Ever wonder how to play a 3:4:5:6 polyrhythm? Well, here you go: Those are the kinds of questions people ask at music.stack.exchange, where I’ve been visiting recently. It’s somewhat refreshingly fact oriented— it’s heavily moderated […]
Category: polyrhythms
Straight 8ths in funk Afro 12/8
Something I’m working out, that needed to be written out to do it: straight 8ths on the bass drum within a funk-style Afro 12/8 groove. I work a lot with this whole area of groove. […]
Hemiola inverted and combined
An easy page of rhythm exploration here, inverting a polyrhythm, combining inversions, and then inverting that. I’ve been encouraged to write these things after noticing that, starting with a simple 3:2 polyrhythm (or hemiola), running […]
Metric modulation a la Silverman – 01
A student brought in a copy of Chuck Silverman’s Practical Applications: Afro-Caribbean Rhythms for Drum Set, and we worked through a part of it together, dealing with metric modulations— or more accurately superimposed metric modulations […]
Page of polyrhythms – updated
Updating my old badly formatted page of polyrhythms from 2013, adding some things, and hopefully making it easier for more people to read and use. I’ve written them in the easiest possible form, expressed as […]
Hemiola funk patterns in 5/8
Here’s a nice easy page of hemiola funk patterns in 5/8— based on our friend the 3:2 polyrhythm. World’s fastest way of getting your students playing hip stuff in 5, if you already (wisely) ran […]
Page o’ coordination: grocery store hemiola – 01
So-called because I found myself unconsciously tapping this out in the grocery store parking lot while waiting for them to bring out my groceries. …incidentally, for the sake of limiting your exposure to COVID-19, I […]
Hemiola funk series: all basic patterns in 3/8
UPDATE: Download link works now! There’s an ongoing political crisis happening in the United States right now, and it’s really hard to write, or do anything else productive. It’s very serious and basically every human […]
Hemiola funk series: all patterns combined
Continuing to work through the possibilities of the hemiola funk series, in hopes of eventually making a concise, coherent method out of it. It has been great for my students— adult beginners, and kids under […]
3:2: varying the 3-side
Here we’re essentially doing straight 8th notes against a broken triplet-feel cymbal rhythm, in a triplet-feel context. For me this is mainly for playing straight 8ths in an Afro 6/8— which I already covered back […]
Chaffee jazz patterns in a 4:3 feel
Playing the jazz patterns from Gary Chaffee’s time functioning volume as 16th notes in a 4:3 feel. I feel like kind of a horse’s ass writing this— it’s all already in the book. But there […]
Hemiola funk series: SS-BB / BB-SS
Another permutation on this basic hemiola funk format I’ve devised, doubling up on the BS, forwards and backwards… wait. I’m deliberately not really giving you a finished concept here— I just wrote this up to […]