Triplets vs. not-triplets

This is a pretty fine point of theory, but it comes up a lot on this site, so I want to state my thinking about it, so I can link to it every time it comes up, and keep any lurking pedants off my back. People for whom music theory is a social weapon and not a practical tool. You know the type.

Basically, I'm freer in my use of the word triplet than are many other people with a college education. I want to explain what's up with that, and clarify some things about this whole area of rhythm and meter.

So, a definition: 

A triplet is a rhythm of three notes played in the space of two notes of the same value. For example, an 8th note triplet is three 8ths played in the space of two 8ths, indicated by that numeral 3 written above the notes. In music theory class, that and only that is correctly called a triplet. It has to be artificial to the time signature; a temporary three note subdivision in a piece written with mainly a standard, straight-8th, two-note subdivision.

Three-note subdivision of the beat: triplets

With compound meters (most meters with an 8 in the bottom number), a three-note/ternary subdivision is implied. It's native to the meter, so the rhythm above notated in 6/8 would not be triplets:

Also a three-note subdivision of the beat: not triplets

Those are just 8th notes. If I say 8th notes and the meter is 6/8, it means those triplet-looking things that sound exactly like triplets. Which is confusing to some people, because they are often not real comfortable with compound meters; in their mind 8th notes = those march-sounding 1&2&3&4& things, and these triplet-sounding 8th notes in 6/8 seem to be an entirely different creature.


Where I get into terminology trouble: 

Because I teach and write, I need to talk about individual beats and partial beats of this rhythm often, and the easiest, shortest, most understandable word for that is triplet. So I say triplet in that context. Middle note of the triplet. Last two notes of the triplet. In some contexts it's easier for the students' understanding to say it that way.

Yes, that really is the entire point of this post. Sometimes I say triplet to talk about a single beat of rhythm with a three note subdivision even if it isn't really a real triplet. I also often say triplet feel— which just refers to anything in music that sounds like triplets, whether it “is” triplets or not.

It's actually not a hard and fast thing that terminology must be consistent with the meter of the piece. Jazz-educated musicians may say (or a chart may indicate) triplet feel, 6/8 feel or 12/8 feel regardless of the written meter, and people are always clarifying points of rhythm using terms of a different meter. Latin musicians refer to the 3 side of clave as the tresillo— which means triplet; another example. Even in written music, if a piece in 4/4 has a lot of running triplets in it, the copyist may stop putting the numeral 3 over every single beat, and make a notation that the continuing rhythm is still triplets, effectively changing the meter to 12/8.

It doesn't matter. The point is, practical musical communication is often not correct to the letter as defined by music theory. There is usually more than one correct answer for describing a piece of rhythm, and often different terms are necessary to describe it to different people in different contexts.

Groove o' the day: Evolution of Songo - 02

Here is the second groove from the Changuito history of Songo video; Changuito is the drummer for Los Van Van, and is a major innovator in Cuban drumming. The last entry covered a groove created by the previous drummer in that band, Blas Egües. As is explained in the video, this is the first type of groove Changuito developed out of that, that more resembles the Songo groove as it's commonly known in the United States.

This is played on woodblock (or bamboo catá/guagua— it's mislabeled as hihat below), snare drum (rim clicks), bass drum, and tom tom; the 2/3 rumba clave rhythm is included for reference:

These are some variations he plays while demonstrating the groove:

Discussion of this groove starts at 10:10:




Heres' a single by Los Van Van that uses this groove. There's a break after 2:15 with some improvisation— check back soon for a transcription of that. Other recordings of this tune use a different groove with a more pronounced snare drum part.

Cymbals for sale

I have to pay for that new camera, so I'm selling a few cymbals I haven't been using lately:

SOLD - 20" Paiste 602 Heavy (blue label)

SOLD - 20" Sabian Jack Dejohnette Signature Ride

20" A. Zildjian Medium-Heavy (60s vintage)

SOLD - 20" Paiste 602 Concert C1 suspended/ride (pre-serial)

SOLD - 16" Sabian AAX Dark Crash (brilliant finish)

Hit read more at the bottom of the page, or the following link to see the rest of them. I made videos for all of these. Follow the cymbal name links to the eBay auction if you're interested in buying.


Sabian 20" Jack Dejohnette Signature Ride - original 90s version

Original early 90s version. Unlathed, unhammered medium ride for that very dry Jack Dejohnette/Joey Baron/ECM sound. Great stick and bell sound; doesn't really crash, but excellent for accents with the shoulder of the stick. Good for recording, moderate volume acoustic gigs, and rehearsals. All styles of music.

Starting bid is $100, buy it now for $150

New Joel Rothman title

In the mail I just received a new book by Joel Rothman: Drumming Outside The Box - for Rock & Jazz. It's basically a library of patterns focused around creating an unbroken rhythm on the drumset, a la Bob Moses's non-independent method— an ECM-type feel. Also good for taking a jazz feel into a triplety, Afro 6-like feel. Or a Mike Clark or David Garibaldi type funk feel. Anything modern and quasi-linear.

The patterns are for two voices— nominally cymbal and snare drum, though you can play them with whatever limbs (or combinations of limbs) you want, adding feet, adding ostinatos— it's designed to be used creatively. Half the book deals with triplets in 4, 3, and 5; the other half covers 8th notes in the same meters, plus a few pages on 16th notes (I usually play 8th note exercises in 2/2, which is functionally the same thing— a four-note subdivision). The patterns usually don't have more than two notes in a row with a limb, so they're designed to be played fast and with minimal technique— a system I heartily approve of. Basically if you can play the first page, you can play the whole book; the focus is on gaining fluency. You're supposed to smoke through a lot of patterns working on this book.

There are other ways of practicing the basic concept of this book— Reed-based methods, Stone-based methods, my Funk/Figure Control system, which is derived from both of them— but sometimes you want to change gears and look at something different. Different sets of patterns written different ways sometimes help you come up with different things. I'm in favor of having a lot of materials around, and doing the same thing different ways.

40 pages. I don't see a price for it yet, but it's bound to be reasonably inexpensive. No reason not to grab it if you're working on this type of thing.

Get Drumming Outside The Box from Joel Rothman Publications

Get other Rothman titles from Amazon via the links below:

Funk drill tweak

This is a minor tweak to my standard funk drill using Ted Reed's Syncopation. It was played by mistake by one of my students (6th grader), but it sounded good so I decided to keep it and write it up.

Hit the link above if you need to review the basic method for this drill, using pp. 34-45 from Syncopation. Briefly, we're playing the top line, stems-up rhythms on the bass drum and snare drum and adding a cymbal rhythm. Play everything on the bass drum, except for the downbeat of beat 3, which you play on the snare. If there's a rest 3, or a held note, add a snare hit on 3. Add the cymbal rhythm of your choice; in the original post I used 8th notes; here I've written quarter notes. Just look at the examples below and figure it out, or email me for a skype lesson.

Today we'll make a two measure phrase out of it, playing the snare on 3 in the first measure, and on 4 in the second measure; again, if there's a rest or held note on 4, play the snare on 4 anyway. So line 1 from p. 34 would be played like this:

Line 2:

Line 3:

And the first two lines of the famous long exercise now on page 38 (p. 37 in old editions):

Would be played like this:

It seems like a small thing, but this gives the second measure a very different feel, more like a fill with the bass drum, with the snare drum suggesting double time at the end— Ndugu Leon Chancler does a similar thing at the end of many of his tom fills. Or just think of it as an easy way of getting into a more open, less backbeat focused kind of funk playing. If you're just getting your stuff together, I think you should be doing this drill every day until you can do it with the long exercises after page 38, with a variety of basic cymbal rhythms. Add this tweak into your routine somewhere. 

Photographers are _kin' crazy

YAAAAH! YAAAAAAH!

I needed to photograph some of my artwork (I'm a painter, too), and was looking at my old digital camera rig— a Nikon D40 digital SLR, which was a popular entry-level camera in the mid 2000s, and is now an embarrassing relic. I thought, hey, why not get a new camera? There must be newer used cameras that will be a giant improvement, that are still dirt cheap. How exciting!

So I start researching photo gear via the usual online resources, and... here's the deal: imagine the worst gearhead drummer in the world, then multiply that times 20. Then imagine they're daily users of some kind of theoretical next-generation hyper-crack cocaine created by the Swiss. They have access to unlimited quantities of that. Then imagine the technical details on which they fixate are one hundred times more numerous and obscure than anything to do with drums. Then mate that visualization with a swarm of homicidal spider monkeys on acid. That's photographers talking about gear.

Well, actual pros are like technical artists in any field, e.g. recording engineers— very detached, focused, low key individuals. There are others who are normal people doing people things, who do it seriously to document some other activity they're involved in. Others are just boring successful people taking up a prestige hobby where they can spend a lot of money. Everyone else with pretensions of being a serious photographer is, when talking about gear, totally insane. 

And then you have people on the internet, who are like I described above, except they were held in some unscrupulous lab where they were injected with the rage virus and released. Unleashed like that. So internet photo gear discussions are a cesspool of ego and untalent... neuroses, envy, pathological obsessiveness... with everyone on a personal mission to miss the entire point of life and art, and murder everyone else with camera statistics.

I may be overstating this by as much as 3%, but clearly many of these people would rather participate in this intricately byzantine game of technical specifications and performance-economic hypotheticals than actually take pictures. I'm convinced that a shocking percentage of them don't even own the cameras they're waging this Balkan-style bloodbath over.

At this point I was going to provide a joke litany of hyper-technical points of consideration forced upon you in researching this routine purchase. Instead just go read this review of the camera I ended up buying. Be forewarned that I did not dose you with any kind of powerful hallucinogen— everything you will see is actual text on the site, meant to aid you in choosing to buy this camera vs. another one.

Reading that nonsense you can see how sadistically the photo community is being _ked-with by the camera companies— whose mission is clearly to design the best gear possible, and release it to the public on an incremental schedule designed to wring the most money possible out of the new photo gear market. It's a game of advancement, obsolescence, and manipulation as exquisitely refined and complex as the cameras themselves.

Anyhoo, that's the background. I have to process all of that information and then find the sweet spot in the obsolescence curve where I can get a camera that is affordable, but not a complete joke. I want something capable of producing objectively excellent results, regardless of where the camera stands relative to current and near-future technology. There have been digital cameras capable of delivering professional results for many years now; that didn't change just because someone came up with something fancier. Still, it's nearly impossible to avoid getting sucked into the death whirlpool of ever-increasing features and spending more than you wanted to.

You have to remember that none of it matters. With my embarrassing prehistoric camera I could have made pictures that would have worked perfectly fine for my purposes. What matters is doing the project, taking the pictures. No matter what the camera, you still have to go out and figure out what to do with it. I use photography as an adjunct to my other creative work. At one point I did it as a kind of diarist (see any blog post prior to 2011). But I'm at a stage with it where I can't do it casually. And I pretty much loathe all other normal photography in the world. So I have to actually go out and make an effort to figure out what to shoot, and how, and why. In the meantime, I still need to photograph my paintings.

Epilogue: In the end I got a Nikon D7000 with an 18-200mm VRII zoom lens— the best semi-pro camera from 2010, and seemingly the second best actual bargain right now. The first best bargain is the successor to the same camera (D7100), which tends to cost a couple of hundred bucks more, with some improvements. The 18-200 is an all-in-one zoom that has been a popular item for about 10 years, and the internet people who hate everything don't violently loathe it, so it must be pretty good.

Groove o' the day: evolution of Songo - 01

First of a mini-series of Afro-Cuban grooves o' the day, transcribed from the history of Songo video below. Grooves are by Changuito, the percussionist who created the Songo drumming style playing with the Cuban band Los Van Van. This is an early version of the groove used by the band's first drummer Blas Egües in 1970.

The groove is played on snare drum (playing rim clicks), tom tom, bass drum, and wood block— here a jam block, originally a bamboo catá or guagua. I included 2/3 rumba clave for reference:

The discussion of this groove occurs starting at about 4:50 in the video:




Here's an early single by the band that appears to use this groove:

Practice loop in 3/4: All Blues

Another practice loop in 3, to go with all of the recent jazz waltz stuff, sampled from the very famous tune All Blues, from the very famous album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. The tempo is 139 bpm.

 

Page o' coordination: jazz waltz with feet in unison - syncopated

I realized while running through these other recent jazz waltz POCs with the syncopated polyrhythmic thing in the feet, these things are kind of hard, actually! So I wrote up this page, that's a little easier, using a similar idea. The feet are in unison with each other, which I think is something we should all do more of. Be more non-independent. Ed Blackwell did a lot of that, as did John Guerin.

There are a ton of these POCs now, most of them covering the same little batch of vocabulary, in a slightly different way. We're trying to create more available options for when you go on the gig and wing it. I certainly never approach these things like I'm going to memorize them and then try to barf them up verbatim when I'm playing. 

I think you should play your left foot heel-down. You'll have more freedom, and you'll have a more relaxed, detached posture at the drums, which is good. You can splash all of the hihat notes, or just the last one, or just the first one. Just the middle one if you're a real weirdo. Do my left hand moves if you wish.

Get the pdf