by Ed Drury
Over the years, the emails I have received about this publication have consistently acknowledged the articles that contain technical playing information with sound samples. One of the first questions I get from student who have just begun to master circular breathing is ,"How do I incorporate that skill into rhythms?" In this article, I will present practice rhythms, strategies for composing new rhythms and links to real songs which used these tactics to lay down a basic rhythm or vamp. We will develop this into a didj piece I composed and recorded which you can stream or download as an MP3 and play with it, alter it or compose an entirely new solo of your own.
Skip this first bit if you are comfortable with the terms time signatures and variance.
Let's start with counting. Easy enough. But first let me explain something about counting. Most musicians don't do it while they are playing. They feel their way. But good musicians can usually count and they do it when they are figuring out a part or communicating a part to someone else. So that is why I'm introducing counting here. It is a tool, one you can always fall back to when you want to figure something out or create something new.
Ok, what are we going to count? Time. Time can be divided in a number of ways. Anyway you want to really. Before we count (time) we're going to make some assumptions about time. First actor on the stage is the concept of a bar. This is our first division of time and what constitutes a "measure". More importantly, it is the highest number that we have to count to for this tutorial. Let's say it's 4. "Four what?". Enter the second actor, the time signature. You've seen it. It's usually found at the far left of a staff of music. Two numbers. The first , or top one is the number of notes in each division or bar of time. We're talking four here so we need to count to four over and over. If the second or lower one is also four, we've got it made. That is the interval which constitutes what four is or four of what. Four, in this case is a quarter note and happily it is one quarter of four so each measure we are going to count one, two, three, four and start over.
There is a further division - always. What if we want, like Mozart, more notes in the measure but still want to count four over and over? We divide each beat in half. We count One and Two and Three and Four and. Thus we have eight notes, every two notes equal a quarter of the measure, every note equals an eighth. That's fun, divide it again and count One And A Two And A Three And A Four And A. So dividing time. That's what we're doing here and next will develop a box to divide into smaller boxes which are beats. One e and ah Two e and ah Three e and ah Four e and ah. Here, and so forth. Quarternotes divid into eight notes. Eighth notes can be split into sixteenth notes and sixteenth notes into thirtysecond notes. Those are all equal divisions. We'll save dotted notes for next time.
Ok, let's get all boxy. We'll stick with even numbers to start out.
| One | Two | Three | Four |
| Da | Da | Waaa | aaaa |
In the top row, our count of beats. Each box is worth one quarter note. In the bottom row our "notes" or events. The first two are tonged beats using the syllable "Da". The second two are really tied together to make a "Waaaaaa" sound the duration of a half note (or two quarter notes) and this is a cheek powered sound where the breath can occur. Now lets continue to divide it up staying in our 4/4 time signature, but adding some eight notes using a double tongue device, "Ga Da" which will involve using the back of the tongue for "Ga" and the front of the tongue for "Da".
| One | And | Two | And | Three | And | Four | And |
| Ga | Da | Ga | Da | waaa | aaaa | aaaa | aaaa |
Really the same rhythm, but with a slightly different feel. The breath is in the same place and occupying the same time interval as in the first example. Before we get into odd numbers, there are some things we can play with to give these basic rhythms more character. Here, I'll introduce the concept of an accent or slightly stressed part of the rhythmic phrase. We can put it anywhere we like, make it fixed or march it along to different places in the phrase. In this simple box notation, I'll indicate an accented beat by capitalizing the accented phrase while leaving the rest all lower case.
| One | And | Two | And | Three | And | Four | And |
| GA | da | ga | da | WAA | aaaa | aaaa | aaaa |
Notice above that there are two accented beats : the first beat of the measure and the second beat. I've actually accented the breath. When we get into odd beat cycles or measures with an odd number of breats, I personally tend to really accent breaths and use them as counting devices or time markers. Oddly, one of the most common questions I'm asked is, "When in that do you breath? I don't hear it?" It's ironic that breathing the very reason for the accents. When a lot of us first learn to circular breath, our sound is a bit weaker and the tone drops during the breath. Working on making the sound strong and the tone hold during a breath is the next level. A lot of people put a great deal of effort into making the breath a silent thing, but really it's just another note or event in the cycle and it can be a punctuation. Here is an exercise : Make your first note a breath in through the nose. A quick sharp strong breath timed with a cheek squeeze, in fact here's an idea, make the first two notes a breath in. Here a boxed example :
| One | And | Two | And | Three | And | Four | And |
| WA | aaaa | WA | aaaa | da | da | da | da |
Beat Cycles vs Time Signature
Our first song example gives me a good chance to clarify a pet peeve of mine. It seems I constantly find examples where people confuse a beat cycle with time signature. It would be easy to say that this didj pattern is in eight, that is to say 8/8 time. It is not, it is four but it is an eight beat cycle in that the rhythm repeats it self every two measures (4/4 + 4/4). So there are two measures or bars in the cycle. Up to now, we've only talked about a pattern that lasts over one measure, but if you listen to most western music an eight beat pattern is a very very common thing. In fact most drum machines default to an eight beat cycle in 4/4 time when you switch them on exactly because rock, folk, reggae, alternative, blues and pop are so predominately constructed around this formula. We'll do both, and they are not always different. Often the beat cylce is the same as the time signature. If the durations of all the beats is the same for one example. But they are often not the same and we'll cover that in a little while.
We'll leave talk about variations and more complicated song structures to the next article and stick to an example that uses one vamp, through out. I decided to use this piece exactly because it is totally "boxy" in the didj. My guitars are the feature in this piece. The didj is the rhythmic hook and the vamp stays solid through out. And it wasn't looped, it's called holding a groove. A quick note about the mp3 samples. You will be taken the MP3.COM song page where you can stream in lo/fi (modem users), hi/fi (DSL or Cable) or download the track. For this, I will get half a cent! So you're making me rich if you do this. Thank you so much for the half cent. But come back after you listen and look at the tablature for the didj part. Here is the link followed by the tablature :
| 1 | 2 and | 3 and | 4 | 5 | 6 and | 7 | 8 |
| Do | DoDa | Toot1 Do | Toot | Do | Da Da | Toot | Da |
1 The toots are the first overtone note. You can review this technique and gets tons of exercises on it in my "Etudes on the Toot" article. The breath is taken just before the toot, during the "aa" sounds of "DoDa". Try phrasing it to "DaaToot" such that the natural increase in pressure as the cheeks are brought tighter squeezes into the overtone note. Some will be disappointed that the didj is not soloed for this, but you should get used to listening for your instrument's parts in ensemble to learn as much as you can from various recording artists who use the didj in their compositions.
Let's get odd!
Five into Nine is a nine beat cycle alternating beat cycles of 4 and 5 beats which produces a feel of a nine beat cycle. It uses triple tonguing to split beats one and two into pulses every two adding up to an eight note in duration. Or, in other words each burst contains sixteenth notes. The alternate beat cycles of four and five create in effect one beat cycle of nine. As Randy Graves pointed out to me in private email, these "beats" in the top row have different duration. The beats in boxes 1,2,5 and 6 are groups of sixteenth notes. The actual times signature could be written as 11/8. This is often called additive rhythm. Here is the tab counting as a beat cycle nine :
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| Tukita | Tukita | Huh | Huh | Tukita | Tukita | Huh | Huh | Huh |
The "huh" is a bounced breath sometimes augmented with a vocal either falsetto or normal pitch. The high falsettos you hear are actually performed during the breath in.
Here is it boxed out counting in 11/8 Time Signature. note that each box is an eighth note in duration, there are eleven boxes representing a box notation of an 11/8 measure .
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| Tuk-it | ta Tuk | it ta | Huh | Huh | Tukit | Tatuk | it ta | Huh | Huh | Huh |
Knowing the interval or duration of the notes, we can just add them up. There are twelve sixteenth notes that adds up to 6 eighth note duration. There are five eighth notes which are our bounced breaths so five plus six is eleven eighth notes or 11/8 is our time signature. So this is the time signature. After you've had a listen, I'll tell you what is in my mind while playing. In other words, how I really count it while playing it.
Here is the link to Five into Nine on MP3:
Ok, once I figured out what I was really going to do I feel this groove by the bounced breaths. In reality, I do two tripple tongues and then take two bounced breaths. Then two more tripple tongued notes and three bounced breaths. Alternating two and three breath bounces with a simple phrase short phrase in between. While we've looked at it from the aspect of beat cycles and time signature, in reality those devices are really only used in the composition of the piece and then abandoned in the performance. If you're boxing beat cycles your mapping events and the duration of each event is not conveyed in your box diagram. If your boxing time signature, however, you must create boxes of equal duration. Making a box in time signature will have more meaning to others. Boxing out a beat cycle may be sufficient to jog your memory for the next session.
Exercises implied - In order to use the breath as a rhythmic device, there are exercises which can help control the duration of the breath cycle, the power of the resultant breath sound and the depth of the breath it self. In other words, you should develop the ability to take a breath of half note, quarter note , eight note and perhaps even sixteenth note duration. And during that breath, an accented, distinct note should result.
To practice playing anything in specific duration, start with a tempo which is neither two fast or too slow. For me, 120 beats for minute is just about right. That's two notes a second and we'll attribute that frequency of beats to eighth notes in this example. While it would be very convenient to use a drum machine other type of time keeping device, a watch and tapping your foot is adequate. First see if you can set your foot tapping once every second. Each tap would be a quarter note in our eight note rhythm equals one of 120 beats a minute. Next we'll need a simple practice rhythm. How about four eight notes on one and two. Da da Da da. Followed by a breath on beat three (a quarter note duration breath) and a breath on beat four (quarter note duration). This is very similar to our first boxy example!
Now we're going to employ a very common and simple rhythmic device. The term "cut time" refers to just what it sounds like, Start tapping your foot twice every second and double the notes you play exactly so that you are doing two eighth notes for every quarter note you did before. Da da da da Da da da da Breath Breath Breath Breath. Stacked up with air? Here is the depth issue. You will suddenly have to make your breaths half as deep or you will be taking twice as much air. Stay with this exercise until you can adjust the depth of your breaths to what is now eighth note duration. Once you accomplished that, you can move to some other strategies for playing faster. Such as rescoring your practice rhythm by moving the breath notes around a bit through the pattern. It's all rather weighted toward the end of the phrase as it is. We suddenly have four breaths in the phrase and we can reassign them into our "boxes". Try this phrase , "Da da Breath Da da Breath Da da Breath Da da Breath." That is a pretty logically reassignment. We have the same number of da's and breaths as we started out with, the breaths are distributed evenly throughout the phrase, although they don't have to be.
What I've done here is to apply a technique to the didjeridu, that is used by percussionists to train in rhythmic patterns. If you've been stuck for things to do with your playing, try scribbling down some box notation. Just put the number of beats in the top row and try filling the bottom row with different mouthshapes or notes about the sound you want to put there. Then see if you can play what you've created. Remember to put some breath sounds into at least one box of your rhythmic phrase so that you can loop phrase over and over without running out of air! In the next section, we'll discuss ornamentations and variations a bit so that you can stay in a particular groove and add enough interesting changes to hold a listener's interest. We'll also take a look at overall structure so that we can hook the grooves we've created into parts and those parts into complete songs.
You can hear examples of many different didjeridu solo's on Ed's didjeridu solo MP3.COM radio station, Solo Didjeridu.
Hear examples of some of the rhythms presented in full songs at http://www.mp3.com/EdDrury
Questions about this and other articles should be sent to Ed Drury