 Hi everyone, this is Jason here from Nathaniel in this concluding part of our series on all things rhythm as we've called it. We are basically going to look at some advanced things which people do in the field of rhythm. First of all, how time signatures could be stacked with each other. That's quite interesting. And then how to generate two time fields like you could be dividing by two and then also dividing by three, you know, and creating these recurring accents. Also what musicians popularly call as the dotted field. So all of this is again coming or hailing from the continuing flowchart of the rhythmic interest when we hear a song. We hear the song bare minimum, feel the pulse, move to the music, see how your body is reacting. Is it swaying? Is it going straight? Very, very important for you as a listener. Forget the fact that you are a musician when you're first listening to a song. When you're first listening to the song, you just listen to it like any other person who enjoys music, which is arguably going to be anyone on earth. I don't know anyone who doesn't like music. I don't know if you do. That'll be very weird. I wouldn't want to meet such a person. But anyway, so you have the idea of the pulse, you feel the pulse, get your body to react, then you divide the pulse by how much or rather before you divide, the pulse will kind of cycle itself in a time signature. Then we looked at dividing the pulse in the in the second part, divide by two, divide by three, divide by four. And then we also looked at the ability of feeling that division in different ways swing versus straight. Then we looked at triplets. And then we also looked at building patterns and accented phrases. Patterns are nothing, but, you know, you divide it by something and then you knock off something and then you get a pattern like a Gallup we saw in the last video, that one or a triplet kind of like an Indian feel for a triplet, something like that, where the beat is actually divided by three. But what you're doing in that division is like a subset. And we also mentioned divide more and playlist, which is a very important rhythmic mantra to have when you're playing music as much as possible. So in this lesson, we'll just look at some of the fancier things musicians do, but come to think of it, as you heard in the intro performance, you'll realize that I didn't play very awkward or strange music. I played quite popular, at least I think it sounded fairly popular in the performance. So you find these things called polyrhythms, dotted fields, odd meter, you find these tough, weird, out of reach concepts generally used by pop musicians, used by movie composers, you know, for very epic themes, very normal themes. So it's good to learn a bit of that. And that's what I'm going to show you in this lesson. Before we get started, it'll be great if you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, if you haven't already hit that bell, very important to hit the bell, like the video, it'll be awesome. Leave us a comment with something you'd like to learn or what you thought about this entire lesson series. And this is part three. If you haven't already do check out part one and part two, there'll be a lot more insights there in the demonstrations of rhythm. Okay, let's move forward. The first thing I'd like to show you, let me first demonstrate it and then try to bring it back to whatever I did. So, okay, so if you see my left hand, my left hand is sort of creating a three by four, isn't it? One, two, three, one. But the right hand could think, like it's a four by four, maybe. One, two, three, four, one, right. It could either be one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one. Now, you could call this a polyrhythm or give it a fancy word if you want, but actually it's just an extension of what we did in the last video, where I'm dividing by four, oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a two. And I'm doing oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a twoy and a three and a. I'm just hitting all those divisions and never repeating the occurrence of the one or the e or the and or the ur. In other words, I'm not hitting one, two, I'm not doing each, each, each, each, each. I'm not doing the ease. Neither am I doing the and and and and or I'm not doing it repeatedly like that. I'm doing it basically in groups or in phrases of three. So one, two, three is the time signature. Dividing this by four, dividing it's a meter of three, but I'm dividing the meter by four units. Oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a two. Now here, again, I'm going to divide my performance by three, even though the beat is divided by four. So oney and a twoy and a twoy, oney and a twoy and a twoy. So this kind of gives you an illusion that it is four. So, and another way to look at it is you have three beats and you have to kind of look at a four beat structure as well. So if you look at a maths chapter called LCM, the LCM of three and four least common multiple is 12. So you need to write 12 beats at the bare minimum. If you want three and four to unite with each other at some point, where will they unite after 12? Will they unite before between the 12? No. So how do you interact three and four? You could probably look at them in that sense. LCM three four is 12, three fours are 12 as well. So you can write it as oney and a twoy and a three and a rather than one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, which is annoying to read. So oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a twoy and a three and a oney and a twoy and a three and two, three, four, one, two. So you get this. So if you think about this as, you know, let's take some like EDM sounding stuff. If ever Coldplay were to do songs on three, maybe it would sound something like this, I guess. So what happened here? So I divide by four, but accent in threes, oney and a two and a three. So it gives you that exact four, one with the accent. So the accent hit points actually become a new time signature, which is visualizes four. So one might argue that four got generated or born from three, right? So three is your base value, which you feel. I'm still imagining it as a three by four or a three beat per bar cycle. My mind is still a three, four, but I'm getting that additional polyrhythm. Now if you wear the shoes of really talented and, you know, experienced drummers, they may argue that each limb could do a different time signature, which is true. And the chapter of LCM and ratios and combining the four limbs could even apply. Now I am not going to be able to show you that because I have only two limbs and it's really tough. Okay. Even this is tough. So you need to practice this really hard. It's easier said than done. LCM is a very easy chapter in maths, but to apply it in music is a little bit of a beast if you think about it. So now let's say I want to divide by two. I want to divide the beat by two. So I go one and two and three and one and two and three and it's still a three by four. So I'll do one and two and now I don't have the ease in the earth. So maybe you could start like that, you know, divide by two and do over a three by four song. One, two, three, one, two, very pop chords. So it's still three, but I'm getting that two feel, I'm getting like a two feel. So you can say it's a three, two poly rhythm. While the three and four working together, you have to think, you have to think in terms of 16th notes. So that'll be okay. Now if you flip your mind around and say, okay, I don't want to keep feeling threes. Why can't I feel normal four by four music or two by four music and feel it in even beats. In the earlier demonstrations, I felt it in beats of three. So now you, let's say you take your left hand and now you think triplets, okay, but you go one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and in the left hand, one and two. Doesn't it feel different the moment I tell you to count one and two and and now you go one or feels more like a four by four. Back to pop. Could even assume it's a triplet and then play around even further. Okay, then you could do like one and a two and a three and a four and go all the way to four. It becomes a normal four by four. It is now moving like that. So again, polyrhythms or any rhythm, whatever you want to call it, never loses the pulse. It all started with the pulse. It's going to just always have the pulse. Okay, so that's about your polyrhythmic feel. You could also do something like, you know, you combine polyrhythms or combining two time signatures by superimposing them with the same amount of time for both bars of cycles of three and four. But what if you want to tell yourself, okay, I want to make a song where a little bit of music is on seven and then the next little bit of music would be on eight. So now you may argue, okay, that's a 15 by eight, right? But as a musician, sometimes 15 is a huge number, you know, so you may want to divide it a little bit more. So if I do something like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Now what I did there was seven meeting nine. Now if I do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 1. You can actually start combining any number with any number. Let me just give it a go. I haven't tried this before. Let's just try seven meeting six, right? 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, right? So a lot of progressive music, if you like, progressive rock or heavy metal, you'll find they do You can get like a guitar riff, imagining this being a heavy metal guitar. Your drummer will be very happy with rhythms like this or maybe not. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, right? Or if you apply this in a Celtic context, there's a song of mine called Jellyfish, which I've released in my last album. Go something like... So I honestly don't know how I'm counting this. I actually told my bandmates it's a 4x4 and then they also thought it was a 4x4. Then we actually tried to play it and it was not working. A normal drum groove did not work for this song. Incidentally, it was not 4x4. Maybe something else. Let's try and see what this song is. I actually forgot. I think it's maybe 31 or something. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. So you have a cycle of 7 plus 8 equals to 15. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And then I repeat the tune, sort of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. And then it ends with a 9. So 7 plus 8, 15, 15 plus 7, 22, 22 plus 9 equals to 31. Now, do you think a composer would have needed to think of this before making the song? I honestly don't think so. At least I did not. So if you get really good with odd time signatures, if you get very good with accents, if you get used to maybe the dotted feel, which I'm going to show you next, you're inevitably going to do things like this. And also music like this, believe it or not, even though it sounds like a folk song, you know, or maybe like a Celtic folk kind of song, I'm not a very Celtic musician. I do listen to a lot of Celtic music, but growing up, I listened to a lot of progressive music, progressive rock, bands like Dream Theater, Rush, maybe some Pink Floyd as well. So those artists are rock artists, but they do a lot of these odd meter groupings of notes. So a great way to understand these more difficult concepts in music is to first enjoy it. And the only way you can enjoy it is to listen to such music. I have taught odd meter to students who are just Dream Theater fans. They've just listened to Dream Theater for so long, and it's so easy to tell them, I don't even have to write it down, it just happens. I just have to say, okay, do it this way, kind of work. So a lot of these advanced topics of music and even the simple topics of music require listening. You're not going to get this with a book, pen and paper, unless you have heard stuff. After you've heard it, then you start writing everything down. So it's important to listen to some of these great musicians. Okay, last but not least, I wanted to introduce you to the dotted feel, which is a very common way of counting music, especially folk music, especially rock music, you count it in a dotted way. What a dotted note essentially does again, it's just whatever you divide by two or four, the dotted concept is going to be like, I don't care, I will go in threes. Okay, that's pretty much in a nutshell how dotted feel works, because the dot adds one and a half times the note value. So if the note value was one, the dotted value is going to be one and a half, that'll be three quavers or three eighth notes. If the dotted value is a dotted half note, that's going to be three beats, right, which we don't use very often. If the dotted value is a dotted quaver, it's going to be half plus half of half, which is essentially 1.75, I would imagine, right, or 0.75, sorry. Yeah, so if you do the dotted feel, let me demonstrate it to you. And it's something, hopefully in this video, you enjoy or get inspired by because it may take some time to crack it. But if you like all this stuff, do leave me a thumbs up or a comment and let me know, you know, what you liked. And I'll try to make specific lessons on each of these topics with good exercises, you know, in this series, I'm just trying to present you all things rhythm. So what I will definitely move forward with a lot of exercises, lot of practical examples for a variety of genres. Okay, so the dotted feel is something like this, you go, if this is your pulse, a 2 E and a 3 E and a 4 E and a 1 E and a 2. So what you do is, if you divide by four, there's almost like a U2 guitar delay, that's another way, if you listen to rock music, the guitar delay will are tongue tongue tongue tongue tongue, it'll just go on and on in dotted. So just goes on 1 E and a 2 E and a 3 E and a 4 E and a 1 E and a 2 E and just goes on. Right, one might argue it could also be a poly rhythm, but right, if I explain it with the left hand, you may feel it even better. Just taking a simple up and down motion. Now you hear the bass 1 E and tough to count 1 E and a 2 E and a 3 E and this will be your normal pulse. This will be dividing by 2. It's nothing great really. Then you do dotted, very rock, very EDM as well. It's used a lot, very Latin as well. If you take this with a chord, back to normal pulse, how lazy that sounds, right? So I call this actually a dotted pulse, where you feel it as dotted, you know. So even if you take like the world's most famous song. So dotted feel, well maybe you can't keep playing dotted notes. It'll never resolve. The dotted feel is aimed at not resolving in a 4 by 4 scenario. But if you just use a few dotted notes and then eventually resolve, you can treat it also like an accent and it's sort of like ting ting ting ta, ting ting ting ta, like resolve it at the end. Right guys? So in this lesson, we've looked at poly rhythms. We've looked at odd meter or poly meter as well, where you combine different time signatures together. I've given you as many illustrations as I could think of in this lesson period. Then we kept it off by looking at the dotted feel. So in conclusion, we've just done this series to kind of give you all the ways to appreciate musical rhythm and all the things which you need to observe as a learner. And the first thing I would like to say at the beginning of this conclusion is the fact that you need to listen to more music. So listen to a variety of music. Another suggestion when you listen to stuff, don't listen to it just because of the language. You can listen to it with a language you don't know or listen to instrumental music, which doesn't even have lyrics. So listen to a variety of music and with any song you listen to, have a weekly average of maybe 10 songs or 5 songs or whatever your time schedule permits. And when you listen to it, have a pen and paper, listen to it with a little bit of purpose or respect for the music. Don't just listen to it in a laidback manner. That's not what a musician does. The song which you're listening to is education. You can't listen to a piece of music and relax. It's the same thing like aspiring whatever, anything, an aspiring artist or a movie maker. They are not going to watch movies like normal people. Yes, they will. They will still enjoy it. But deep down, they're looking at how did that person make that thing. So as a musician, when you're listening to songs, pen and paper out, forget the piano. You just need a pen and paper and your ear. So what are we trying to listen for in conclusion? The pulse, the underlying force of the song. If you do not feel the pulse, please do not move to all the other steps. It's going to be very difficult for you. Get the pulse, get that into your nervous system. It has to be there. After the pulse, the time signature. Sometimes the time signature just comes very obviously like four or three or it may be odd like seven after which we try and look at the phrasing, the accents, how you divide the beat rather before that are you dividing by two, dividing by three, dividing by four, are you swinging it and then you set across a time grid and after that you accent stuff. You create phrases and then the whole divide more play less concept where you divide, but you don't have to play everything. So hit those accented phrases and in this part, the concluding part, we've looked at a few advanced things as we call them, which are polyrhythms, polymeters, dotted fields and so on. There'll be a lot more lessons on rhythm on our channel. Rhythm is one subject which I really love and I myself keep learning as much as I can as a student myself. So I hope I've shared some of these insights and I hope if not anything at least you're inspired by the topic or the world of rhythm and you can listen to music more and more in the future hopefully with a more deeper perspective like what is actually going on in that song and what is making me dance. Why am I dancing this way versus that way? That's because of the maths behind music. Deep down rhythm has to be maths and very maths heavy and after you played really well then the emotions start kicking in. So music has to first be played very well and very tight and very patiently when you learn it and then eventually the emotion and the passion and the expression. Right guys, again this is Jason here from Nathaniel. If you haven't already do hit the subscribe button, the bell icon or the bell button, give the video a like, share the video with all your friends on your own channels and what else can you do? Yes, all of these lessons are supplemented with our hand written notes which are available on the Patreon channel. So do head over there as well and learn along with the Patreon notes. It'll really help. Everything is hand written and I've written it for making this lesson a lot more understandable. So Patreon, subscribe, share the video, leave us a comment. Very important to hear from you all. Cheers and catch you in the next one.