Something I have always wondered about the song is how hard this piece would be to play solo on a piano. The reason I wonder is that parts of the piece, particularly one part near the end, feature concurrent melodies (or maybe a melody and a harmony), one of which is in eighth notes and the other in triplets. As someone with only the most basic piano skills, it seems that such disparate rhythms would be very difficult to play with one hand (while the other hand is presumably occupied doing the bass line). Or am I wrong about this, and it just looks/sounds difficult without actually being so?
Any piano-playing Dopers want to weigh in, maybe after trying to play the piece themselves?
Three-over-two does and three-over-four take some practice, but it’s not that bad. The easiest and most accurate way I know of to practice the rhythm and get the feel for it is to find the common denominator and subdivide the beat. Like so:
1 2 3 4 5 6
X . X . X .
X . . X . .
So that’s for the three over two section (quarter note triplets over quarter notes)
For the three-over-four section, well, you have to work it out in twelve:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C
X . . . X . . . X . . .
X . . X . . X . . X . .
Once you get the feel for that down, you can bring it up to the same tempo as the first. (The first example 3:2 is subdivided into 6 and the second 4:3 is subdivided into twelve, but they both fit one measure in this piece. And, no you, are not counting it when you’re actually playing it at tempo. This is only for practice to get the feel of the rhythm down.)
I used to practice drumming on my knees stuff like this during high school when I was bored. You eventually do develop both a muscle and rhythm memory for it. One thing to be wary of in the 3:2 example is there is sometimes a tendency for people to slop that rhythm and change the triplet into something like a dotted quarter, dotted quarter, quarter (in the case of triplet quarter notes) instead of evenly dividing it into three triplet quarter notes. Counting it accurately at first and developing the feel for the right rhythm helps against that.
Oh, shit. I didn’t notice that was all one hand. You said it in your OP, but I obviously skimmed it. Yeah, that makes it a lot harder. Not impossible, but a lot harder. I’m assuming in the original the parts are played by two different instruments, so it’s not really meant as a piano piece played with two hands. I’ll see if I can play it when I get to a piano. I assume I won’t be able to do it without a bit of practicing.
A bit tricky, but perfectly playable even with the polyrhythm being played on one hand. You just need to get your fingers waggling even more independently than usual. At least it’s not some Chopinesque 22-vs-12 monstrosity.
It’s not that hard. Here are the three rhythms going on in the highlighted part of the song, two played by the right hand, and one by the left. The cycle lasts for two beats, so is repeated a second time to complete a four-beat bar. The left hand is dividing two beats into two, while one melody line of the right hand is dividing two beats into four parts, and the other right hand melody line is dividing two beats into three parts. The melody line divided into three is a polyrhythm, since, unlike the other two lines, it’s not deriving from multiples of two.
R: X—X---X—
R: X–X--X–X--
L: X-----X-----
Here it is again, with lines dividing each beat.
R: X—X-|–X—
R: X–X--|X–X--
L: X-----|X-----
It’s probably easier to understand if one adds a further sub-division, halving each beat, so one can think of it as triplets.
I just tried it, and it’s not that bad. It did take a few minutes of repetitions to get the 3-over-4 feeling in one hand, as I am completely unused to it, but as long as you know what 3-over-4 sounds like, it’s okay. The score itself does look like it was written with a human playable keyboard in mind. There’s no weird fingerings or stretches or any kind of digital acrobatics necessary to play it. That 4-over-3 part fits very comfortably in one hand, with the 3-4-5 fingers playing the upper part, and 1-2-3 for the lower part.)
Another thing that may help, I drew up the 4-over-3 rhythm on an online drum machine website, and you can listen to the sound of the rhythm with this link. It’s slowed down from the sheet music’s tempo so you can get an idea. I think you’ll find the rhythm itself is fairly intuitive. (Kick and hi-hat hit the quarter notes so you know where the beat in the bar is, hi tom is the triplet quarters and the low tom is the eighth notes.) Now it’s just a matter of repetition and bringing it up to speed in your practice.
I’ve played that one before, and every time I hear it, it seems to be played with a good bit of rubato, not mathematically perfect 22 over 12 (or, easier to think of, as two 11 groupings over 6.) You just kind of want to keep the left hand pulse steady there and do your best to fit 11 right hand notes over 6 left hand notes, land together on the 12th note, and do the same thing again to come around to the one together. Maybe it’s not supposed to be “slopped” like that, but that’s what I was taught (and this was twenty years ago when I was doing that kind of music.) I do recall Chopin being very strict about his rubato, though, with the left hand keeping steady rhythm and all the push-and-pull happening in the right hand, though most modern takes on his pieces have a more modern interpretation of rubato, with both hands pushing and pulling the beat.
Um, substitute “3-over-4” in the couple of places I have “4-over-3” written two posts above. Not that it makes that much a difference, but to keep it consistent and what is written in the score, that’s what I meant.
Chopin actually had 11 vs 6 in the previous measure. My feeling is that if he had wanted to continue that, he would have written this measure in the same manner. Instead, he has a beam connecting all 22 notes while the left hand has the same 6+6 beat that’s consistent with the rest of the piece. So the way I try to play it is to keep the left hand more or less constant and play the 22 notes on the right hand without worrying too much about keeping both hands in sync. I guess that means I follow Chopin’s recommendation.
Yeah, basically same deal, except I think I line up that 12th beat when I did it (it’s been many years since I’ve played that or anything classical, really), as it does line up on the score, and it’s the easiest way for me to not lose my place in that mess of notes. I’m not sure it makes that much a difference.
I actually think it makes a decently big difference. Feeling the pulse on the 3 seems to be easier for most people. All of the common mnemonics are 4:3, like “pass the goddamned butter.” For the longest time, my only strategy to deal with it was to use triplets to change the tempo and then put the sixteenth notes on top of that as syncopation.
It was only the introduction of a 3:4 mnemonic that helped me get it right: “Passbutter and the milk.” That helped me feel like the 3 was syncopated, while the 4 is on the beat.
I find using the composite rhythm much easier for when you’re doing it on a single hand. When I do two hands, I can often put one or the other hand on autopilot for the beat, and then play triplets in the other hand.
I mean, it’s not that much a difference in the sense that it’s played the same way unaccented, it’s just where you feel the pulse: on the threes or on the fours. When I practice these polyrhythms, I’ve always done it so for a set of repetitions I would concentrate on feeling the triplets as the beat, and for another set I would concentrate on counting the non-triplets.
Funny enough, Google/Youtube is doing a good job of tracking me, as this 4:3 and 3:4 polyrhythm video showed up in my Youtube suggestions a few hours after posting to this thread. I had never learned or even heard of those (or any) polyrhythm mneumonics until watching through that video, and here it shows up again. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been a big deal to me, as I never was taught a mnemonic and just had to figure it out for myself and how it feels, rather than be stuck into a phrase and its natural accent patterns that stressed the triplet as the underlying pulse (4:3).
