Marriam Webster defines syncopation as "a temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent in music caused typically by stressing the weak beat". I find a lot of the time , a lot of rhythm / time related problems happen when we approach the subject without addressing every single part of the definition of syncopation.
I use only three drum books in my pedagogical approach - "Syncopation" by Ted Reed, "Stick Control" By George Lawrence Stone and "Drum Wisdom" by Bob Moses (that one's not so much about technical exercises as much as it is required reading). Syncopation is a GREAT book if you know how to apply it so if you don't have it I suggest you get it.
Today's topic is not so much about the infinite number of ways you can use syncopation to endlessly push your technical envelope - but just about the rhythms on the page.
Let's examine the legendary "page 38" of the Syncopation Book. Why legendary? Ask anyone who went to Berklee .... anyways
Ok, so bar no 2 is a great place to start. See the first two notes on the downbeat (strong beats, aka the opposite of a WEAK beat). so these two beats are on the 'regular metrical accent" or what us more gangster ass musicians call the downbeat.
The next two notes would be upbeats, or "temporary displacement of the regular metrical accents in music caused stressing the weak beats". There are a few words here, but I think it's key to understand the word ACCENT. Notice the definition doesn't say syncopation is a displacement of the BEAT, but it's a displacement of the ACCENT.
An accent is basically like a shade, or an emphasis. This is the effect of an accent ... i'll demonstrate below
(Without an effect) This is an accent.
(With the effect) This is an ACCENT.
An accent doesn't change the underlying sentence structure, it merely shades it a different way to place a certain emphasis at a certain part of a phrase.
The problem with the way the page is notated, is that it doesn't address the underlying structure of the rhythmic grid that is going on. Couple that with the fact that drummers play an instrument that is fundamentally attack based (we practice rudiments, to get as fast as we can, unlike horn players who play long tones and try to make them last as long as they can) and that's a gigantic recipe for a rhythmic mess. All in 1 bar.
So the rhythmic grid is a bit more like this.
If you don't play the drums, let me blow your mind and tell you something really scary. 99 percent of drummers think that the first note and the fourth note of the highlighted bar are exactly the same thing. Yup, we think a quarter note and an 8th note are the same thing. A hit on the snare drum. We don't think about note values so much in the way everyone else in music does .. rather we think of them as signals of where in the rhythmic grid we should be hitting something.
That, and add that to the fact that even though from day one from our drum lessons, our teachers tell us to count out loud while we're playing, we don't because it's just too troublesome to coordinate the 5th limb of the voice when we're already dying trying to move 4 of our other limbs.
So we don't understand the actual value of understanding note values, and because we didn't count when we were young, we didn't develop a strong sense of the rhythmic grid. At least if we were playing the right note values, even if we didn't really have a great sense of the grid, we'd be starting and ending our notes in (kind of) the right places. But we don't even have that. A hit is a hit is a hit is a hit.
Ironically, because of the nature of our instrument, we're usually in a position where we're likely to have the worst sense of time in the whole band (unless we've worked on our time more than anyone else in the band). The task of timekeeping usually falls to us not cause we're best suited for the job, but because we play the only instrument that doesn't throw managing harmony in the juggling act that is playing music (but actually we have to, but that's another topic for another time).
Why are we instinctively better at knowing where downbeats are than where upbeats are? I have a few theories
1. While we don't usually COUNT, we do practice to metronomes that slam downbeats into our ears
2. It's human to have a dominant side (for example, being right handed). Even if i chopped off your left leg, and told you to hop down the road, you'd probably still hop down the road in some kind of constant rhythm. If you're Singaporean like me and had to go through National Service, you started every march with your LEFT foot not because you were leading with your left side, but because you were extending your dominant right hand to start. Almost everything we do with our dominant side is in some way related to downbeats in rhythmand music
3.Downbeats are absolute, and can't be moved for effect in music. But upbeats are left up to interpretation, whether the music is straight, or swung, or somewhere in between, those upbeats are different from song to song. So basically we have about 3 times as much practice in our musical life practicing downbeats than practicing each of those kinds of upbeats.
I find the best way to deal with this issue is to just try to even everything out and get familiar with every part of the beat. We’re only as strong as our weakest link, so the more time we spend on addressing the unfamiliar in our rhythmic understanding, the better.
I tell my students to imagine that each eighth note in the bar can be represented by an empty square ... so 1 bar is 8 squares. Then I tell them that every time they play a note, one of those squares changes colour, let’s pick red for example. So if they come up with interesting combinations of empty squares and red squares, they can create pretty interesting patterns and actually even within 8 notes there are quite a few combinations.
The most important thing is to remember that the interesting patterns are caused by the juxtaposition of the empty and red squares, so if we forget that the empty squares are just as important as the red squares, that’s where problems start occuring.
Just for fun, i'm going to do something crazy and try to use excel to prove my point. I use excel probably too much in my day life, but it's actually a great tool to show you what i'm talking about (that and the idea of drawing the diagrams and scanning them and uploading them really seems like a chore)
Ok so let's take it that this represents 2 bars of time , with each cell being the value of an 8th note. Note that every cell is exactly the same size, just like in music every 8th note should be the same size.
So what usually happens is we first learn to play the drums, and inevitably someone yells at us that our time sucks. So we get a metronome, and tell ourselves we've going to blast this pattern into our ears for the rest of eternity.
Ask most drummers what they think this would be, and they would tell you quarter notes. But technically if we understand that the colour represents the amount of time the music that we put out from hitting a drum should be taking up in the --- i dunno time space continuum or something then this is actually a graphic representation of 8th notes, at a placement of quarter note downbeats in the bar.
It's a key principle to learn and understand that even though for us drummers, the execution of
and
are probably achieved through the same mechanical movement (say, one hit on the snare drum) the way we conceive of the note is going to have a huge effect on the timbre of the sustain of the note and the amount of time the note lasts AFTER the point of impact which in turn over a number of notes has a cumulative effect over how the music feels. Unlike a horn player, who gets to control the sustain of a note simply by either breathing into the horn or not, or a piano player who gets to control it by either leaving his finger on the key or lifting it up, us drummers are playing something percussive, so we basically have to have all the experience and imagination possible BEFORE the point of impact of the note, because once we've made the impact and the note has begun, while we're still responsible for the quality of the music that happens during that note value, we really have no more control over it anymore.
So ok, mechanically similar movements do not always yield musically similar results. How we think about it is important, how we internally hear it is important and in fact I would argue the MAGIC of syncopation and what makes it make so exciting is the element of sleight of hand. Syncopation is what makes the audience feel like even though SOMETHING feels out of control, or out of the ordinary, but it's only exciting if the performer also conveys the feeling of "don't worry, i know where this is going, you're going to see in a minute. In the meantime, let's have some fun!"
Here's an example.
Without the context of knowing where in the bar the red squares are appearing, this picture looks similar to the very first picture that showed us 8th notes landing at the quarter note downbeat placements. But what if I knew, internally, while I was playing, that I was using this to create an illusion that something in the rhythmic continuum has changed. What I was actually doing was this.
To get the effect of what this is like, try putting a metronome on, but singing a major scale starting all your notes only on the n's of the bar.
Looks the same, and without any context, sounds the same, but with context is extremely different. The key thing is to present the information without revealing the context but to perform in such a way that the audience knows you know where the context is.
Watching someone walk across a tightrope is only exciting if there is a CHANCE that the person may fall off, but if we also know that the likelihood is that he's not going to. Seeing performers take risk is exciting, but watching a highly uncoordinated person try to walk a tightrope when everyone already knows he's not going to make isn't watching someone take a risk, it's just watching somebody partaking in a performance of futility. And that's no fun to watch at all.
By the same account, it's also no fun to watch someone simply walk across the road. It's possible to play only downbeats your whole life and never make a mistake, but where's the fun in that for you or the listener?
So I'm going to introduce you to a concept called "Resolution Points" and I wasn't the one that came up with this. You can check out the concept of resolution points in Bob Moses' 'Drum Wisdom' which if you haven't read yet you owe it to yourself to, if only because it is the most unique drum instructional book there is in the world. So he speaks about how every point in the bar is different, and how you've got to get to know how to end your phrases and every point in the bar. So let's take the and of 4, for example. A favourite of jazzheads across decades
So that's how we initially begin when we try to work on this. For most of us, myself included, it's hard enough just trying to hit that accent on the and of 4 in time and keep going in time because it's so new and foreign. It takes a while, but after a while we "kind of" have some kind of an inkling of how it should sound like.
But then a few things happen. Because we're trying so hard to hit it, we stop breathing when we get to the point, tense up, and then maybe make the n of 4 shorter than it should be.
Even visually, we see some kind of a lack of summetry right where that red spot is that doesn't make us feel excited, it just makes us feel uneasy. Right there, we fell off the tightrope.
Or this might happen, where right after getting the resolution point correct, we're so happy we forget the music still going on
This can happen either before the resolution point, or after the resolution point, or sometimes during the resolution point.
I think the trick it to make it such that the audience can only HEAR the colours, but the way you play makes the FEEL the grid. Which means the grid has to be STRONGER in your internal ear than the external music you are presenting to the listener.
Then you can present something that both feels symmetrical and asymmetrical all at the same time, and that's the magic! That's what draws us in
If you've ever found yourself wondering what makes everything your favourite drummer plays feel so great, even though he's playing seemingly simple things, it's probably the fact that he's hearing a LOT more internally than he's letting you hear. I think we're all trying to play music cause we want people to FEEL something, and ironically the best way to make some FEEL something is to make it such that only the person who is performing can hear the whole picture of what he's trying to present, and the framing of the apparent notes with the careful managing of the silent notes is what makes people feel something in the time feel of the music.
As humans we're drawn to symmetry, but we also get bored quickly. Syncopation is basically a way that we get to address both sides of our human selves at the same time, because great syncopation requires that there is always an underlying symmetry of the underlying rhythmic grid that doesn't change, but also allows us to colour that rhythmic grid in ever changing and constantly evolving patterns that also can keep our interest.
This means that the only to really get good at this is to get to learn every single part of the beat intimately, both as a possible accent and not accented note. And to get to learn all kinds of cool combinations of accents and non accents and rests and non rests and long note and short notes that can make two bars worth of excel cells just waiting to be coloured a realm of infinite possibility.
Just remember you can put all the colour you want on a canvas that you want, but you can't change the canvas. The beat and the grid is always there.
So what are we really trying to do here? Are we resting to frame the notes? Or are we actually playing the notes just so we can frame and give the silence context?
Oh by the way, when you play quarter note downstrokes in time, you only can do so cause you're playing perfect upstrokes on the upbeats. So practicing those upstrokes (which are played silent notes) is REAAAAALLLLLYYYY important
All my best,
Wen