Creating a musical toolkit Part 3

In part 3, I left off with a discussion of melody. I hope you've all been working on those melodic ideas and beginning to incorporate some shakuhachi glisses or middle eastern microtones into your playing.

In part 4 I'm going to begin a discussion of rhythm. Some general comments first and then an exercise or two to get you started.

My simplest definition of music is "sound and silence organized to happen in real time". Rhythm is the expansion and division of sound and silence in relation to a specific pulse or set of pulses. Pulse is what charts the passage of real time.

Think of pulse as the beat. There's lots of things that can happen to the beat. You can have more than one beat at the same time (poly-rhythm) or change the beat (speed up or slow down the tempo) or you can modulate the beat or tempo (metric modulation). These are all useful notions.

But the first thing you need to do as a player is to become comfortable with the idea of the beat itself. I think everyone is born with a way of hearing. Some folks hear melody and harmony very clearly, others hear melody or rhythm more strongly. Others still hear timbre and rhythm most strongly. There are, of course, some cultural tendencies to hear in certain ways, based generally (in my opinion) on a variety of things; what technologies are available to musicians of that culture, what's traditional to the culture etc. Without digressing too far into which cultures do what (though if you're interested, drop me a note and we can discuss it or maybe I'll dedicate a future series of columns to the topic), let me say that in my years of teaching and playing music, I've noticed that rhythm really seems to be a block for many players.

How do you get rhythm? One way is to begin to find it in everything; walking has a rhythm, the sound of the gas pump numbers clicking over as you fill your tank has rhythm, maybe even the chatter of your hard drive has a rhythm.

Rhythm is about cycles. It's about regularity. You anticipate events, broadening your connectivity to them. Most rock and roll music consistently has a snare sounding on beats 2 and 4. Listen to that and clap along. If you can clap on 2 and 4, you must also be able to clap on 1 and 3. Then try 1 2 3 and 4.

This month's exercise is really simple. Just think about regularity. Try to find it everywhere you can. Then think about dividing it in half or thirds. Or doubling it or making it four times as large.

Aric Rubin