The pedant is a disturbingly-slender, reedy-voiced, scrutinous man. There’s a lot of confusion about rhythm, making the subject an easy target for low-grade, often barely-informed pedantry. See any internet music forum, or rehearsal of college […]
Category: rhythm
Q & A: Turned around
I received this question in the comments a while ago: I wanted to ask you a quick question about listening to (not playing) up tempos. I find that sometimes my brain shifts the hi-hat 2&4 […]
Tresillo rhythms – EZ rock orchestrations
UPDATE: pdf link works now. I’m doing too many things this week. I’ve been running some students through this, and it sounds good. A more accessible version of my funk control series. Some basic rock […]
Tresillo and cinquillo inversions
I’ve got way too much painfully unfinished stuff in the docket right now; about a dozen long written pieces languishing in my drafts folder, some in-depth practice materials in development, an ambitious new book project, […]
Jazz rhythm book
There’s a good book on rhythm that is kicking around on the internet for you to download and read: How to Read Jazz and Other Syncopated Type Rhythms. It’s by Micheal Longo, who had a long […]
Triplets vs. not-triplets
This is a pretty fine point of theory, but it comes up a lot on this site, so I want to state my thinking about it, so I can link to it every time it […]
Hemiola basics – UPDATED
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 […]
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 […]