follow the bouncing ball

Post 56 of 90.

It was a long day at work. In fact, for whatever reason, it has felt like a very long week. I spent part of the day today thinking it was Friday.

I spent a lot of time last night working on the reverse 3/2 polyrhythm that opens "Intergalactic Boogie Express." I began by working on the entire polyrhythm as a pattern of 6 beats with the chords on 2, 4, and 6. I found this to be playable, and it wasn't too hard to get my foot tapping on the 1 of the 6 pattern.

But, we're eventually aiming for the rest of the piece to have a triplet feel, so I began working on getting this pattern divided in half into patterns of three with the accent every three beats to mark the triplet feel.

To begin working on this, I worked on tapping my foot on 1 and then 4 of the 6 pattern. This turned out to be harder than it seemed. The sub-cycle of physical motion within the initial foot tap, this followed by lifting in preparation for the next tap, became an issue. It was hard to find a regular pattern of motion for the foot tap and to get that synced up to the "strange" feeling of tapping my foot on the 4.

I moved to referring internally to the 4 as "1" of a 3-beat pattern, and for some reason this was easier to get in sync with. I began working on imbuing the "downbeats" with a big accent to get the overall triplet feel going, and I wound up standing up and bouncing my entire body from side to side in sync with that feeling while maintaining the chord hits in the right places. I wanted to get this rhythm into my body, and it seemed to help by exaggerating the accent in this way, as if the "1" of each triplet was a big basketball dropping down to bounce off the floor. I tried walking around, dancing around, whatever I could think of.

It seemed to help. I found myself playing the chord hits in the right places and generally keeping the polyrhythm intact. I'll find out tonight whether I was successful in getting the rhythm into my body to any degree. We'll see if it's any easier.