Documenting Rhythm
Some of the members of Drummers In Exile talked about recording some of the jams we do. I know myself, on a couple of occasions have recorded parts of our jams on my phone with an audio recording app just out of curiosity. If anything the recordings were informative from the standpoint that they offered the potential of cataloging some of the common rhythms we tended to play on any given night. It also got me thinking that it would also be interesting to notate some of the rhythms we do; to isolate the main components of a particular rhythm or pattern and develop an easy to understand method of charting it.
Drums and percussion are usually charted using a standard 5 line musical staff with note-heads and pitch positions adapted to various drum and percussion instruments. Those who are familiar with the musical staff notation system may have seen these types of charts. I was looking to create something simpler and more elemental that would be easily understandable with very little instruction required.
I came up with a system which requires no vertical grid and represents a uniform time scale horizontally.
The above diagram is an empty chart that does not yet have any rhythmic notation.
Let’s start by listening to the simplest possible rhythm.
In the above audio clip you can hear that this is just a steady repeating pulse. In this example the tempo is 1 beat per second or 60 beats per minute. Using this charting system the rhythm would be represented by placing dots where a percussion instrument is played:
Now I could have just as easily said my tempo was 120 beats per minute and charted my rhythm this way:
Determining the tempo can be somewhat arbitrary. This ultimately depends on the nature of the rhythm and what will end up being the easiest notation to read and communicate to other players.
In the next example I will make use of one of the subdivisions of the scale.
I will notate this beat in the following way:
In this example the tempo is 100 bpm. This rhythm has a note half a beat after the fourth beat. This pattern also demonstrates how the fourth beat in the chart loops back to the beginning of the pattern.
Now we can go one step further and look at a rhythm that is notated using the smallest subdivision in the scale. The tempo of this example is 60 bpm.
This rhythm can be notated this way:
If we wanted, we could continue using smaller and smaller subdivisions to represent notes. For most basic rhythms and simple analysis the subdivisions in the above examples will be all you need.
Now we will go back and look at the first diagram which was just an empty chart containing no notes. Each whole beat is divided in two, then divided in two again to give us four subdivisions for each beat. There is however, a fairly common class of rhythms that requires that each beat be divided into three subdivisions. For lack of a better term we will call these triangular rhythms. This chart looks like the following:
Let’s listen to a rhythm that requires this type of chart.
Now let’s look at what that chart for this rhythm looks like.
It is important to remember that the small back arrow represents where the chart loops back into the first downbeat. So we never put a dot on that point. Try to follow along with the chart while you listen to the rhythm and this should become clear.
The next thing we want to add to our charting system is the ability to indicate the loudness of a percussion note. Our primary need is to be able to indicate accents of certain notes in a particular pattern.
If we take another listen to the previous example we can hear that the notes played on beats 2 and 4 are considerably louder than the other notes in the pattern. The other notes in the pattern might vary somewhat in volume but beats 2 and 4 are much stronger. To indicate this I have used larger dots on beats 2 and 4; enough that it should be quickly apparent that those are the accented notes.
You may also notice that beats 2 and 4 also have percussive instruments added that have different pitches that add to the colour as well as the volume of the sound. Later on we will look at a method for charting those types of details as well.
All the examples up until this point have been patterns that have repeated every 4 beats. Patterns can repeat after any number of beats. Although most popular rhythm patterns repeat in 4 beat groups there are many common patterns that repeat every 3 beats. To chart these rhythms we simply modify the very first example we looked at containing 4 beats so that it only contains 3.
Let’s listen to an example of a rhythm pattern that repeats every 3 beats.
The chart representing this rhythm will look like this:
Because the 2nd 4 beats in this pattern are different from the first 4 beats we can’t represent the pattern by looping only 4 beats. We will just add another 4 beats to the chart…
The reason we repeat beat numbers 1 to 4 instead of using 1 to 8 is because rhythmic structure in conventional music notation is based on bars. So in the above example each group of 4 beats would be referred to as a bar. Bars of 3 or 4 beats are the most common in most styles of music.
This covers all the basic concepts of the system. Three and four beat examples are given here, but you could document patterns with any number of beats. You could also incorporate different shapes in addition to dots to represent specific percussion instruments.
