Persons of all ages dig repetitive rhythmic patterns. And what’s not to love? Repetitive rhythms are at the heart of most styles of popular music and give listeners a pulse to latch onto, and
Persons of all ages dig repetitive rhythmic patterns. And what’s not to love? Repetitive rhythms are at the heart of most styles of popular music and give listeners a pulse to latch onto, and hence, a beat to dance to. But what happens when a rhythm repeats, but does so starting on a different beat?
To illustrate, Ex. 1 takes a simple rhythmic motif—four consecutive sixteenthnotes— and displaces it by one sixteenth note at a time over the course of a single measure to produce 13 variations derived from the same rhythm. (Tip: You can create three more displacements by crossing over into the next measure.) Establish a comfortable tempo, assign any chord or note(s) to the motif, and get to know each displacement and where it lives—intimately.
One common displacement technique is to maintain a stationary rhythm, say on beat one, and then repeat it starting on any sixteenth-note in the same measure. Let’s add some notes to our previous motif (the ascending 4-#4/b5-5-root blues-rock lick in Ex. 2a), repeat it displaced one sixteenth-note at a time, and see what happens. Right off the bat, Ex. 2b, which delays the lick by a single sixteenth-note, reveals the origin of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” lick! (Tip: Add a low, open E on the and of beat three.) Displacing the repeat another sixteenth beat results in the Zep-meets-Pawn-Stars motif shown in Ex. 2c. Carefully work your way through the remaining six displacements in Examples 2d through 2i and see how many you can associate with familiar riffs and songs. (Again, you can create three additional displacements by crossing the bar line.) That’s a lot of mileage from a single, four-note lick! The payoff is that