24 May
The Nature Of Rhythm
Beat, Groove, rhythm, pattern, feel, measure, pulse, time, figure, sequence, loop. These are all words that refer to the musical combinations that drummers create when playing a repetitive series of notes.
The rhythmic role isn’t confined to the drums given that most music has rhythm even if it doesn’t have a constant tempo, just as the drums are not necessarily confined to playing the rhythm, (they can also be extremely melodic.)
Rhythm represents the oldest of musical concepts and provides the foundation for just about everything that we hear and respond to in music. A beautiful melody can quickly lose its impact if the order and spacing of the notes, i.e the rhythm, is changed even slightly. Changing the rhythm can also enhance a melody giving it a completely new character.
Similarly a rhythm can end up sounding very different if the melody is altered. A great example of this is if you take any short rhythm and configure it around a drumkit in a variety of ways, it’s likely that not all of them will sound that great.
Take the melody from a well known nursery rhyme, folk tune or any familiar song and play it on two or three drums. It’s a simple way of coming up with an idea for a rhythm but it also highlights the rhythmic nature of melody and how easily it translates from one instrument or voice to another.
Melody can be precise or it can be implied. Drums can augment a melody by playing a fundamentally melodiless rhythm, or they can imply melody subtely by using the tonal qualities of the instrument. They can also be tuned to a precise pitch and play melodies. Drums are often said to be tuned to a tone rather than a note because they seem to cover a range of pitchs but it does depend on how how you tune them. Terry Bozzio and Mike Manieri are both drummers that have been known to tune certain drums to exact notes and even used combinations of notes to represent certain chords.
Rhythm and melody are inextricably linked with the unlimited combinations of pitch and placement, and the speed or tempo at which they occur. They can be thought of as separate but ultimately just represent the relationship between beats and pitch, a beat being a point in real time and a pitch being its frequency.
