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: rhythm
Microtiming jive
Microtiming is a term that gives me hives every time I hear musicians use it. To me it suggests misaligned priorities, a disappearance up one’s own rear end, and the resulting degraded musical abilities. The […]
Rhythms in 7/4
Here’s a page of basic rhythms in 7/4 to go with yesterday’s practice loop. The vamp on the loop is phrased in 3+2+2/4, so I’ve given a Ted Reed-style guide part on the bass drum line […]
Natural sticking timing exercise
This is something I’m working on with some students: a timing exercise using natural sticking, modified slightly from something we used to play in drum corps. Natural sticking, briefly, is a method of sticking hand-to-hand […]
Basic 16th note rhythms
Have I ever told you I like using the easy parts of Syncopation? Here’s part 2 of that library piece from the other day, in this case converting the quarter note exercises to 16th notes […]
Basic 8th note rhythms
This is a straight library piece— I’ve just transcribed the quarter note exercises from Reed into 8th notes in cut time, which will be more useful to me than the original. This same basic collection […]
Another way of counting odd meters
Here’s something new to me- though for all I know it’s a common thing- for stupid dogmatic reasons I for years stayed pretty willfully ignorant about the finer points of playing in odd meters. Probably […]
Stick Control expander – Rhythm, part 1
One of the things I’m working on getting together is an array of stuff to do with Stick Control, that do not make more sense to do by the melody-interpreting Reed/Syncopation method. I know that […]
Time signature figure-outer
Gah! What? I’m not sure my title is actually grammatically correct- a time signature “figure-outer” sounds like a job description, when what we are dealing with is more of a figurer-outer– a method to help […]