In my experience, everyone loves a good polyrhythm, especially within the context of a solo guitar piece. Polyrhythms can add an interesting perspective and atmosphere to a piece of music, and I...
In my experience, everyone loves a good polyrhythm, especially within the context of a solo guitar piece. Polyrhythms can add an interesting perspective and atmosphere to a piece of music, and I take quite a lot of liberties with the concept of polyrhythms on all of the songs on my What Just Happened album, as well as my new album, which will be released at the end of this year.
The examples in this column are derived from my song “The Impossible,” about which I have received many questions during clinics.
“Poly” means “more than one,” so, combined with the word “rhythm,” a polyrhythm is a musical figure in which more than one rhythmic pattern is happening simultaneously. When stacking polyrhythmic figures, an array of different and somewhat random-sounding harmonies can be created until the two different rhythms re-synchronize at a given point. In our featured example, we have a lower part performed entirely with the fret hand on the three lowest strings and a higher part on the top three strings, executed with the pick hand only. Let’s look at each part individually, then we’ll join them together.
For this song, my guitar is tuned to DADGAD (low to high: D A D G A D), with a capo placed at the fourth fret but not touching the highest string, which remains un-capo-ed. The resultant tuning, at concert pitch, is F# C# F# B C# D, which yields a very unusual chord, Fssus4addf6. Due to the use of a “partial capo” here, the tab numbers in this lesson will represent the actual frets, so a “4” on the one of the capo-ed strings would be played “open.”
Let’s begin with the fret-hand pattern, shown in FIGURE 1. The part is