Rhythms That Break Your Brain But They're Just 4/4

one of my favorite devices in music is when you hear something that you can't really figure out what's even going on rhythmically and then all of a sudden it just reveals itself to you and it's totally not the thing you were expecting at all and that's exactly what I found when this song was shared to my circle Community recently and I'm still trying to figure out what's even going on here but check this out right when this starts my brain goes to like a sort of 74 feel like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 [Music] 7 so far I'm like but I still think it's in seven and [Music] then okay what's that little kind of snare drum BackBeat thing going on oh okay now it's [Music] here wow okay this is a great example of one of those rhythmic things that you kind of get an idea of like okay well maybe it's this and then as it reveals itself you realize oh I was very wrong and then where it reveals itself you're like w it's just 4 four but where every quarter note has five subdivisions it's like a I guess like a grouping of five maybe just like a quintuplet I guess but we end up with this 1 2 3 4 5 2 2 3 4 5 3 2 3 4 5 4 2 3 4 5 1 except it's even faster but that's just where it starts getting [Music] insane they're doing something that's even more insane with this Rhythm so we already have these groupings of five sometimes we just call them fives right and within that they are subdividing into groups of three in some places and then also groups of five five okay all right I'm trying to decipher what's going on [Music] here all right to understand this let's let's look at it on paper here so if we take a four four measure we have four quarter notes and as we've said we're taking each one of those quarter notes and we're dividing it into a group of five we're giving five subdivisions to each beat well once you have this pallet of 20 of these subdivisions to work with throughout an entire measure you can start dividing them in all kinds of fascinating ways and it sounds to me like the first two Melody notes are groups of four followed by groups of three 4 * 3 is 12 that's it that's 100% it so let's think about this let's do some math math because we know we have 20 subdivisions to work with so if the first two are groups of four well that's eight and then we have bum bum Bumm and that's right before for the next down be so that's four groupings of three 4 * 3 is 12 + 8 is 20 so with a little bit of math we can find out exactly what is going on rhythmically here and how we can take something as simple as a bar of 44 and turn it into something that's absolutely [Music] insane wow when I first heard this recording it reminded me of a song that got really popular when I was in college it's by a band called brotherly and the song is called system and it sounds like [Applause] [Music] this closer baby incredible groove right and it sounds like oh this is just going to be like a straight forward thing [Music] until hold on wait a second [Music] CL my brain just broke and that's exactly what I was feeling when I heard this for the first time I could not figure out I thought I had it figured out and then all of a sudden something was introduced that made me go wait a second that's not right at all what's happening [Music] here all right well now all sudden it sounds [Music] like sounds like it's here now right but wait a second we can also still [Music] Force the original feel that we had in the [Music] beginning so here's the thing with this and this is what's amazing about all of this stuff right because you'll remember maybe a couple years maybe you don't remember you should go check out this video a couple of years ago how many years ago now I don't even know we did a video All About T Haman and some of the insane rhythms and time signatures and poly rhythms that he uses in his music and my whole point with that video was that so many of his insane time signatures are simply just for four but a lot of people said well maybe that's true but it actually can be helpful to think of them in some more wacky ways because it helps kind of keep track of where everything is and I totally get that but one of the beautiful things about this type of music and these crazy rhythms is that there is no one siiz fitzall because let me tell you here's how I hear this obviously I hear [Music] this 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 and that works right but at the same time 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 we can hear both of these meters on top of each other and later in the song we can actually hear this emphasize 2 3 1 2 three very clearly 1 2 3 here right right 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 we we feel that very powerfully [Music] except now we've obviously move back into this 4 four [Music] field oh man this is absolutely unbelievable now ever since this song was shown to me I've always felt like it was 44 and 34 at the same time and it's almost like one of those like is the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise things like you can kind of Imagine both meters at any point in the song and you can make it work because in some ways it kind of is those two feels stacked on top of each other however there is a brilliant video put out out by the song's composer Robin Malarkey actually talking about his breakdown of how this song works and when I saw this for the first time I was fascinated because I was immediately like oh I didn't have that right at all so this is the a section of the song it's in 6 4 6 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 when he said this and he starts counting I'm like I'm sorry what like like this absolutely was not at all how I was hearing this song the whole time and so my first thought was like okay well I mean you know he's the composer so what do I know I'm obviously wrong but then he said something very interesting and uh that's where I feel a beat I know some people don't that's fine okay um some people feel it more 1 2 3 4 5 6 all right so he's pointing out here that some people don't feel it that way and that's fine and that some people feel it the way and he starts County exactly the way that I've always heard it that's a really interesting thing to hear from the song's actual composer and actually my my perception of where the one is kind of changes throughout the song anyway so what a fascinating thing to say his perception of the song changes throughout anyways so he's literally saying like it kind of just doesn't matter like whatever works for you you can kind of feel it anyway that you want to and I think that's one of the most fascinating things about these types of rhythms is that you can come across people who have Dr fantastically different opinions on how things should be counted or felt and in the search for musical definitions and assigning Theory to everything we have a tendency to want to find the right answer but maybe this is the perfect example of where there isn't necessarily a right answer and it doesn't matter anyway but circling back to one of my favorite pianists [Music] tasan digging into music like this has taught me different ways to keep track of some of these insane rhythms and there are few examples that I think better en capsulate this than his composition the [Music] grip when you first hear this you're like what if we count to four or count to eight we can actually make something line up in this crazy line that ton is playing here we're starting to get somewhere we're starting to figure out how this thing might actually be notated and we're starting to discover Clues as to why this might actually just be in 44 and so when we force ourselves to kind of overlay that 44 on top of this seemingly insane Groove we discover what's actually happening and then it gives us the ability to go well wait a second let's pair that against what the bass drum is doing and all of a sudden we can come up with a way to think of this thing that is so easy to hear check it [Music] out we're going back back to that figure right but when we lay that over a 44 group let's take this here and then we're going to play that underneath [Music] it that's it and when we learn how to feel the the sort of back and forth of these two things we learned some pretty interesting things I saw an insanely hilarious real 7 over9 poly Rhythm it goes like this this aggressive child isn't a threat to anybody this aggressive child isn't a threat to anybody this aggressive child isn't a threat to anybody a 79 poly Rhythm that is just absolutely hilarious but what it actually can teach us is that we can come up with all kinds of ways to hear this bizarre rhythmic figure over a time signature that actually makes a lot of sense in this case we have so we can look at every part of that and figure out where the drop one and a two e and a three and a four and a one and a two and a three four and one and two and a three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and a four and one and and three four and one I don't have enough breath for all of that but that is how it would be broken up and if you can memorize that feel you will never lose your place because you'll be able to hear it it sounds crazy it sounds convoluted but these are the ways that you can decipher and memorize super complex rhythmic figures and especially when we have things like this and things like system and things like the Earth we have to come up with ways to be able to think of how they actually are laid out so that we can keep hearing the overarching Rhythm whether that's 44 or whether it's 64 it it doesn't really matter we need to come up with these ways to keep track of it and sometimes it's as simple as just memorizing whatever works best for you kind of like Robin Malarkey is saying here whatever works best for you to figure out how you feel that is totally fine but as soon as you start coming up with those different ways that make sense to you you'll realize that these rhythms are not as complex as you may have thought well maybe they're actually very complex you just come up with ways to make sense of them and once you make sense of them you unlock the groove because now you don't hear it as some awkward thing that nobody could dance to or tap a foot to you hear it how it's laid out inside of something that you can tap a foot to and that's what makes it that much more fun to listen to this recommendation came from my circle community and if you want to get access to the circle Community as well it's included with any of my courses which you can find out more about at the link in the description down below that's it for this video let me know if you have any questions on this comments below thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next [Music] video

Channel: Charles Cornell

Views: 452,912

Keywords: Charles, Charles Cornell, Charles Cornell Studios, Studios, Cornell, Piano, Piano Covers, Tigran Hamasyan, Tigran, The Grid, Drip, Entertain Me, Tigran Hamasyan Reaction, Brotherly System, Brotherly, Robin Mullarkey, The earth

Id: TVNV2ptR7hU

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024