Gnarly Grooves that will BREAK your Brain

when i was 13 years old and first learning how to play the bass guitar i tried to learn soil a song off of system of a down debut record now there's this verse riff on the song that just it was incredibly frustrating to me at the time because i could not get the timing down no matter how hard i tried this is what it sounds knowing what i now know i would say that this riff is based on alternating measures of seven eight and four four it's kind of like two measures of four four but the first measure is missing an eighth note giving it this kind of aggressive record skipping effect that is just so irresistible and friendship is one of the strengths of you the reasons of the fine prisons and the fines reason from the time now it was so frustrating but also so alluring about this riff is that i didn't understand it couldn't wrap my brain around it but i knew how to rock out to it i knew how to move my body to it and so does everybody in this crowd they aren't counting alternating measures of seven eight and four four they're just going for it this is a feeling that i've found very tantalizing over the years the feeling of having your brain break in confusion with something that your body just feels to be inevitable so for the past year and a half drummer sean crowder and i have been working on music that explores the human perception of time through irregular grooves and because they're grooves you're meant to feel them you're meant to embody them you're meant to move to them and with anything groove related if you overthink them even irregular grooves you're kind of missing the point you're missing the feelings that they might give you so pull up a chair grab a coffee or two today we are talking about the musical techniques of perihelion a record that we just released that explores the uncanny valley and musical perception trying to get back to that feeling that i first felt learning the riff of soil by system of a down part one metric modulation metric modulation is like a key change except instead of changing keys we change musical tempos based on some kind of rhythmic relationship double time swing double time is a basic metric modulation where the quarter note of an old tempo becomes the half note of a new tempo effectively doubling the speed the new tempo has a two to one relationship to the previous tempo the opposite is true too you can have the tempo giving you half time but you can do other relationships between tempos as well something that the american composer charles ives loved to exploit to tell musical stories like in putnam's camp in this piece for orchestra you hear this mysterious music which is interrupted by the sound of what sounds like soldiers marching nearby in a different tempo entirely [Music] this has a rhythmic relationship of four to three the whole note of the original tempo equals the dotted half note of the interrupting tempo it's a pretty chaotic effect but charles ives is using polytempo as well as polytonality to achieve an effect that we've all kind of experienced before the feeling of standing in the middle between two separate musical events like say bachata is playing outside and you're in your one bedroom bronx apartment making dinner and you're listening to a majimal on your sound system which is of course something that's definitely happened to me before ives tells musical stories like the one that i just told you using complicated rhythms [Music] machina the second track off of our album perihelion tells the musical story of la makina a car shifting gears from one tempo to another the way that we get into this metric modulation is actually by playing both tempos at the same time for a period there's this ostinato which i'm playing over here on the stack with the left side of my body [Music] kind of sounds like a car engine so i can keep this loop going and then play a beat with this side [Music] this groove is built around a very slinky baseline that we stole from jacques pastorius who played it on the outro of the weather report tune river people [Music] thank god you can't copyright baselines because we straight up stole it sorry jocko love you and so what happens in that transition for a brief moment i actually play two tempos at once at some point the car downshifts to a slower tempo but we keep the engine going on the left side and just shift the backbeat around [Music] i play the dotted eighth note so i'm accenting every third sixteenth note sounds like this [Music] and then that speeds up slightly and i hit every fifth sixteenth note [Music] and so that becomes our new tempo it's magic [Music] [Applause] and so we get a story being told through metric modulation a strange discombobulating feeling that comes from overlapping tempos much in the same way that charles ives did and then to get back instead of hitting every fifth uh 16th note we hit every fourth quintuplet it's this weird thing where it's it's really like a crossfade it happens gradually and you almost don't even know what's happening until you're there in the new temperature like wow how did i get here [Music] it's a very cool smooth way to transition between tempos that's it's a lot smoother than if you would just go abruptly from one tempo to the next speaking of discombobulating let's talk about part two the five three morphing [Music] the tricks is an orchestral pop song sung by hannah sumner that features an arpeggiated synthesizer in quintuplets five notes per beat the vocal melody on the other hand is in triplets three notes per beat the triplet flow that all the kids are listening to these days [Music] when hannah and i sat down to write the melody to sean's scratch drum tracks which were in quintuplets we kept defaulting to triplet melodies which is very interesting i think there's a reason why that might be both quintuplets and triplets are uneven subdivisions you can't divide a b evenly with them and so there's this inherent lopsided feeling to both kinds of rhythmic patterns like you know consider the quintuplet swing groove where you have an accented group of three quintuplets followed by an accented group of two giving you this nice swing feeling if you squint your eyes at this groove long enough or i guess like squint your ears you can kind of hear it as a triplet swing just maybe like not played super precisely and so like triplet and quintuplet grooves can like blur together sean wrote an arrangement of the itsy bitsy spider in quintuplets for our tuplets for toddlers project a children's album full of advanced rhythms and the bass line that he wrote for me to play involved a lot of syncopated triplets even though his drum part was all in quintuplets [Music] playing it didn't really feel like an exercise in polyrhythms i actually didn't have to think about it too much it felt very natural to combine triplets and quintuplets [Music] the jingle that i use for all my q a videos is based on this triplet quintuplet thing like the backing track is in a quintuplet swing but the vocal melody is just hitting all these triplets this is what's kind of happening on the dark but sean's using this very clever trick using nested tuplets to take this whole thing a step further if you take this quintuplet swing groove you have this uh space of three notes and two notes if you take that first part of the beat the three notes and you evenly space two notes in between that you get this [Music] that just sounds like triplets is that just a triplet [Music] i mean it could be whatever you decide and so in this song that uh little in-between note comes on the snare so [Music] question becomes is it a wonky triplet or is it this nested quintuplet thing and the answer is kind of both when i wrote the string arrangement for the wonderful resonance collective they initially were a little freaked out by how the sheet music looked but i just told them hey just think of it as triplets and you'll feel it just fine and they nailed it on the first take [Music] you know musicians will joke all the time when confronted with crazy rhythms like this by saying just feel it man but there's a degree of truth there because over time musicians develop intuitions about their instruments and their bodies and they can draw upon the tropes and the vocabulary of the music that uses these kinds of rhythms and at a certain point hopefully you just feel it well and what i like about these kind of rhythms that are really in between the grid so to speak is that they start to feel less mechanical and mathematical they start feeling just like i don't know like it's a feeling i don't even know what you call it you know so some of the most organic non-mathematical rhythm i've ever heard comes through something i've heard called language melody but you probably would recognize it as that style of playing along the memes that charles cornell and mononyeon have popularized where people are matching the vocal inflection of memes on their instruments thus turning it into a kind of melody and the way that you learn to do this is you basically listen to the same recording over and over and over again until you have the sound memorized a very interesting kind of rhythm can happen when you overlay a sample on top of a groove and then try and do that language melody thing to the sample and kind of ignore what the groove is and do something that's off the grid a little bit and the two things interacting can create this really interesting push and pull effect that we kind of exploited in sun gazers all these people [Music] the tune is constructed around a clave a key rhythm on top of which all the other elements are built this clave rhythm is built from two groupings of three sixteenth notes one grouping of two sixteenth notes and then four groupings of three sixteenth notes [Music] you can divide this measure of five four into two chunks the first two beats and the last three beats there are four evenly spaced notes four dotted eighth notes in the last three beats effectively giving you a four against three polyrhythm these two notations are for the exact same music they just look a little bit different you can hear how this groove works in the solo section featuring the wonderful guitar stylings of thomanda from thank you scientists [Music] but it gets weird when we try and play a vocal sample that was laid on top of this rhythm the way that this vocal sample sits it lays on the measures so that it covers the space of nine sixteenth notes but there are four syllables you see all these being pronounced and they're evenly spaced over that that would give us a four against nine polyrhythm which is effectively a four against three within four against three [Music] it honestly sounds like i'm playing offbeats but i'm a little sloppy like i'm a little out of time it's a pretty cool sound in context you can say that it is a nested tuplet but you could also just say play sloppy offbeats and the effect is more or less the same [Music] and then the second time that happens there's another fill which is still in this space of nine sixteenth notes but i play this thing but that's nested within the 9 16 so it's like i mean yeah you could you could double or triple nested it if you wanted to really get out there with the notation because what is this thing on its own that might be honestly very similar to the dark quintuplet triplet thing it's like the reverse of that instead of three plus two with the nesting and the three it'd be like two plus three with the nesting in the three i mean this all comes back to a feel thing at the end of the day the analysis comes afterwards this was uh you know one of many phil ideas that we just tried and tested you know through experimenting and this one just happened to sound and feel good now i haven't described this rhythm yet so far i've just shown a slide that says insert spicy rhythm here but if you had to define it it'd be one layer of four against three followed by a nested layer of four against three which outlines the four syllables of you see all these followed by two sets of quintuplets themselves including a nested tuplet on the second half of three quintuplets you could do that but honestly at the end of the day we're just trying to figure out a way of playing along to a vocal sample with that language melody approach where you're just trying to match the sound of the recording and you're not worrying so much about the underlying groove you're just trying to feel it that connection that's that's key because if you don't feel it then other people don't feel it and i think that's another thing that we try to do whether it's conscious or not so to go a little bit meta here sungazer is an independent band and we don't have any record label support for this release of perihelion we don't have any pr firms that are pushing this record and trying to get publications to write reviews about it instead the way that we're marketing this record is through social media word of mouth and through algorithmic engagement on youtube both sean and i have music theory youtube channels that explore musical curiosities around the world and so we've chosen to highlight musical curiosities in our own music in order to better promote it the danger of course in this is that we might over highlight certain elements in the music like for example this this ridiculous thing this happens like for a split second in one song but weirdly it's a marketing tool it serves the same function as pr firms sending out emails because we know what kind of content gets the clicks which is that sweet music theory content we're going to promote it a certain way versus others but we just don't want to give anybody the wrong impression that this is the only thing that we care about so the the 13 tablet reggaeton but yeah don't worry there's a lot more to talk about on this record if that's your thing go check it out if there's anything off the record that you want explored further let us know because there is a lot of brain breaking rhythm on there if you enjoy my channel or anything that i do here please go check out my patreon there's a patreon discord that you can go to and talk about music theory with other like-minded individuals and yeah thanks so much everybody perihelion is out now you can definitely get into this morphing zone between the rhythms where you can go from a quintuplet swing to a triplet ish thing [Music] there's like shades of triplet in between all of them that's really cool

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 655,395

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: ACA-i8BOr9Q

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021