I’ve been playing drums for about three years. I recently came across the following simplest of all non-degenerated polyrhythms.
The original text of this post was created by my human intelligence in German. The translation was a collaboration between man and machine. The man was I and the machine was Google Translate.
The first three quarter notes follow a completely normal eighth-note rhythm. Then comes a kind of crazy triplet fill on the snare, while the hi-hat continues. I encountered this in Solo 17 from Tom Hapke’s book, 66 Drum Solos. When I saw it, I thought, “What the hell is that? How am I ever going to be able to play something so crazy?” That same day, I had my drum lesson. Desperately, I asked my teacher. He told me he would play it but with tom*not Hapke but the drum. This joke works better in German, because there both are capitalized. and snare instead of hi-hat and snare and I should just repeat by ear. It sounded something like this:
BOOM! It worked almost immediately and sparked great enthusiasm in me.
A little later, another approach occurred to me. You bring the whole thing to a common denominator. In other words, you count to six. On 1 and 4, you play the tom, on 1, 3, and 5 you play the snare. Consequently, the measure shown above looks as follows.
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
Snare | o - o - o - | o - o - o - | o - o - o - | o - o - o - |
Tom | o - - o - - | o - - o - - | o - - o - - | o - - o - - |
To further explore this, I’ve created 2 pages of rhythms and notated them in MuseScore. I’ve gone overboard with the last few rhythms. I can’t play them myself and see them more as a long-term goal, if I ever get anywhere with them.