Should you use polyrhythm “sayings”?

Pass the bread and butter! Or... maybe not?

Is this sort of thing actually useful for learning polyrhythms?

In this video, I give you a couple of ways to think about this.

Have fun watching, and let me know if you have any questions/comments. I’m happy to hear from you!

TRANSCRIPT

So some folks have asked me if I like to use these, I guess maybe they're not quite mnemonic devices, but these sayings that we have for polyrhythms, like past the bread and butter, past the bread and butter for a four over three polyrhythms. And the short answer is I have not found those to be super useful for a couple of reasons. The first one is it only gives you one angle from which to view the poly rhythm in past the bread and butter, past the bread and butter, past the bread and butter past. It's very clearly four over three. Three is the meter that I'm feeling as the reference and then I'm playing or hearing four on top of that. Three over four feels totally different. And while the math of all of this is cool, it really is about feel for me. I think polyrhythms have a feel to them and I think that's the important thing to hone in on.

So they feel four for three and three over four feel very, very, very different. So I don't think that sort of mnemonic device, I have to learn two of them for every poly rhythm that I want to play. But more importantly, unless you're a percussionist or a pianist, it's really unlikely that you're going to be playing both parts of that of any poly rhythm, rather. I think you're going to be thinking of or asked to play in three over four, right? So you're going to be having three as a new pulse over the original four pulse and asked to do something in that three. So if I was asked to do that, I would set that up like this. I'm going to be in four, so I'm going to be feeling four is the pulse. I'm going to subdivide this pulse into threes using ta-ki-ta, and then I'm going to regroup those as groups of three, or sorry, groups of four.

Then I'm going to take out all the ADEs and just fill that big quarter note, regroup it as a big group of three. Now I can feel that three as the new pulse and I can play any sort of grouping subdivision grouping in that big three. So this is how I would feel plate in three over four rather than just three over four. And that's why I don't think the sayings or the mnemonic devices or whatever you want to call them, are super helpful in really diving into what it means to play an A poly rhythm or what it means to play in three over four or in four over three, or in five, over two, or whatever. The ability to play both of them is fine, but for most people, that's not really the point. It's the ability to feel a new pulse over an original pulse and then do something else with that pulse. So that's why I think that this system of learning rhythms, while it takes more work, more effort, and you have to sit with it for a while, I think ultimately it's more beneficial for all musicians, not just percussionists.