or if you thinlk in 1-trip-let,2-trip-let ways of counting its
1 let2 let triplet trip
the bell pattern sounds like a bembe. To me it’s in 6.
Anecdote: a friend of mine was given the task of writing out lead sheets for a Earth, Wind & Fire album in the 1970’s. He was unprepared for the task, having only experience with simple country ballads, so he brought the album to me in desperation. I reveled at the challenge, and wrote out a sketch for several of the tunes (can’t remember which album at the moment) for him to follow. I loved the complex rhythms (complex for western music, at least) but admit that they were difficult.
I had an advantage, at the time, of having custom-designed playback equipment of my own design to change pitch and speed of any audio source. Not a big deal now, with computer sound editing, but pretty sophisticated in the 1970’s. I would often double the speed of a track to get the bass line, or halve the speed to get a complex melodic pattern (I had infinite variability of speeds/pitches, but double or half was easiest to work with).
Ever listen to Brenda Russell? I worked with her on demos, which didn’t have the advantage of a drummer or click track to keep accurate time. At first I thought she just had sloppy timing! Yet her playing was so precise that her complex syncopation, if I listened very carefully, could be transcribed perfectly (or so she said, when we went into the studio with my charts for another player to interpret).
Relating to your experience, I have often had difficulty listening to My Girl, as the bass line always felt off by a half-beat at first until the rest of the instruments join in. To me, it was always two pickup notes instead of one. If you don’t know where beat “One” is, nothing else makes sense!
The bass has pickups for most downbeats. Although the sound system I’m listening to this on isn’t high quality, I don’t think those are anticipations, but pickups (repeated, not tied).
The tempo of that piece is about 45BPM if you count it as a slow 4/4. Then the subdivisions are sixteenth notes (4 notes per beat) and the horn “punch” at the end of each riff is on the sixteenth note immediately before the downbeat, the same portion of many beats where the bass has the pickup. If you aren’t sensitive to this kind of syncopation, I can see how you would have trouble with determining the downbeat.
Billy Joel once wrote “Beer Barrel Rag”, and I was glad to have the equipment available to slow him down to get all the fancy, fast notes he rattled off in his right hand. His publisher was counting on me!
looking around it seems to be written in 12 most often. I tap my foot in 6.
In this version the bass is more clipped and the sixteenths are tighter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjxdmsXzwmQ&feature=related It’s still a PITA to pick out at tempo.
To my then-high-school-aged ears, the patterns were new and confusing. I tried to transcribe them as I thought they’d be written, rather than as they were performed, and wound up with a square sounding dotted-eighth-sixteenth monstrosity that was just completely wrong. I brought what I’d done to my instructor, who then explained about figuring out what the pulse is first.
I can see where that would give you a leg up.
yeah its a 12, its hard as hell to feel at first but once you do it really really grooves…
the bell pattern you linked was the rhythm i discussed earlier in the post
This website has some great transcriptions and recorded examples: http://www.zen30989.zen.co.uk/chap1.htm
I guess it depends on your experience. I find it simple, precise, unambiguous and exacting. In short, one of the clearest recordings I have heard of that kind of music. The bass is exactly on sixteenth divisions of quarter notes and so is everyone else. Hear the guitar? It’s playing sixteenth notes precisely (4 to a beat). I can’t imagine anything more obvious as to where the main beat is! Even the backbeat accentuates it.
Songs like this were the kind I dreamed of getting for takedowns, since I charged by the project, not the hour. I’d have a pencil sketch for this lead sheet in about 10 minutes after hearing it twice. The chords are all major triads, major 7ths, and minor-7ths, (some parallel, a common soul convention). The melody is simple and precisely on the beat (or sub-beat), unlike some ballads and blues where it wavers all over the place.
Of course I can’t see what you wrote, but you may have been right. Many beats have dotted-eighth, then single sixteenth components. Note that this is different from swing, where the subdivision is usually triple, not quaduple. When you hear this tune, don’t you think (fast) 1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4?
I’m not sure why you found this difficult, but I can relate in a way. When I was in music college, I had an instructor who I admired greatly, Dr. Manus Sasonkin (now deceased, so I guess I can talk about him). It seemed he knew everything about everything in music - harmony, composition, theory, performance. He even had been commissioned to write an original work for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
One day I was writing a transcription for a local band of Mancini’s arrangement of Green Onions, and I was a little confused about the voicing of the trumpets and trombones. I was also handicapped by having a record player not much better than a “Victrola”. What was the 2rd trombone playing on the 4th beat? I was stumped.
So I called up my esteemed professor and asked if I could come over and maybe he could help me figure out the horn parts. Surely there was no one better! But when I played him the record, he confessed he couldn’t figure out as much as I had done already – the genre was just too foreign to him as a classically-trained musician. I left his house none the wiser, except if I didn’t get an “A” in his class, he would have some ‘splainin’ to do!
So, Gfactor, perhaps your “natural” musical experience lies elsewhere, and that’s why you find it hard? 
Oh, I can pick it out once I focus on the stuff you talked about, and that’s how I’d do it now–find the basic pulse and then break the pattern down into 16ths. Maybe my early transcription experience with this particular piece just sort of makes me less confident about what I hear with this song. I dunno. Also, I haven’t done much of this sort of thing in years.
That notation is really weird. I don’t hear a triplet feel anywhere, in any instrument, in the first example. I hear a duple division and a 6 pattern (6 groups of 2 each). It’s a very simple rhythm if you listen to it. I just can’t reconcile it with the notation, and can see no reason to write it that way unless you insist on fitting everything in the world into a 4/4 bar (which is pretty stupid).
The use of --3-- notation is usually to fit a 3 pattern on top of a 2 pattern (superimposed – one instrument or section is playing duple, one triple, and they coincide on the major beats. Outside of that, it’s unneccessarily complex to use --3–.
More bembe stuff.
In case you’re curious it’s pronounced bem-bay. I can’t do the mark over the e.
hmmm… that “website” - “Afro-Cuban Rhythms for Drumset” is a book I studied out of at Drummer’s Collective. Maybe it’s been sliced and diced enough to avoid a copyright violation. I don’t know. Anyway, the book is great.
http://www.amazon.com/Afro-Cuban-Rhythms-Drumset-Frank-Malabe/dp/0897245741
Same here. I hear it in six, and that triplet notation linked to looks really odd and confusing to me, because I hear the major beats subdivided into 2s not 3s.
Ditto. If there is no duple counter-rhythm (and there isn’t in the example), there is absolutely no reason to use “3/2” triplet notation. It is designed for a different situation.
I didn’t have a problem with the notation when I was working on it. Frankly, I was grateful someone took the time to put this book out. The price you pay for it is a pittance compared to what you get out of it.
The notation makes more sense when you have it in front of you at your kit and you’re working through the exercises, layering one rhythm on top of the other, adding the accents, etc. I don’t know exactly why they did it the way they did but one thing it does is it illustrates the different undercurrents going into this groove.
The hazards of stuffing centuries-old oral tradition polyrhythms into a western framework, I guess.
The example given isn’t a polyrhythm. It isn’t complex and it fits very well in western notation without ambiguity. As well as Mozart does. Just a little syncopation, which doesn’t present problems, either. Scott Joplin’s music has total compatability with western notation of now or then.
The notator of that site made the written music unecessarily complex, possibly out of ignorance, or maybe he was just approaching the task from a different angle.
Believe it or not, I once had a piece of demo sheet music thrust at me with a chord described as “C-F-A (pitches). Flat the F one half-step and the A two half-steps.”
Unh…sure, but what’s wrong with calling it a C triad?
That’s not nearly mysterious enough. 
I agree with this. Calling the examples in the link I posted “great transcriptions” was misleading. OTOH, the linked site and other materials I have seen tends to explain why many want to hear the piece in 8. Instructional materials often include breakdowns in 8, even if they aren’t necessary.
To all who are saying that this rhythm is not in a triplet feel/ the notation is wrong etc…please read.
That rhythm comes from, as i typed before, Ghana, The drumming and DANCING of the ewe people, You can familiarize yourself with the drums and bells/shakers (axatse) herehere.
Within the numerous songs that these people play lies Atsiagbekor an old war dance, The dance has two sections. a slow (dotted quarter = 70ish) and a fast (dotted quarter = 130ish)the important thing here is the dance, the dancers dance right on the dotted quarter, and in this art form the dancing and drumming go hand and hand each is equally important and dancers are expected to drum and drummers are expected to dance. If for no other reason that its a 12/8 pattern even if your body wants to feel it as a 3 or a 6. Also within the drumming itself there is a lot of polyrhythms happening, With the patten being in 12/8 the master drummer can easily improvise over the bell by feeling the pattern in 3. 6. 2. 12. etc
This pattern of turned into bembe music when Africans were brought over to the Americas, with the music still ingrained in them. Creating a whole new style over time.
Please try to appreciate that it is in 12/8 now, no matter how square our hips may move to it.
Actually, I was referring to the grooves in the book (site), not the bell pattern.
The bell pattern as it’s written in it’s triplet way is part of a groove further along in 4/4 where the hi-hat plays quarter notes. It’s sort of out of context. Again, the site is really a cut & paste job of a book, so what you’re seeing is a bit different than what was originally intended.
If you’re referring to me, my main objection was to the notation, which I felt was uneccesarily complex. A 12-beat pattern can be expressed in western notation very well as 12/8, 6/8 or 6/4. Note that the text on that page even suggests 6/8, but the notation examples are in 4/4. Using "3"s to force it to fit into a 4/4 framework only makes it harder to read or visualize.
As far as hearing triplets, I don’t, at least not in the smallest beat division. I hear 6 groups of 2. YMMV. Even if you hear them, the notation is inappropriate.
And it’s entirely possible that other instruments, playing or accenting on different beats, can be layered on top of that base percussion, but I don’t hear any in the example.