Understanding Rhythm 3

Hello again! I hope all you readers have been experimenting and creating new rhythms. In this installment we will be taking a look at 3/4 time as well as triplets, but first I would like to talk a bit about practicing rhythms so lets get stuck in.

Practicing Rhythms

A lot of students including myself in the past tend to just approximate the rhythm they are trying to learn, hoping that they will get it right eventually, but are unsuccessful, and wasting a lot of time, not to mention losing patience.

I came up with this list to avoid wasting time and to learn rhythms faster. So follow these steps to memorise rhythms/licks and you will incorporate them into your playing faster.

1. Tap or clap the Rhythm slowly - Learning is not a competition, people tend to forget this. Slow down and focus on getting it right.

2. Vocalise or sing the rhythm – Pick a syllable e.g. Da La Ma whatever! Just try to get the rhythm on your tongue. Tabla players have an amazing control over rhythms as they spend lots of time learning to say rhythms (Bols) before attempting to play them on their instrument.

3. Play the rhythm on your instrument – Even if it is a strumming pattern, try to play the rhythm on a single string, as well as in a lick. Also try to apply it in to an alternate picking/ legato exercise.

4. Play the rhythm to a metronome/ drum machine – Don’t rush into this step. Make sure you know the rhythm before playing it to a metronome. A Metronome/ drum machine is a great tool to help tighten and even out your playing but if you try practicing a rhythm or pattern that you don’t have under your fingers with one it is a waste of time as you will just make lots of mistakes. Save this step until you are relatively comfortable with what you are playing.

3/4 Time

If you have been following this column you will be able to see that 3/4 refers to three quarter note (Crotchet) beats in a bar, if not please refer back to Understanding Rhythm 1. The basic pulse is counted as 1,2,3.

Here is how 3/4 appears on the stave.

3/4 has been used in many pieces of classical music and it tends to crop up in mainstream Rock/ Pop music from time to time, mainly in the form of a ballad. The most common piece of music in 3/4 you would have heard would be,"The Blue Danube" by Strauss. You may not recognise the name but I’m sure you would have heard it, check out Example 2.

Here are some more familiar songs that are in 3/4 time:

• My Favourite Things - Rodgers and Hammerstein
• Manic Depression – Jimi Hendrix
• Caught in a Web – Dream Theater

Triplets

Using the chart in Understanding Rhythm 1 we saw that notes can be subdivided into equal parts, e.g. Two Eighth notes are equal to one Quarter note or 2 sixteenth notes are equal to 1 eighth note. Looking at this we see that the note lengths are halved each time, but a note can also be divided into three equal parts giving us the triplet. You can use the words "one and a, two and a" to count triplets.

Triplets are found everywhere in music, in all genres. I have included a couple of examples using eighth note triplets in different styles.

In the next instalment we will cover more forms of Triplets as well as Compound Time signatures.