I think this may be my first post on this forum, but this thread is quite interesting. I have to admit I finally got a rythmic revelation last weekend, coming from two things. First I practiced latin bass, with my foot clapping the clave (in brazilian music, it's a 2 bar long 4/4 pattern, which can actually be interpreted as laying down a ternary rythm in one bar, and a binary answer in the other bar. they can be interchanged, so they're called 2-3 and 3-2 clave). This was the first thing, actually feeling not a regular pulse, but a broken pulse. When you play the bass, you actually syncopate the underlying clave, but one syncopation is more ternary, cause you have the ternary flow going on, and one is more binary. Playing like this made me realize this "in my guts", cause I already knew about the clave and things. And that made me realize "that's why I love the techno stuff", cause even if you have your 4/4, you always have some kind of clave rythm breaking the flow going on, and actually that's mostly what I focus on when dancing. Also, the loopiness and repetition makes it able for you to focus your attention on different parts of the beat. Kind of like clapping 3 against 2 polyrythms and shifting your focus from 2 to 3 or vice-versa (there was this link to the polyrhythm page, that exercise is quite hard at the begining, and then after a time it starts to feel natural, and you can invert the rhythm as you want, clap it on different parts of your body, syncopate against it, etc...).
The other part of the revelation was reading a book by Mark Butler called "Unlocking the Groove" where he analyzes rhythm patterns in early techno, focusing on things like turning the beat around, multiple perceptions of one pattern, etc... That's when I noticed all that was wrong about my tries to do techno (I am mostly doing kind of funky weird stuff up to now), and why I always quickly left feeling a bit frustrated. The goal is, even if you have your 4/4 at the core, to create this possibility of multiple interpretations. And one way to achieve that is using polyrhythms. Another way is to structure your 4/4 in patterns like 3 + 3 + 2 or 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 4 which are very close to a ternary rhythm going against the binary pulse. Shuffle is just a quick and dirty way to add ternarism into the beat. He also makes a distinction between syncopation, which is just a way of reinforcing the rhythm you're syncopating against, and independent rhythmic lines.
The funny thing is, now that I kind of grasped this in a millisecond long "aha"-moment, I find it much easier to follow things like african drum music or indian music (once I know the basic rythmic circle), than before.
I think Steevio would consider a 3+3+2 pattern as kinda cheating around a "real" cross rhythm, cause in the end you just come back to the even numbers again. But it definately gives more funk to a tune than the usual minimal drum pattern with the snare on 2 and 4 and the hi-hats on the off-beat.
Waht I like about some oder loop techno is that they actually use the bassdrum in the way you describe instead of just running on the 1/4s (especially 3-3-2-3-3-2 instead of 4-4-4-4). Would like to see more modern techno doing that.
"In my life I widened a lot of holes!" (Jeff Milligan, talking about slipmats)
Red Kite wrote:... a "real" cross rhythm, cause in the end you just come back to the even numbers again...
i was waiting to see if someone will ever notice the difference. most of the people who posted in this thread dont make a difference between a cross(poly)rhythm and an odd time signature. thats where alot of the misunderstanding comes from.
Red Kite wrote:@ Wesen: Inspiring post, thanks.
Waht I like about some oder loop techno is that they actually use the bassdrum in the way you describe instead of just running on the 1/4s (especially 3-3-2-3-3-2 instead of 4-4-4-4). Would like to see more modern techno doing that.