Tuesday, May 23, 2023

That last Reed tweak: one further

Going one further with that last Reed tweak in 3/4, in which we played alternating triplets, beginning every measure with the right hand. Normally with alternating triplets, every second measure would start with the left hand, so to make that work we had to do some different things on beat 3 of each measure. 

Quick summary of the larger method: reading from my book Syncopation in 3/4, play alternating triplets, accenting according to the rhythm in the book, swing interpretation. Play those accents on a cymbal with bass drum in unison, and the rest of the rhythm on the snare drum. It's an ordinary thing. See the last post for how we made each measure start with the R hand. 

With this tweak of the first tweak, we're going to use an idea from another alternating triplet item, where we omitted any of the cymbal notes falling on the left hand— while continuing to play the bass drum there. 

Best to just illustrate it. Here are the first two lines of the full page Syncopation Exercise 1 from Syncopation in 3/4: 


Here's how you would play it with the original tweak (one way of doing that, there are other options for how to handle the third beat of each measure):  


Here's how to do it omitting the lefts on cymbals: 


The situation in measures 3 and 6 is a little funny to me,  but everything doesn't have to work perfectly. 

A good application for this is to play a repeating rhythm in 3/4, in 4/4. For example, the first measure from the above example, played over two measures of 4/4: 


Or four measures of 4/4:

Small typo: add bd/crash one 1 of the first measure only, every time you play the whole phrase.


There you go. I'm looking to develop living textures, not pure licks, so I do any part of this part of the time. I don't overwork it, I change it up.  

1 comment:

Jonathan said...

Thanks for these tweaks and suggestion. I have and love your 3/4 book.