On the sage advice of a fifth grade student, I’ve revised this old page introducing the 3:2 polyrhythm, or hemiola. I’ve added a few variations and inversions, added stickings and syllables for counting… and deleted […]
Category: polyrhythms
Straight 8ths within Afro 6/8
I keep feeling like I have to justify doing so much with the Afro 6/8. I’m just working with it a lot, and here we are nothing if not personal and idiosyncratic. I also feel […]
C.K. Ladzekpo’s basic polyrhythms
From the This portion of the recent This/not this: polyrhythm post, I’ve written out C.K. Ladzekpo’s list of basic polyrhythms every Ewe learns while growing up, along with our now familiar 6/8 bell pattern: You […]
Page o’ coordination: 2 over 3 metric modulation
We’ve done some jazz waltz POCs, and some metric modulation POCs, but some people will still have problems moving between the two in actual playing, so here’s something that may help with that. The modulation […]
This/not this: polyrhythm
This post was going to be a survey of YouTube videos on polyrhythm, but most of them were so bad, it was shaping up to be a real bloodbath. So let’s just summarize by reviving […]
Groove o’ the day: Tony Williams — Footprints
Here’s a Latin-style groove Tony Williams plays at one point in the odyssey of jazz percussion that is Footprints, a tune by Wayne Shorter, from Miles Davis’s album Miles Smiles. The tune is in 6/4, […]
Page of polyrhythms
I’m bogging down in a couple of very wordy pieces, so a little light fare today— just a page of two-voice polyrhythms written out in the simplest possible form. They are written in the form […]
More meter-within-meter phrases
Here’s a little supplement to the meter-within-meter introduction of a few days ago: some additional two, four, and eight measure practice phrases: It’s easy to get yourself into trouble with this, so it’s important to […]
Getting started with meter-within-meter
Playing meter-within-meter— playing in one meter during a tune in a different one— is a very common rhythmic element in jazz, which became fully realized in drumming during the 1960’s by Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, […]
Hemiola applications: funk
Here are some very straightforward funk applications derived from the 3:2 polyrhythm in 4/4 in the hemiola basics post. By isolating each measure, revoicing the parts slightly, and adding obvious things like a downbeat on […]