https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-do-an-ear-training-audit/
It’s an inescapable fact that great musicians have great ears. Unfortunately most musicians don’t have very good ears – and they’re understandably a bit embarrassed about that. So if you want to really reach your potential as a musician, it’s time you did an ear training audit. https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-do-an-ear-training-audit/
Get Rhythm: All About Syncopation
So, you are listening to a hot jazz trio or your favorite metal band when you notice that the beat seems to be jumping all over the place. While the band seems to know where they are going, you are wondering, “Where’s the beat?”
The chances are that the band has left the comfortable land of boring rhythmic structure and is journeying into the exciting musical world of syncopation.
Though these may be uncharted, intimidating waters, they’re well-worth exploring! The concept of syncopation is, at its core, a simple one. Besides, if you’re not careful, music without syncopation can become a rhythmic snoozefest.
Read on for your introduction to how syncopation affects the feel of music, how to develop your ear for it, and how to apply it to your instrument to create your own songs with syncopation. Then, try our syncopation exercises to practice what you’ve learned!
Table of Contents
1. What is Syncopation?
2. Where Did Syncopation Come From?
3. Why Learn Syncopation?
4. Types of Syncopation
5. Syncopation for Different Instruments
6. How to Learn Syncopation
7. Ear Training Examples of Syncopation
8. More Syncopation Practice
9. Skipping Around the Beat
What is Syncopation?
Syncopation is your secret portal to the world of intricate, complex rhythms that immediately add a spark of interest to the music they’re underlying. Since its inception, musicians from nearly every genre have dipped their toes into the syncopation pool, recognizing that great things happen when you play around with the beat of a song.
A Definition of Syncopation:
“A deviation from a regular expected rhythmic pattern, often placing stress (through dynamic accents) on weaker beats or omitting stronger beats.”
When you count, there is a natural “stress” (aka a dynamic accent in musical terms) on the downbeats (think “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”). A syncopated rhythm will often omit the strong downbeat or stress an unexpected part of the rhythm, often using 8th notes and 16th notes patterns (e.g. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and).
Where do you find syncopation?
As you can see, the concept of syncopation is actually quite simple, and can be applied to every musical style, whether you are mixing a new dance beat, singing jazz, and or jamming out with your indie rock band.
You can often find syncopation in musical styles like Latin music, jazz music, and funk.
In fact, wherever there is rhythm, there is the potential for syncopation. Even in dance: the dancer can syncopate with a strong step on a weak beat.
Yet syncopating while keeping the beat steady can be difficult to master. By working on your listening skills, you can teach yourself basic syncopation by listening and then imitating the rhythms.
Syncopation is important because without it your music can easily become repetitive and uninteresting. While that might be what some artists strive for, most musicians like to both entertain and challenge the listener with exciting new musical ideas!
How to Identify Syncopation
So how exactly does syncopation sound?
When you’re listening to a piece of music, you often end up subconsciously tapping your foot to the beat. Now, take note: are the strongest accented notes coming down right as your foot taps the floor, or while your foot is up in the air?
If your foot is up in the air, there’s a high chance the song you’re listening to deviates from the regular pattern of accented downbeats! In fact, if your foot is doing anything besides hitting the floor at exactly the time the accented note is heard, chances are you’re hearing a syncopated rhythm.
Where Did Syncopation Come From?
While syncopation has been around for eons in many musical cultures, it gained prominence in Western music in the late middle ages. After the Black Death swept through Europe, the entire culture responded with a major shake-up: the Ars Nova (“New Art”) composers’ playful experimentation rebelled against the prevailing rhythmic norms:
It may sound pretty tame to our ears, but reading these rhythms challenges even experienced classical musicians.
These rhythmic innovations stuck around (albeit in a somewhat tamer forms), with prominent Baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach using basic syncopated rhythms in their compositions. Classical and Romantic composers followed suit, with big names such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms also using syncopation to create variety in their music.
Try counting along with the beginning Mozart piece in “two” (duple meter), then in “three” (triple meter):
Which one fit better? Which one do you think Mozart wrote in?
Show answer
It’s pretty tricky – Mozart obscures the meter with accents on normally weak beats.
Syncopation Skips On
It didn’t end there. 20th century composers, notably Igor Stravinsky, picked up on syncopation and ran with it, experimenting with accenting offbeats for incredible dramatic effect. Stravinsky’s composition “The Rite of Spring” spun the idea of rhythm on its head, incorporating highly irregular patterns and breaking away from the strict rhythmic structure so common in orchestral work:
Syncopation also found a comfortable home in jazz music. To the jazz musician, syncopation is as natural as breathing.
A Meeting of Two Cultures
Syncopation received a huge boost when West African music met European music in the Americas. Traditionally, West African musicians focused much more musical attention on the various dimensions of rhythm, creating complex, dynamic, and fluid rhythmic expressions undreamed of by their European counterparts.
When African-Americans layered these rhythms with the “squarer” European-derived rhythms, syncopation became the norm for ragtime, jazz, blues, rock, and now nearly every form of popular music worldwide.
For example, listen to the left hand part for Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”:
It’s a straight, steady, 2/4 European-style march. Now the more fluid rhythms in the right hand:
Combine them together, and you have syncopation:
Why Learn Syncopation?
If you’re sticking to straight, strict rhythms, you’re really missing out on a world of fun. Put it this way: syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to melody – it creates a desire for resolution and a reason for forward motion.
1. Play music you love with ease
Nowadays, most of the music you’ll hear and love will have a degree of syncopation. Learning the rhythmic structures underlying these songs will go a long way in helping you play them without getting your instrument in a tangle.
2. Add interest to your music
The unexpectedness of syncopation elevates your music from sounding “nice” to having real punch! The importance of syncopation in creating unexpected, “groovy” rhythms cannot be overstated. Rhythmically complex genres such as Latin music, funk, and jazz could not exist without the contribution of syncopation.
3. Make it easier to craft lyrics and sing along
Lyrics are, in fact, often syncopated! The very nature of language and speech means that it’s rare for phrases to fall perfectly in, say, 4/4 time with beats 1 and 3 being the strongest. Speech is more nuanced than that, with stressed syllables of lyrics often falling on sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and generally between beats.
If you have lyrics in mind, try creating a syncopated instrumental accompaniment that matches with the syllable stress pattern of the words you’re using.
4. Two birds, one stone
Learning syncopation will also enable you to make sense of one of the hardest-to-tame beasts in music theory: polyrhythms!
Polyrhythms give a feeling of multiple simultaneous meters. Consider the example of triplets over duplets:
The second and third notes of the triplets can be said to be syncopated; they fall outside of the expected “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” beat that the duplets provide.
Polyrhythms literally consist of multiple conflicting rhythms simultaneously being played. Thus, these grooves provide an excellent listening exercise; if you can make sense of polyrhythms, you’ve already understood syncopation!
Types of Syncopation
There are various ways that you can move around, add, or omit beats to spice up the rhythm of your music. It’s not always a complicated mess of a rhythm; basic syncopation is easily teachable to young children!
Let’s look at a few of the most popular and straightforward ways you can syncopate:
Even-Note Syncopation
Even-note syncopation is generally found in the rhythm section, and it’s perhaps the most straightforward kind of syncopation. This is ubiquitous in Western music, and occurs in “simple” time signatures with an even number of beats (think 2/2, 2/4, and 4/4 time).
Normally, the odd-numbered beats 1 and 3 are stressed.
If you want to add a bit of interest to your 4/4-time composition, try emphasizing beats 2 and 4 instead, and seeing what happens! The beat does not technically change, but the dynamic accents do, creating a different feel.
This is also referred to as a backbeat, and is commonly found in pop, rock, and electronic music. Ska guitar commonly uses a backbeat to accent the “upstrokes”.
Suspension
This one involves a musical “sleight-of-hand” to make the syncopation work. The strong beats are “masked” by using a tie, so the emphasis falls on the weak beats. Take a look at the score below: while the note of the strong beat technically still exists, the beat itself – poof! – “disappears”. Here’s an example of such a syncopated rhythm:
Missed Beat
While suspension involves masking the beat, missed beat syncopation means omitting it entirely.
In missed beat syncopation, the normally stressed beat isn’t shifted or split, but rather, replaced with a rest.
Offbeat Syncopation
This can best be described as a seeming shift in the beat, occurring when the stressed note falls between beats. Often, this is achieved by shifting the whole measure over by half a beat, so that the first note is half a beat long, therefore “skewing” the remainder of the measure. This is particularly popular in pop and rock music.
This is also a rhythmic hallmark of ska and reggae music; the accented beats and the piano/guitar lines hit the offbeat “and”s, giving these genres their distinctive groove.
Generally speaking, there are two types of offbeat syncopation: beat-level and division-level. Think of this as macro and micro-offbeat.
Beat-level
Think of beat-level syncopation as a shift in the beat; the beat still remains the same, but the shift creates emphasis on the “and”s of the count:
This is also sometimes called off-beat syncopation.
Division-level
This type of syncopation also signifies a shift in the beat; however, it occurs on a smaller metrical level, often making the syncopation more complex.
Division-level syncopation occurs when the “unit” being syncopated isn’t a beat, but a subdivision of a beat, and the subdivision (e.g. a sixteenth note within a beat containing four sixteenth notes) gets shifted.
A Syncopation Tickle Test
You can test yourself ability to produce and identify some of the syncopation types with this fun exercise: say “tickle” over and over again with a steady beat:
Now, try accenting the second and fourth “ticks”:
Which form of syncopation are you using?
Show answer
Accent the “le” instead of the “tick”:
You might call this offbeat accent a little ska-tickle!
Now try taking out a “tick” here and there:
Now what type(s) of syncopation are we using? (Hint: we are combining two types!)
Show answer
Syncopation for Different Instruments
Syncopation can occur in any instrument, and does not necessarily have to present in the percussion section.
Vocals
Music with syncopation is everywhere! If you’re singing, you’re most likely to be syncopating. Most popular music is highly syncopated, as is our natural speech. But learning how to describe or even notate this syncopation can be invaluable for your sight-reading, and for communicating with other musicians.
Rhythmic syllables are a great way to get in touch with syncopation and develop more precision in your interpretation of syncopated rhythms. These are popular in many cultures, especially in India.
Listen to Zakir Hussain (from the north Indian Hindustani tradition) and Vikku Vinayakram (from the south Indian Karnatak tradition) “talking rhythm” in the first highly-syncopated 25 seconds of Shakti’s “La danse de bonheur”:
When you want to “talk rhythm” in Western music, the Kodály approach syllables work the best.
If you’re not sure about your syncopation, sing some syncopated lyrics over a steady beat and melody – or even clap your hands and sing “off” the beats.
The Rhythm Section
Perhaps the most obvious place where you start with syncopating music is syncopating the percussion section. Syncopation videos and tutorials for drummers can be found all over the internet, with many illustrating how you can shift around where the kicks and snares land to create a distinctive new groove.
For a basic exercise, play around with displacing the usual pattern of kick drum on 1 and 3 and snare drum on 2 and 4. This guide gives some great starter beats for drummers looking to mix it up.
Syncopated drumming can be combined with an “unsyncopated”, straight melody for an interesting effect, or vice-versa.
Piano & Keyboards
Historically, syncopation has been incredibly popular in piano music, especially with ragtime, jazz, and swing piano.
Take some cues from jazz piano on how to displace notes for anticipation and dramatic effect.
Another popular use of syncopation in piano is in Latin music. By learning just a few simple chords and arpeggiating them, you can play your own syncopated Latin groove that Gloria Estefan herself would be proud of!
How To Learn Syncopation
To understand syncopation inside-out, it helps to have some knowledge of music theory, particularly familiarity with other elements of rhythm. But having syncopation explained to you isn’t enough; to really get a good grasp of it, you need to try it out for yourself, too!
Tools
As with anything in music, a well-trained ear will be your best friend in learning syncopation. Understanding different time signatures and where the stressed beats normally lie will go a long way in helping you make sense of syncopated rhythms. FIXME INSERT LINK + SUGGESTION TO A RELEVANT ARTICLE OF OURS MAYBE?
How to Count Syncopation
Remember the 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and count we mentioned in the beginning? You can expand this to 1 e and a 2 e and a 3 e and a 4 e and a, which takes you up to sixteenth notes. Count out syncopated rhythms by stressing the spoken syllables that the beats fall on.
Start by Listening
Figure out what time signature the piece of music you’re listening to is in, then take note of where the stressed beats are. You might have to listen to the song several times over, but soon enough, you’ll be able to tap out the beat and determine which beats are accented, and where the accent is “off” the beat.
Practice makes perfect; the more syncopation you listen to, the better you’ll get at spotting these seemingly scattered beats, and the more you’ll see that similar syncopated rhythms exist in songs within the same genre.
As always, start small, and start simple. Listen to syncopation in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 time, and learn how to count and perform them.
When you’ve mastered counting and tapping out basic syncopation, try our exercises below for something a bit trickier…
Ear Training for Syncopation in Latin Music
Use your ears to hear how syncopation is applied in these examples.
- Listen to the ear training example
- Follow with the musical notation
- Try to tap or clap the different rhythmic lines
- Listen to the full track and try to tap the rhythm with the all of the instruments playing
In this example, you will be listening to a Latin music clip. In Latin music like merengue and salsa, the percussion instruments, piano, and bass line all work together to make an incredible intricate rhythmic web. In the clips below you will hear all of the different Latin percussion instruments solo. Then you will hear the full track (repeated once for a total of eight measures).
After you have mastered all of the rhythms above, listen to the full track below. Follow the notation. Then, take turns playing along with each of the instrument parts in turn. Once you are comfortable with these complex rhythms, pick up your instrument and create a melody that follows the different rhythmic patterns. If you are a vocalist, improvise a simple melodic line over the complex rhythms, occasionally incorporating syncopation into your melodic line.
More Syncopation Practice
Feel comfortable with these complex Latin rhythms? Then call a friend over. Each of you will take a different rhythm and take turns playing the rhythm and improvising over the syncopation.
While syncopation is found in many musical styles, Latin music has some of the most complex syncopated rhythms in popular music. You might find some syncopation in rock and jazz, mainstream pop tunes, dance music, and indie rock typically don’t stray as far from basic rhythms.
In hip-hop music, the syncopation is often found in the actual lyrics, and the truly talented hip-hop artist can create complicated rhymes as intricate as the most complex drum beats.
Listen to a few of the musical examples below to further explore syncopation in music. As you listen to the music, use your ear training skills to:
- Find the pulse of the song
- Tap a basic four note rhythm
- Identify the downbeats
- Hear how the instruments and/or vocals deviate from the stronger beats
- Listen for rhythms on the weaker beats
If you are comfortable with syncopation, you can even take out a pair of sticks and try to tap out the more difficult rhythmic beats:
In a Rush to Syncopate?
In this music example, the entire band goes crazy with the beat, throwing in so much syncopation that it can be difficult to determine the pulse of the piece.
This includes a change of time signature to 7/8 (or seven 8th notes per measure instead of the typical eight 8th notes per measure to make standard 4/4 time).
Brick Syncopation
Almost by definition, funk music is syncopated. Whether it’s the bass player messing with the beats or the drummer skipping quarter notes left and right to play syncopated 16th note rhythms, if you want to find syncopation, funk is where it is at.
So Much To Syncopate
The Dave Matthews Band is one mainstream band today that is not afraid of experimenting with rhythms, time signatures, and syncopation.
With a myriad of musical influences, The Dave Matthews Band is a great example of mainstream music that can also challenge the listener.
Skipping Around the Beat
Now that you know some common syncopated rhythms, use your ear training skills to listen for these beats in music you already know. There are literally hundreds of characteristic rhythms used in all musical genres, from classic rock to jazz to samba.
Once you’ve really understood syncopation, try incorporating it into your music, whatever your instrument! If you are a vocalist, make up your own rhythms and vocal lines using nonsense syllables, like jazz scat singing. If you play the violin or another orchestral instrument, mess around with adding notes to these Latin rhythms or the other score examples in this post.
As you become comfortable with basic rhythmic patterns, start experimenting with your instrument or voice. Soon, you’ll be naturally reading and improvising your own syncopated rhythms and melodies with ease.
The post Get Rhythm: All About Syncopation appeared first on Musical U.
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How to Clap in Time
For some, finding the beat can be as easy as hearing your heartbeat or breathing, but not everyone picks up on the pulse so easily. Maybe you’re that guy who can’t hear the rhythm and has two left feet, or the girl who always finds herself clapping on beats 1 and 3-ish when everyone else is jamming out on 2 and 4. Maybe you are a singer who has perfect pitch but can’t find beat 1.
If that’s you, don’t worry! While it may seem like clapping in time is something you “should” already know how to do, with some ear training skills and a little bit of practice it is a quite learnable – and valuable – skill.
Why learn to clap in time?
What if I just want to play my instrument? What’s the big deal about clapping in time anyway?
Well, it turns out that clapping in time is a foundational skill of musicality, and will enhance your performance and enjoyment in every aspect of your musical experience.
So today you will learn the basics of clapping in time step-by-step:
- Learn how to truly hear what is around you
- Learn how to sense rhythms in your environment
- Clap basic rhythms
- Learn about clapping on “2 and 4”, and “1 and 3”
- Learn how to clap to a song
Once you have learned how to truly pick out the pulse from a musical example, it only takes a little bit of practice to truly master clapping in time.
How to Listen
The first step to clapping in time is learning how to listen, really listen. The legendary composer Pauline Oliveros described this type of listening as “deep listening” or “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing.”
What this means, is that in your everyday life, you take the time to listen and use your ears to extract sounds, specific sounds.
Exercise 1. Quiet
The composer John Cage was best known for his experimental music and philosophy on sound. One of his best-known works is titled “4’33” in which the performer sits quietly for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. During this time, the ambience of the room like people shuffling their feet, birds outside, or even people coughing, became the composition.
There is rhythm all around you. This can be anything from the sounds of traffic and the city to the quiet of the woods to the rushing and cyclical pounding of ocean waves on the shore. Birds, insects, weather… all have rhythm. Learning how to discern different pulses within a greater soundscape will help you learn how to properly clap in time and find the beat.
For this first exercise, you will take ten minutes to simply sit still and listen. As you sit:
- Listen for sounds around you
- Try to pull out specific rhythms or melodies you might hear in your environment
- See if there is a steady beat, like a backing truck or the chirping of a grasshopper, that you can lightly tap your hand to in time
Exercise 2. Heartbeat
To date, nearly every civilization and society have developed some sort of percussive rhythm in their music, even if they have been isolated from modern society for all time. Part of this is that we have an intrinsic rhythm in our bodies through our heartbeat, even our breathing.
For this exercise:
- Find your pulse on your wrist
- Start counting with your heartbeat 1-2-3-4
- Tap your foot to your heartbeat
- For a variation, stand up and jog, doing a few jumping jacks, or walk briskly and repeat the exercise
- How has your heartbeat changed?
Breaking Down the Beat
Why is it important to clap in time, to find the pulse of a piece of music?
The underlying layers of rhythmic sound are what drive the music. Yes, the melody sticks in our heads and the harmony tugs our emotions. But without the steady beat, we wouldn’t be tapping our feet and feeling the groove. This steady pulse is the rock on which rhythm is built, and the measure of music’s movement forward.
Exercise 3: Clapping in 4/4 time
In 4/4 time there are four beats per measure. The pulse follows a simple 1-2-3-4 quarter note pattern
- Listen to the Four Beat example below
- Close your eyes and internalize the pulse
- Tap your foot to the rhythm
- Clap to the rhythm
Most of the music you hear on the radio has a basic 4/4 time signature like the example above. What this means is that you can take a song in 4/4 and isolate the simple four beat pattern by counting 1-2-3-4 along with the song.
Exercise 4: Clapping with “Eye of the Tiger”
If you listen to “Eye of the Tiger” below, starting at [0:26], you can hear a very basic quarter note rhythm in the drums that continues throughout the entire song.
The drum part is very basic. You can hear the bass drum and snare drum rhythm (from about [0:30] on) isolated here:
- Listen to “Eye of the Tiger”
- Starting at 0:26, listen specifically to the drum set part
- If you can, tap your foot to the basic 4/4 rhythm
- Count 1-2-3-4 with the drum part
- Clap as you count
Exercise 5: Clapping on beats 2 and 4
While you are listening, you may have noticed that the snare drum part falls on beats 2 and 4.
In fact, most of the time, when you clap along with a popular tune on the radio, you will want to clap on beats 2 and 4, not on beats 1 and 3 (don’t be that guy!):
In many pop, rock, hip hop, and even jazz tunes, the snare drum or tambourine falls on beats 2 and 4.
- Listen to the Example below
- Count out loud
- Practice clapping on beats 2 and 4
- After you have done this, go back to “Eye of the Tiger” and try clapping on beats 2 and 4 along with the snare drum
More Practice:
You can practice clapping on beats 2 and 4 every time you turn on the radio. There are many examples of pop and rock songs, especially, that have a clear drum part that will help you find the pulse and clap on beats 2 and 4.
Clap it Off
Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” is another great example of clapping on beats 2 and 4. Check it out:
Now, not all genres have the audience clapping on beats 2 and 4. There are many popular folk genres where beats 1 and 3 are emphasized or even every beat, but in most popular music cases, you will want to clap on beats 2 and 4.
For example, in the Americana Bluegrass video before, you would clap on every beat, not just two and four.
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Clapping
There are some genres like pop and rock that have many simple straightforward beats. Below are musical examples that are driven by a simple pulse. Using what you have learned in this article:
- Listen for the drum part – the snare, in this case, rings like gunshots on 2 and 4.
- Clap along with the snare on beats 2 and 4
- Listen for other rhythm section instruments like the keys, bass, or guitar
- See if you can clap on 1-2-3-4
We Will, We Will Clap You
In case you’re still having a rough time with clapping on 2 and 4, clap right along with the guys from Queen:
Did you think you were clapping on 3? If you count a fast “4”, it seems like this: “1-2-3 rest, 1-2-3 rest”. However, once the song is underway, that’s going to feel too fast (this phenomenon is called “double-time”). Here’s a better way to think of it: “1 & 2 , 3 & 4” (so the rests is really the “&” of 2 and 4).
All About That Clapping on 2 and 4
Here’s another online clapping tutorial disguised as a hit song:
In the intro clap along on 2 and 4 with the dancers. Wait, what was that double clap thing? You heard right! Here’s the pattern: “1 2 3 4, 1 2& 3 4”. Don’t worry if you can’t catch the double clap – learning to clap on 2 and 4 is quite enough for now.
Once you can clap along with the intro, work on keeping the same pattern going through the verse. When the clapping returns in the chorus, you’ll see if you were able to keep it up.
Still Struggling? Call a Friend!
So far you have practiced listening to rhythm and beats in your environment, picking out simple drum parts in tunes, and clapping along with a drum set. If you find that you have been struggling with the exercises up to this point, take some time to practice these exercises with a friend.
Sometimes practicing with someone else will help you develop your own skills.
And don’t worry if they struggle as much as you do or if they are a clapping-in-time superstar. Either way, working together will help your musical skills!
I hope that you enjoyed this fun article on clapping in time. Now you have the basics that you need to clap in time. As you become more comfortable with easier pop and rock songs, move on to other genres like jazz or hip hop. With some practice, you will soon be a clapping champion!
The post How to Clap in Time appeared first on Musical U.
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How To Pick The Perfect Song To Fit Your Voice
New musicality video:
In these heady days of universal musical access, singers can choose from a dizzying range of musical styles to sing. Singing in different genres can increase your vocal abilities and opportunities, but how do you know which styles best suit your own voice? https://www.musical-u.com/learn/how-to-pick-the-perfect-song-to-fit-your-voice-5-tips/
It can take some time to figure out what songs will sound and feel really good with your own natural voice. If you keep in mind these five tips, your voice will stay healthy while you’re learning and growing in your identity as a singer.
1. The Shower Test
2. Home on the Range
3. Style and Comfort
4. Take it Easy
5. Ask Why
All the ins and outs of singing can take some time to learn. By choosing the right songs for your voice, you will be able to focus more attention on building your technique, strength and stamina without harming your voice. Since you’ll be more comfortable along the way, you’ll also have more fun.
So press that record button! Let your emotions guide you as you find your own style, and your “home on the range.” Take the easy road at first, and figure out why you really want to sing. Once you have taken these steps, you’ll find the songs that best express the natural treasures within you!
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