Grab your free transcription of the exercises in this video (it will be emailed to you).
Watch enough music and you start to notice patterns.
And the pattern that inspired today’s video was hard to ignore.
There’s this…rhythm…that underpins so much of modern drumming, and modern music. It satisfies my two major conditions to be considered “a thing”:
30 years ago and further back, you hardly heard it
It’s near-ubiquitous today
Just a few examples:
What About Me, by Snarky Puppy
The Grid, by Tigran
A bunch of the prog rock catalogue, including Periphery
And I’m sure once you know what I’m talking about, that you’ll think of tons more.
It’s this syncopated, serpentine rhythm that’s hard to pin down. It feels like it should be “hemiola”, or cycling groups of 3 over the barline, but it’s not.
The answer?
5.
Not quintuplets, necessarily. Just groups of 5 notes against a quarter note.
If you’re in 5/4, than your rhythm will cycle neatly. If you’re in other meters, we need some simple math.
But that’s what you’re hearing.
Two of my favorite examples are What About Me - the chorus and subsequent drum solo section - and a VF Jams ear-worm with Devon Taylor. (Both featured in the video.)
But there’s also Tigran’s The Grid, and Dracul Gras by Periphery.
In this video, we’ll delve into 3 facets:
Why is this suddenly everywhere (my hypothesis is musicians get bored with stuff)
How do we play it in the simplest terms
How do we use it practically over normal meters (and what are those song examples doing)
Once you get this pattern in your ear, modern music and modern drumming will make a lot more sense, and you might even hear some of these ideas in your own playing!
Hope you enjoy!