it was the strangest thing.  Relay for Life is an overnight walkathon that raises money for cancer care.  the wife used to be co-chair for the local one.  granted, that was before the economy took the taildive.  but, there used to be tents all over.  packs of kids who had found an excuse to stay out all night in the spring running around like banshees.  vendors filled the outside of the walking track.  it was just abuzz with people. 

not tonight.  i think there were less than 12 walkers when we played.  the field that used to be filled with cars and tents had maybe six tents in it.  it was like, i dunno, going to a florida marlins game. 

so we set up and played.  to an empty stadium.  lol.  and we played fine.  its just that no one was there.  and at least in this instance, i’m sure it wasn’t because of us!  no one comes to, or takes a pass on a walkathon because of the bands. 

anyway, i’m off to down a couple of cold ones and get some sleep.  tomorrow is another day.

Oh Duh – just settled in to check scores and saw the Phils took the series opener from the Dead Sox.  Yay.

in my experience polyrhythms have always included irrational rhythms.  so, let’s start with that. 

Say we take a period of time.  the time it takes between one click on a metronome and the next.  and we chop it into bits.  usually we chop it into the same sized bits out of habit.

• we chop it in half and get eighth notes.  the old [ 1  And  2  And  3  And  4  And]   =  {1  &  2  &  3  &  4  &}
• we chop it into four pieces and get the familiar sixteenth notes [ 1  e  And  uh,  2  e  And  uh,  3  e  And  uh,  4  e  And  uh]  or as i like to write it { 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a }
• we chop it into three and get the triplet thing happening [ 1 trip - let, 2 trip - let, 3 trip - let, 4 trip -let ] or however you count it out.  in here lives the shuffle beat, and a LOT of blues and swingy stuff.

here’s where it gets fun.  you can chop that same slice of time into say FIVE pieces.  drummers do this when they practice a rudimental five stroke roll to a metronome count.  i think guitarists never do it.  the idea should strike 98% of them as a wtf moment. 

of course if the metronome is slow enough, and the piece of time between clicks is long enough, you can cut that piece of time into 7 notes of equal length, 9 notes (which breaks down into 3 sets of 3 notes, so it’s not as funky or odd sounding), 10 (which is a double time five stroke roll), 11, 13, 14, or 15 notes. 

breaking that piece of time into 7 equal pieces is very unusual in the west.  frank zappa used to do it. but i’d say he’s unusual. 

 so here i am, sitting at the snair drum with a metronome playing through the headphones.  the click track is just a little too fast for me to play seven notes per click.  so screw it, no shame it taking a little longer.  i decide to play seven notes per TWO clicks.  we’re chopping up time anyway, and now i can keep up the pace.  every two clicks i’m hitting seven equally spaced notes on the snair. 

you know how you make it a polyrhythm?  add another voice, since poly means like, you know, more than one.  I take the phones off and plug the click track into the monitors.  now, you hear BOTH the rhythms.  my seven notes over the click track’s two notes.  and voila, a 7:2 polyrhythm. 

Seven notes spaced over the time that is usually occupied by Two quarter notes.  ”seven against two” if you’d prefer.

That, is a polyrhythm.   

it is indeed put simply as one rhythm playing against another, but it’s a completely different beast than the contrapuntal independence thing. 

the coolest polyrhythm i ever saw/heard was on zappa’s “the black page” from an NYC recording.  he took 16 notes, which if you’ve ever gone ra-ta-tat around the drumkit you’ve played four on the snair and four on each of the 3 toms.  totally simple.  he chopped it into something along the lines of 5:2, 5:1 and 6:1, so it was 16 notes, in the space of 4 quarter notes, but totally different. 

the simplest polyrhythms are 3:2 where you hit triplets on the ride against straight eighths on the kick/snair.  that’s pretty standard; you can find it in a christmas carol.  it would look something like this . . .

that’s bass cleff stuff, but you can see the note groupings.  3 against 2.

NOW, THAT THAT’S ALL SAID – the word polyrhythm seems to be stuck in a bit of a semantic struggle. 

people will refer to things like layered time signatures as polyrhythms.  RUSH used to do things like have the drums play in 5/4 while the band played in 4/4, and after 20  we’re all back together.  if you play something in 3/4 and i play in 4/4, after 12 we’re back together again.  i understand why you’d want to call that a polyrhythm, and i’m not gonna get all caught up in a struggle over words.  but, i will call timeout and say we need to align our lingo here.

the term i’ve heard for that situation is polymetric. 

oh duh, let me include the typical admonition for any drummers that wander into this fray.  if you really want people to shake their heads – ADD SOME RESTS into all of this.  as rests are like, unbelievably important.

P.S. - i just pushed BUY on a Mandala.  at the moment they come in two parts.  uber-midi controller and software you can run on a decent machine.  i’ll need to upgrade the laptop or an old desktop (or both) to make it come alive.

i think the only time i’ve heard the phrase contrapuntal independence is when i was studying with a jazz drummer in Lancaster many, many moons ago.  he had binders and binders of these rhythms.  the left hand plays a pattern, and the right hand plays a different pattern, and the two mesh.  apparently that is the core behind the phrase “contrapuntal independence”, independent rhythms that mesh to form one larger rhythm.  here’s the quote from Oxford:

“for music to be truly contrapuntal there must always be a balance between independence and interdependence”

okey doke.  and that was that.  i had done it, i’m sure it helped, but the concept was dormant for a long time.  enter a night of internet browsing on african drumming.

in modern western music, a lot of what you hear are two rhythms put together in a way that meshes.  i’m not calling them contrapuntal, but i know that if you take a bass line and a guitar chord progression, you’ve got a song (they mesh).  if you listen to Aerosmith or Guns and Roses, you’ve probably got a second guitar interacting with the first by playing a different line that meshes. 

in traditional african music, they don’t use a lot of things you have to plug in.  makes sense considering.  they use drums - drums that have interesting tonal properties. 

and so i stumbled upon a set of rhythms that were presented as coming from different regions in the continent.  they are offered as the leading rhythms from different peoples, and they come in two parts.  drummer #1 plays a rhythm, and drummer #2 plays a rhythm.  that didn’t strike me right away.  at first i thought it was the top two rthyms from an area.  choose whichever you like best. 

i programmed some of these into a sequencer.  took me forever to remember how to use the damn thing, my industrial metal days are long gone i guess.  but i fire up rhythm #1, and it sounds like someone beating on congos.  not special at all.  and i add a second rhythm, and it turns into what i thought was a “comes with the box” quality drum machine pattern.  if i had come up with it myself i would have been proud. 

once i adjusted the pan, and made one come out of the left speaker and the other rthym come out of the right speaker – BINGO!  the whole room came alive.  i get it

 and so two things hit me:

- i just stumbled on to the feed for a great drums and bass jam.

- I can do this on a kit.

i’ve been pecking away at that second part ever since.  the deal is that if i play it all flat (no accents), i’m not banging out the rhythms.  each of the rhythms has two or three voices.  i think each rhythm would be on one drum, so it’d be like finding three sound zones for this rhythm:

- – - -   – o o – High
- – x x  – - – - Mid
X – - -   – - – - Low

that’s 1 e & ah, 2 e & ah and you’re done.  terribly simple, right?  that’s the left hand part.  the counter rhythm is:

x - - x   x – - -  High
- – - -     – - X X  Mid

just two voices, with the right hand. 

if i had a mandala, the left hand part would be different zones on it and it would be godly. 

at any rate, last night i finally made it all come together.  i kinda sat down and decided i wasn’t going anywhere until i got it, even if it took days.  i have a loose grasp on it now, after pecking away at it forever.  yay.  AND . . . as i’m tapping on everything, it strikes me, this is some bad-ass contrapuntal independence going on!

so that’s my intro to african rhythms.  it takes me three or four weeks to digest the first one.  and it’s in 2/4.  god help me when i like, bring triplets into the equation, lol.