Creating Rhythm In Music

[Orencio Suhag]

Often times when I'm writing or producing some music on my computer I tend to follow the usual and annoying pattern "standard" beat pattern, like when you have a metronome that ticks and you start or change a phrase exactly on that given beat, no matter what is your marking ( 4/4, 8/8, ... ) this result in a boring composition.

First and foremost -- I cannot stress this enough -- we express ourselves in the idioms of the music we listen to. If you want to start having more rhythmically interesting inspirations of your own, you need to be filling your ears with rhythmically interesting music. If you're not already doing this, start compiling collections of music that has the rhythmic interest you are aspiring to, and listen to it lots, especially in casual contexts like while driving or in the background while posting to StackExchange.

Third, start analyzing the rhythm of pieces which strike you as rhythmically interesting. That is, when you encounter a piece that strikes you as rhythmically interesting, get the score, and spend some time thinking about how it works. Maybe start a binder of such inspirational exemplars.

Then, start setting yourself formal exercises that employ rhythms other than the ones you are finding boring and pedestrian. Start with the basics: you're tired of 4/4? Set yourself the assignment of writing something in 3/4. Or writing five somethings in 3/4. Don't know where to start? Go listen to a bunch of waltzes. Next up, 6/8: go write some jigs. After than, 9/8 (slipjigs, if you need examples). Then get really crazy: 5/4. 7/4. 10/8.

Then start assigning yourself to write to the more interesting compound rhythms you find. For instance "America" from the musical "West Side Story" is a famous example of the hemiola syncopation in modern music, alternating bars of 6/8 with 3/4: set yourself to writing your own piece in 6/83/4. If you are having trouble coming up with something original, set yourself to doing it in a different mode or key.

This isn't just for varieties of time signature; anything rhythmic that strikes your fancy, set yourself the exercise of writing something that uses it. "Hey, this piece uses the quarter-half-quarter syncopation in 4/4 a lot; I'll go try that out."

When you start out, probably a lot of what you write will sound like crap. That's okay. This, too, is a form of practice. Composing is just like with playing an instrument: the more you do it, the better it will get. Your mistakes will inform your inquiry into how these things work, and how you can use them yourself.

When I studied music composition, one of our basic exercises was to compose rhythms without melody. This forces you to develop rhythms that are interesting in their own right. You can then develop the rhythms into melodies, or you can perform them on percussion or by scat singing. Or you can simply use it as an exercise to train your rhythmic composition skills.

The rhythm by itself is not enough. The sophistication that you describe emerges as an interplay between rhythm, melody, harmony, themes, phrasing and many more, including the form of the whole piece. True, there are engaging percussion-only pieces, but these have their own melody and harmonies, their own structure and form. A number of half-notes in a row can be engaging, given they happen in a context that makes it so. On the other hand, even most sophisticated patterns could be boring as hell if performed wrong.

There is nothing wrong with standard beats like 4/4, 8/8, 3/4, 6/8, etc. Moreover, these are so prevalent and ubiquitous that any other rhythms are received in their context. It is immensely hard to create a natural 5/4 or 7/4 music, i.e. not just something in 5/4 beat that feels natural, but a piece that is received like the even beats (or any other beats for that matter) have never existed. Therefore, if you wish to study odd beats, I would recommend doing so in the context of the evens.

Listen to music. That is the thing you should start with. Pick the kind of music you like the most. For example, the following two drummers gave me a lot of inspiration. (I should mention that I'm a pianist, not a drummer; indeed, I learned a great deal about classical music (which would be my favorite if there is such a thing) from people playing jazz, fusion, progressive rock and so on.)

Internalize a few patterns. Take a single example and learn it to the point you can hum/tap/whatever it while consciously listening to some other piece (later even in a different meter and style) and appreciate the effect which the two rhythms create together. Then take another pattern, rinse and repeat.Start with something simple, like:

The two above are intentionally mismatched against 4/4, the point is to appreciate the misses and hits between your pattern and major beats of the one you are listening to. Then you can experiment with some more complex beats. If I were to suggest just a single one, learn the rhythm known as, among others, 6/8-clave, triple-pulse standard bell pattern or Naigo. (See also Wikipedia; presented below in 4/4 meter to make it easier to practice against standard 4/4 beats.)

Dynamics is of utmost importance (in rhythms and patterns; of course, dynamics is not only volume). Don't get offended, there are amateur musicians that miss this simple fact, so I was compelled to state it. The basic effect is, that it provides a kind of purpose. Try to play the following (to use the previous example) using constant velocity (doesn't it sound mechanistic and inhumane?), and then again, but with marked accents (it's just some version, there is nothing special about these particular accents). Observe that sound varying (e.g. using high-conga and low-conga tones) doesn't help as much as the dynamics.

Convert a well-known tune to another meter (in a way that fits the tune the best). It might be a bit silly exercise, but it does help. Some notes will have to be compressed in time, others stretched, or even removed. You can learn various rhythmic functions a note may have, how they interact and how to use it. Later, you can use such techniques to add more notes to make your pattern more dense, lively, or yet some other kind of feeling you wish to achieve.

Recently there has been some interest within the VCV community about Risset Rhythms - something I had never heard of before. They are a compositional technique that gives the illusion of a constantly accelerating or decelerating rhythm, very similar to a Shepard tone, or Shepard scale, or Risset - Shepard glissando.

The Shepard tone and Risset rhythm are closely aligned, one involves looped rising (or falling) pitch, the other accelerating (or decelerating) tempo. Think of a rising or falling ramp wave to represent the pitch or tempo. Both have two or more voices that are out of phase with each other, with each voice fading out around the discontinuity of the ramp wave, so that both extremes of the loop fade away. When one voice is silent, there is always another voice in the middle of the ramp that is full volume. The pitch/tempo extremes fade in/out, and your brain perceives the louder section of each voice constantly and smoothly changing in one direction.

Remember that there is a close relationship between rhythm and harmony. For example, polyrhythms become harmonic chords when sped up to audio rates. So I think it intuitively makes sense that the underlying mechanism behind a Shepard tone and Risset rhythm is the same.

The Count Modula Shepard Generator works great, but it is limited to rising tones. Also the Count Modula module uses a triangle wave for the VCA envelopes, whereas I think most implementations use either a Bell curve or a sine wave (actually cosine).

The Count Modula module provides the saw and unipolar triangle waves at multiple phase intervals, and for each pair, the triangle is -90 degrees (+270) out of phase with the saw so that the low (0) point of the triangle corresponds to the saw wave discontinutity.

I found that a pair of Bogaudio 4 FO LFOs can easily do the same as long as you sync them using the RESET input. I chose the 4 FO because I only wanted four voices, but if you want 8 voices you can use the 8 FO instead. The Bogaudio modules give you the option of a rising or falling ramp, as well as sine or triangle for the VCA. It was just a bit confusing getting the right ramp/sine phase relationships until I got used to it.

I offset the VCA (sine or triangle) LFO so that it goes from 0 to 10. For the ramp I used a 40% scale and offset by 2V so that it goes from 0 to 4, and each voice is effectively 1 octave apart from its +/- 90 degree phase neighbor at any given time.

Here is the result. Within the video, roughly 1/4 of the time is spent on each waveform combination. It starts out with a rising pitch ramp and sine VCA envelope. It then switches to rising ramp and triangle. Then falling ramp and triangle, and then finally falling ramp and sine. The difference between triangle and sine is subtle, but definitely audible.

It has been many decades since I worked with calculus, so I punted, and instead decided to reset each LFO clock voice when the ramp rolls over and the voice is silent. In this way the rhythms should be consistent, and the reset glitch will not be heard.

I use a Bogaudio CMP with input B one sample behind input A. It generates a reset trigger whenever the B and A differ by 1 V, which coincides with the end of cycle that I want. And this technique works equally well with rising and falling ramps.

All I can say, is that nothing worked until I multiplied the Ramp LFO (the one that controls the rate) by LOG base2. This was my breakthrough. So you need a standard Ramp LFO (1 to 2 volts) multiplied by LOG base2 (= 0 to 1 volts) which will increase the speed by 1 octave (double time). The Clocked module has 3 subdivisions so actually you increase the speed by 3 times. And everything lines up perfectly.

Yeah I actually came across this number by accident. I drew up a Risset Rhythm in CAD software to find out the ratio and ended up with that ratio. Googled it and ended up by the Plastic number. Talk about working backwards .

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