Hemiola | The easiest Poly-Rhythm is the most powerful

hi it's chris with implied music so i got a question about hemiolas uh hemiola is a greek word where the expression is from a greek term meaning half again as much and we use it to describe two against three rhythms well that comes up in a lot of interesting ways let's just take a look at it today [Music] first of all two against three it's a conventional rhythm in pop music we hear it in afro-caribbean drumming and simply put it's the rhythm right i learned to um play and perform the two against three rhythm um by counting six i'll show you what i mean on the screen so let's just set up a six eight time signature in logic and i'm just going to put this in play and we're going to just record you're going to hear the click track because having a referent is really important one two three four five six you hear that right so one two three four five six one two three four five six one two three four five six that's the conventional way we hear six eight or any six rhythm but of course it's possible to divide six in three groups of two one two one two one two one two one two one two and if you look at these two side by each you can see that there seem to be well there are a sort of a tighter more densely packed grouping of notes so i've got three attacks in one measure here compared to two attacks and that rhythm is going to be the three against two rhythm well it suggests a bunch of things doesn't it and by the way if you want to learn it i suggest you try doing something like this one two three four five six one two three four five six in one hand while going one two three four five six one two three four five six in the other hand i learned to do it on my thighs you just can't see them because they're out of the shot but you get the idea right well listen it's got a lot of interesting applications i'm just going to roll back because i i made a few things to take a look at and i want to show them well first of all here's a conventional one two three one two three olive and this green so my olive color is a simple group of one two three four five six and my green color underneath starts off emphasizing every groups of three and then goes to groups of two you'll hear the change well that second group you know from measure four is a cool sound right because one is emphasizing every two beats and the other is emphasizing every three beats this is the essence of hemiola let's go on in uh in this pattern in starting at measure eight in the olive i'm doing two notes alternating in patterns of three and in the green i'm doing two notes alternating in groups of two however because of the way i've orchestrated it up and then down and then up and then down it's kind of creating a four note or two note pattern that crosses the bar line and here we're starting to get some interesting results one two three four five six one two three four five six [Music] because i've chosen my notes carefully basically it's just kind of a c9 major chord i'm getting an interesting result i do like that a lot well going on i've taken it just one step further and this is where it starts to get interesting for me so here in the olive i'm playing notes every two beats and i'm playing a four note pattern as a result it crosses the bar line and resets itself two beats into the next measure and here it resets itself three beats into the next measure and you can see that at measure 17 the whole thing would begin again against that in the green i've got a simple three note pattern just kind of on every beat and that's of course going to reset itself easily really every half measure every measure but the net result is fascinating because again i've chosen notes that will work together hemiola is about groups of um three and two beats melodic phrases that acknowledge that grouping and then perhaps extending those melodic phrases it comes from a word which just means half again as much and the interaction of those two things create a kind of a rhythmic potentially rhythmic harmony and also a very fundamental intervallic harmony since after all the frequency ratio two to three is the perfect fifth well hemiola a great word sounds a little bit like some sort of skin condition but we've got an ointment for that like and subscribe hit the bell and you'll be notified when i do my next video i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Implied Music

Views: 13,366

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Id: xKlC5xxb3oM

Length: 7min 18sec (438 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2022