Using 5:6 polymeter as a lead player
Added 2018-06-03 16:00:00 +0000 UTC
I've been playing around with konnakol (it's that indian "scat singing" you may have seen) for many years, but it doesn't always translate over to my instrument, the guitar. Recently though I had some success- a common practice in konnakol and indian music is to play polymetric groupings.
For example, play 8th note triplets, but group them as a 5 note phrase. You could play the notes A-B-C-E-C as 8th note triplets. The first time you play it, the beat falls on the note A. The second time you play it, the beat falls on the note B, third time C, etc etc. You have to repeat the phrase 6 times and then you'll be back starting on the beat again.
Recently I wrote a track that had the following passage- the chord progression went from D to BbAug to Bm - 2 measures of each chord. I loved the way the three notes D-E-F# flowed over this progression, giving a really strange disconnected and comatose feel. I wanted to match the melodic strangeness with a rhythmic strangeness and used this little 5:6 thing where my melody played a 5 note phrase, F#-E-F#-E-D, over and over as 8th note triplets, until I cut it off early to end on a 1 beat.
It gave me exactly the thing I was looking for- a lead that amplified that strange confusing emotion I wanted to feel during those few seconds.
It can be surprisingly difficult to do these sorts of things, and it takes a lot of practice to internalize the rhythm, but you can save some struggle by programming in weird concepts like this on a drum machine or daw to hear the rhythms and practice along with them. I highly recommend you try learning the basic konnakol concepts, as they'll eventually influence your playing and writing in some really liberating ways.
