian traditions, and the STOMP years
Instruments you’ll hear: body percussion, pandeiro, berimbau, caxixi — and more
Find Aluá
Also mentioned
Wilton’s Music Hall shows — 24th January
Kids/family show at 2pm · Evening show at 7pm
Info:
Support the show
Full transcript
Hello, my name’s Steve Pretty. I’m a musician, performer and composer from London, and welcome to my podcast, Steve Pretty On The Origin of the Pieces.
This is the show that helps you to hear, understand and enjoy music in new ways. Hello everyone, welcome back. It’s been a few weeks since I spoke to you.
Hope you’ve had a great few weeks. It’s 2026, here we go. It’s lovely to be back in your ears and eyes.
Once again, this podcast is available on YouTube and Spotify if you want to watch it. There’s some fun visual stuff coming up in today’s episode in particular, so do tune in. Thanks for all your feedback over the last few weeks.
I’ve had some lovely comments about the last episode, episode 36, where I dealt with how I made the My Friend Maisie theme, which is the theme song I wrote for the new Sky Kids TV show, My Friend Maisie, which was really fun to put together. I talked about pentatonic scales and all that stuff. Yeah, I really, really enjoyed that one.
So let me know if you’ve got any further feedback. And it was fun digging into a bit of music theory, a bit more than usual, but hopefully with a purpose, even for those of you who don’t consider yourselves musicians. Because again, this podcast is for anyone who is slightly musically curious, whatever that means to you.
And in fact, over Christmas, I did something called the 12 Days Of Listenmas on my social media. You can probably already tell by the name of this show that I’m a big fan of bad puns when it comes to naming these sorts of things. So yeah, the 12 Days Of Listenmas was where I spent 12 days.
I did like a little sort of one to three minute video every day for 12 days from Boxing Day to the 6th of January, taking people through how to understand music, how to listen to music in a deeper, more intricate and informative way. And I really, really enjoyed putting that little series together. And in fact, what I thought I would do just to kick off the year is to play the first four days of that.
Now I’ve cut out all of the introductory stuff. So I’m just running the four days into one another, jumping from one to the other. And the way I’ve sort of broken down over those 12 days how to approach thinking like a musician, hearing like a musician, which is kind of the goal of that little series, is to break music down into three parts.
Now these are somewhat arbitrary distinctions, but I think they can be quite helpful. The first of those is time. And that’s what I’m going to do today, is play the little excerpts from the first four days, which are all to do with music in time.
And for the next couple of episodes, I’m going to play the next chunks of how I think about music, which I think of as colour and then story. So that’s coming up in the next couple of episodes. But to kick us off in 2026, here’s my little guide on how to think and hear like a musician when it comes to music in time.
Day one is the most important thing of all and that is pulse and rhythm. Now here’s a little exercise you can do to practice the distinction between pulse and rhythm. As you’re walking, think of your footsteps as the pulse.
Now the pulse is the literal beating heart of music. It’s the absolute essence of music from almost everywhere in the world. And as you’re walking, you can think of that as the pulse.
And what you can then do is over that scaffolding, you can construct a beautiful building, you can construct a beautiful rhythm. And what you do to do that is just subdivide or multiply these footsteps. So rather than two, one, two, one, two.
You can go one and two and da, da, da, da. Suddenly you’ve got a rhythm. You can mix that up.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And that is rhythm, right? You’ve got pulse and then you’ve got rhythm laid over the top of it.
It’s a really, really fundamental thing to understanding music. Expanding out upon that, we can build that into a beat. I’m going to do the most basic beat with my slightly ropey beatboxing.
Goes like this.
So that’s still dividing the beat up just with three different sounds now. So pt, ka, ta, pt, ka, ta. Right, that’s the subdivision.
Now, what we can do for day two is keep those subdivisions but slightly shift where they sit, so they’re not sitting in such perfect mathematically placed spots, right? And what that gives us is something that feels very different, right? How about this?
So the subdivisions are basically all still there. Pt, ka, ta, pt, ka, ta, pt, ka, ta, pt, ka, ta. But now I’m shifting where they sit. So now I’m going pt, ka, ta, ka, pt, ka, ta, ka.
So the ka is shifted. It’s not just a one, two, three. It’s now a one, two and. It’s slightly later. Or slightly earlier, rather. Pt, ka, ta, ka, pt, ka, ta, ka. And that is the essence of the groove.
Right, and now that’s the difference between something which can feel quite stiff and something which feels like it’s got a little bit more human feel to it, like it has a groove. And that’s the essence of it. It’s basically about micro timing.
And day three was about that concept of groove and something called the pocket. And the pocket is basically how things sit relative to the pulse. It’s like a little kind of invisible hammock around the pulse.
And if you think about, say, a funk drummer, they might sit slightly behind the beat. So the snare might come slightly after where you’d expect it to, but consistently. And that creates a laid back feel.
Or you might have something like a lot of electronic music where everything is on a grid, everything is perfectly placed. That can feel very tight and very precise, but it can also feel very rigid.
So groove is that human feel within the pulse. It’s about the micro timing, it’s about how things sit relative to the pulse. And it’s one of the reasons why music can feel so different even with the same basic pattern.
And day four is about a concept called entrainment. Entrainment is basically the phenomenon where two oscillating systems synchronise. So if you have two clocks on a wall, sometimes over time, they will synchronise with each other.
In humans, it means that when we hear a steady pulse, our brains and bodies start to synchronise with it. That’s why groups of people can clap in time together. It’s why marching works. It’s why music can make a crowd move as one.
It’s also why groove matters. Because when you lock into a groove with other musicians, you’re literally synchronising your nervous systems in time.
So those are the four concepts: pulse, rhythm, groove and entrainment. And those are the building blocks of thinking about music in time.
Now, in the second half of today’s episode, we’re going to jump back to Wilton’s Music Hall to a live segment with Aluá Nascimento, who is a Brazilian percussionist and multi instrumentalist.
He was a guest at my show there in January 2025 and we had a really fun chat. We played a duet together. He did some body percussion. He demonstrated some Brazilian instruments. And we talked about groove and rhythm and all sorts of things.
So let’s jump to that now.
Okay. Hello everyone. We’re back at Wilton’s Music Hall. I’m delighted to be joined by Aluá Nascimento. Hello Aluá.
Hello Steve. Hello everyone.
Aluá, you are a percussionist. You’re a multi instrumentalist. You’re Brazilian. And you’ve also been in STOMP.
Yes, that’s right.
So we’re going to start with a little duet. This is a tune called Brazil. I’m going to play trumpet and you’re going to play pandeiro.
Yes.
Okay, here we go.
Thank you very much.
So Aluá, for those who don’t know, what is a pandeiro?
Pandeiro is like a Brazilian tambourine. It’s used in many styles in Brazil, like samba, choro, forró, many things. It has a different technique and it can sound like a drum kit in one instrument.
Can you show us some of the basic sounds?
Yes. So we have bass sound.
We have slap.
We have tone.
And we can combine them.
So you can do many different rhythms just with these sounds.
Amazing. And you also do body percussion, which people might associate with STOMP, but obviously it’s a much older tradition.
Yes. Body percussion is everywhere. In Brazil we have body percussion in capoeira. In Africa, many places. It’s a way of making rhythm without instruments.
So capoeira is this martial art, dance, music form. How did you get into that?
I grew up in São Paulo and my father is a percussionist. I was always around music. Capoeira was part of the culture around me. The berimbau is the main instrument in capoeira. It’s a musical bow.
Do you have one with you?
Yes. Here it is.
So this is a berimbau. It’s like a bow with a string and a gourd resonator. And you play it with a stick and you change the pitch with a stone or coin.
Yes.
Can you show us?
Sure.
So you have three sounds. Open.
Closed.
And buzz.
And you can play rhythms with it.
That’s such an amazing sound. And you also have a caxixi, right?
Yes. Caxixi is a shaker. It’s often played together with berimbau.
It’s like this.
And you can combine.
So, can you show us some body percussion patterns?
Yes. So we can use clap.
Slap.
Stomp.
And we can do different combinations.
So for example.
And you can do many things.
Okay, audience. We’re going to do a little bit of audience participation. I’m going to get you to clap on the pulse and Aluá will do a rhythm over the top, and then we’ll swap.
So steady pulse. One, two, three, four.
Great. Now Aluá.
Amazing. Now let’s try adding a stomp.
Fantastic.
So Aluá, when you think about groove, what do you think about?
Groove is feeling. It’s not just playing the notes. It’s how you place them. It’s about listening to each other.
Yes. And this is the thing we were talking about earlier, the pocket. It’s micro timing.
Exactly.
So Aluá, you were in STOMP. What was that like?
It was amazing. It was a big learning experience. Playing with objects, making music with everything, but also the discipline of a show, the precision.
And that connects back to what we were talking about, making music out of whatever’s around.
Yes. Music is everywhere. Rhythm is everywhere.
Thank you so much, Aluá.
Thank you.
And there we go. That was Aluá Nascimento live at Wilton’s Music Hall.
I hope you enjoyed that. Do check out Aluá’s work. He’s a brilliant musician and educator.
As ever, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a musically curious human. It really helps.
You can also support the show on Patreon. That’s patreon.com/StevePrettyOnTheOriginOfThePieces. And go to my website originofthepieces.com for all of the back episodes of the show. There’s loads more resources there, transcripts, videos, all sorts of stuff, as well as, of course, my Patreon, which is going to get a bit of an injection of life in 2026.
We’re back on track now for more regular episodes after a little break for Christmas and New Year. So look out for the next episode in a couple of weeks’ time. And meanwhile, stay musically curious.
I’ll see you next time. Bye.