Tips on Polyrythyms

[magneezius]

Well I've been trying to learn various polyrythms with my drummer. Specifically 3 against 4 just the same as Aenema by Tool. We just applied a very straight forward beat but the drummer play 4 beats against my 3. Well the amazing thing about this is it seems simple in theory but difficult to play and listen to. I find myself getting caught up enjoying and listening and tend to loose the beat which is odd enough because it sounds more complicated than it actually is. Does anyone have tips to not let this happen. Im sure there some gurus on Polyrythms out there. any and all help is much appreciated.

Originally Posted by magneezius

Well I've been trying to learn various polyrythyms with my drummer. Specifically 3 against 4 just the same as Aenema by Tool. We just applied a very straight forward beat but the drummer play 4 beats against my 3. Well the amazing thing about this is it seems simple in theory but difficult to play and listen to. I find myself getting caught up enjoying and listening and tend to loose the beat which is odd enough because it sounds more complicated than it actually is. Does anyone have tips to not let this happen. Im sure there some gurus on Polyrythyms out there. any and all help is much appreciated.

Okay wait a sec - 3 against 4? Do you mean 3 against 4 or 3 against 2?

This is how I go about learning any polyrhythm - it's thorough and it works fine. I've used it for learning to play 3 against 5 and stuff like that which probably I'll never use but was fun.

Simply - write down the rhythm according to the lowest common multiple. If you're playing 3 against 4, the lowest common multiple is 12, so you need twelve beats

XXX XXX XXX XXX

And then fill in the beats for the different rhythms
XXX XXX XXX XXX this lines got the 4
XXX XXX XXX XXX this lines got the three

So you just play the top line with your right hand and the bottom line with your left. Start really slow, and just repeat.

When it comes to playing with another member of the band, I find it best to just concentrate on your own part whilst you're initially establishing your independence. Repeat it over and over with the other player and you'll find that the overall sound sinks into what you're doing.

On our myspace there's a tune called Chameleon where I'm playing a cross rhythm bassline to the guitarist's guitar part - in this I'm playing two bars of a 7/4 groove and then finishing off with a 2 beat phrase to get back in synch with the guitarist. We use cross rhythms quite a lot, and learning them by yourself is different to learning them as a band. In the band situation it's best to focus on the meter and hold your own playing and wait for the 'band sound' to sink in. On your own (which is a great way to practice) you can focus on the mechanics, really slowly, and if you do that, then you're body will have learned and after that you can speed it up and enjoy the musicality of it all you want.

Also if you want to get more into Polyrhythms (and good on you if you do), then get any book on djembe playing, or specifically African Bell rituals. They have great polyrhythms and interesting claves.

I put a post up asking if any other bassists were into styles outside the Jazz Funk and Rock genres, and mentioned some styles. I got a couple of like 'what the?' replies. But it's interesting to note that Danny Carey gets a lot of his inspiration from tabla playing, so there's a huge amount of fertile ground and inspiration to be found in what people term as 'ethnic' sounding music.

[magneezius]

Thanks moose Great tips!

[chaosMK]

With messed up time sigs, polymeters, polyrhythms... it just takes time before you get knack for it. Nothing makes me as happy as those type of jams though!

I conjure up this impenetrable sonic shield and ignore the rest, just stay on top of my own thing when it's a bit over my head/still new to me.

Here is a mathy jam (I am especially in my own world around :30, the 5/4 part)-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dJqkOdI8T4

[Hoover]

One suggestions for playing true polyrhythms:

learn what the composite rhythm is supposed to sound like, and then learn to hear your contribution as part of that whole when you're all playing together.

In other words, don't just think about you playing the "3" component in a 3-against-4 figure (which can lead to an almost solipsistic, isolationist mindset: "chung chung chung, chung chung chung, chung ching chung...I must play 3, dammit!")

Instead think about the entire structure and how your part relates to every one else's: "CHUNG Chung-a chung-A chung, CHUNG Chung-a chung-A chung..."

There is a very specific sound that 3:4 or 5:4 or 7:8 or 2:3 etc. have. While you can certainly get there by knowing how to subdivide such that you can hit the "virtual tempo change" on the nose, it's much easier to simply know what the entire figure is supposed to sound like (at a given tempo).

(y' know the old saying "A thread like this is useless without pictures", right? Well, a thread like this is useless without standard musical notation imho! Or audio examples at least. Or all of us hanging around in a rehearsal studio with our instruments and some beers...)

[EADG mx]

Originally Posted by afromoose

Okay wait a sec - 3 against 4? Do you mean 3 against 4 or 3 against 2?

This is how I go about learning any polyrhythm - it's thorough and it works fine. I've used it for learning to play 3 against 5 and stuff like that which probably I'll never use but was fun.

Simply - write down the rhythm according to the lowest common multiple. If you're playing 3 against 4, the lowest common multiple is 12, so you need twelve beats

XXX XXX XXX XXX

And then fill in the beats for the different rhythms
XXX XXX XXX XXX this lines got the 4
XXX XXX XXX XXX this lines got the three

So you just play the top line with your right hand and the bottom line with your left. Start really slow, and just repeat.

When it comes to playing with another member of the band, I find it best to just concentrate on your own part whilst you're initially establishing your independence. Repeat it over and over with the other player and you'll find that the overall sound sinks into what you're doing.

On our myspace there's a tune called Chameleon where I'm playing a cross rhythm bassline to the guitarist's guitar part - in this I'm playing two bars of a 7/4 groove and then finishing off with a 2 beat phrase to get back in synch with the guitarist. We use cross rhythms quite a lot, and learning them by yourself is different to learning them as a band. In the band situation it's best to focus on the meter and hold your own playing and wait for the 'band sound' to sink in. On your own (which is a great way to practice) you can focus on the mechanics, really slowly, and if you do that, then you're body will have learned and after that you can speed it up and enjoy the musicality of it all you want.

backed

also try tapping rhythms out on a table or something.. then you don't have to worry about sounding notes, tone, technique, etc

[cowsgomoo]

ooh polyrhythms.... I LOVE polyrhythms.. there's something alluringly unnatural about polyrhythms, almost like you're defying some sort of law of nature

the only thing to do is keep practicing and learning the sound of the various polyrhythms... and eventually they make sense

but remember that not even the greatest musicians can play them always strictly to tempo all the time... check out the live version of Frank Zappa's 'Sinister Footwear 2nd MVT' on the album 'Make A Jazz Noise Here'... that band was populated by about as accomplished musicians as you'd find, and even they didn't manage to negotiate their way through the last minute or so without the tempo drifting slightly... we're talking a 3/4 meter with big swathes of 7:6, 13:12, 5:3 etc... so don't feel too bad about not always nailing them..

I play around with that kind of thing in my tune 'Police 5' (link below)

[MonetBass]

OK, here's how my percussion friends taught me. Tap your hands along with the rhythms of these words, both hands together on the 1st syllable (beat 1), then alternating hands for the subsequent syllables:
2 against 3 = NOT DIFF-I-CULT
3 against 4 = PASS THE STINK-ING BUT-TER (or use your own colorful adjective)

It worked great for me.

[Phrogie]

Originally Posted by Hoover

One suggestions for playing true polyrhythms:

learn what the composite rhythm is supposed to sound like, and then learn to hear your contribution as part of that whole when you're all playing together.

In other words, don't just think about you playing the "3" component in a 3-against-4 figure (which can lead to an almost solipsistic, isolationist mindset: "chung chung chung, chung chung chung, chung ching chung...I must play 3, dammit!")

Instead think about the entire structure and how your part relates to every one else's: "CHUNG Chung-a chung-A chung, CHUNG Chung-a chung-A chung..."

There is a very specific sound that 3:4 or 5:4 or 7:8 or 2:3 etc. have. While you can certainly get there by knowing how to subdivide such that you can hit the "virtual tempo change" on the nose, it's much easier to simply know what the entire figure is supposed to sound like (at a given tempo).

(y' know the old saying "A thread like this is useless without pictures", right? Well, a thread like this is useless without standard musical notation imho! Or audio examples at least. Or all of us hanging around in a rehearsal studio with our instruments and some beers...)

+1

As a percussionist (as well as a bassist), and one who plays djembe (and doun-oun, as well as all kinds of other nifty hand-type drums), I've found the easiest thing to do is listen to the -entire- phrase, and sing it to myself. Once I know what the phrase sounds like, it's just a matter of finding my part in it. My drummer and I have gotten to the point where we don't even talk in terms of measures any more... it's all about the phrases...

At least until I -have- to count something out in measures, which I'm finding happens more during recording than playing live (easier to "feel" my place when I can hear the guitar or singer (or to be the one singing myself)).

Tell yas tho, love how the polyrythms sound together... a LOT more interesting than just the whole standard 4/4 quarter note rock beat.

---Phrogie
polyrythmist basist

[rustinstrings]

http://www.bassplayer.com/article/no...s/Jul-07/29662
has some insights. Search for "count", and "odd".

[Linkert]

Originally Posted by magneezius

Well I've been trying to learn various polyrythyms with my drummer. Specifically 3 against 4 just the same as Aenema by Tool. We just applied a very straight forward beat but the drummer play 4 beats against my 3. Well the amazing thing about this is it seems simple in theory but difficult to play and listen to. I find myself getting caught up enjoying and listening and tend to loose the beat which is odd enough because it sounds more complicated than it actually is. Does anyone have tips to not let this happen. Im sure there some gurus on Polyrythyms out there. any and all help is much appreciated.

Search around for the Swedish band Meshuggah. They are polymasters!

[Marcury]

Here's a tool I've found useful for learning to play polyrhythms, it's called Quadranome: http://www.luckymedia.com/Quadranome/

[cowsgomoo]

Originally Posted by Marcury

Here's a tool I've found useful for learning to play polyrhythms, it's called Quadranome: http://www.luckymedia.com/Quadranome/

that looks pretty nifty... a further development of that would be if they could make it work over two bars... for example, I used to use Cubase to practice the spacing of polyrhythms by having 'rest' bars of regular time in between the phrase bars, then looping the two bar phrase over & over...

so you have time to compose yourself and feel the 'real' pulse for a bar before throwing a 5 or a 7 over it... instead of what can be confusing constant polyrhythmic weirdness for every single bar

and another development would be nested polyrhythms.. that'd be cool

back in the old days before Cubase was good at this sort of thing, 1 beat used to divide up into 240 tiny chunks of time, so i'd get my calculator and work out where the individual notes of a septuplet fell by dividing 240 by 7 and rounding to the nearest whole number... after a while you learn them automatically but nested tuplets became a math challenge as much as a playing challenge

does anyone else actually write music using polyrhythms or is this just a mainly academic discussion? I would love to hear some of you guys' music

I tried to recreate the sound of Om once after I became Om whilst meditating. I got a single sine wave of 1 second length and divided it up using a tremolo on adobe audition. I superimposed loads (like about twenty) of different rates of extreme tremolo that were all primes. like 3Hz, 5Hz, 7Hz etc, and in the end I got a really nice waveform. It sort of reminded me a bit of OM, and it was nice for meditating, but it was pretty intense and really it was a futile exercise anyway due to the whole inherent impossibility of the thing. I slowed it down and made it repeat for about two minutes. It was nice because essentially it was a very fast very intricate polyrhythm. It was like listening to maths, but so fast it seemed natural. So in that way it was quite a lot like OM.

We also use polyrhythms in our band, but I've already mentioned that.

[ZonGuy]

Magadini has a book called "Polyrhythms" that is worth studying.

PRs are nice, but in a band context, tread carefully, esp. around rhythmically challenged players (g***t**ts) that are counting on you to keep time.

[magneezius]

Originally Posted by ZonGuy

Magadini has a book called "Polyrhythms" that is worth studying.

PRs are nice, but in a band context, tread carefully, esp. around rhythmically challenged players (g***t**ts) that are counting on you to keep time.

Thanks!. Peter Magadini's book on polyrythms looks exactly like what I need. Im buying it ASAP (hopefully for X-mas). I also thought about getting Magadini's book of Polyrythms for the drumset, A perfect gift for my drummer (or any drummer I'm sure).

I've been writing music at home with guitar pro in tab form and layering parallel beats to get my own different polyrythmic beats. This way I'm able to visualize it, hear it, then play it!

The only way I've been able to keep it consistent and on time is to let myself stop over thinking and over analyzing what im playing and simply play it!....

Complex in its own simplicity

[Hoover]

Originally Posted by cowsgomoo

does anyone else actually write music using polyrhythms or is this just a mainly academic discussion? I would love to hear some of you guys' music

see the link in my sig

[magneezius]

Bump

[middy]

Originally Posted by MonetBass

3 against 4 = PASS THE STINK-ING BUT-TER (or use your own colorful adjective)

Yeah.

"Pass the GD butter. Pass the GD butter."

That's what I always use.