FIERCE GUITAR
GREG HOWE
Displaced Accents and Polyrhythms
One of the most important aspects of
improvisation, at least for me, is the ability to
steadily deliver a stream of 16th notes (four
notes per beat) containing interesting and
somewhat unpredictable lines within the context
of mid- to high-tempo music scenarios. Playing
16th notes at a typical mid-tempo speed such
as 120 bpm is not necessarily a difficult task for
many guitarists, however to do so in a manner
that doesn’t rely on the use of overly predictable
sequences or pre-rehearsed licks can often
prove to be a bit more challenging.
One of the methods I’ve found to be very
helpful in assisting with this quest is displacing
the accents in these sets of fours, resulting
in a particular kind of polyrhythm. The
various official definitions of the word usually
include language that goes something like,
“the simultaneous sounding of two or more
independent rhythms.” If this concept were
new to me, that definition would likely be of
little value, so before we try to make use of
this concept let’s first try to understand it.
For our purposes, a polyrhythm will be defined
as an odd-numbered sequence or grouping of
notes used in the context of a time signature
for which they were not originally intended. In
this case, all odd groupings will be 16th notes
(four notes per beat).
Greg Howe
Greg Howe has enjoyed a successful recording career
since bursting onto the scene in 1988, and his talents
have been sought after by some of the biggest names
in the music entertainment industry, such as Michael
Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and Enrique Iglesias.
For example, Exercise 1 illustrates a very simple sequence in G major
that descends three notes at a time from each consecutive lower
degree of the scale, implying a triplet (three notes per beat) feel. The
natural tendency is to keep counting to three as we play it in order to
ensure that the design of the sequence remains consistent with the
correlating numbers.
However, Exercise 2 shows how that same exact sequence could be played
in a 16th note (four note per beat) fashion. As you can see, nothing actually
changes other than our perception of how the sequence is heard within the
context of the rhythm. In this case we’re using a three-note sequence while
counting to four, which means that from a four-note-per-beat perspective,
we no longer have a series of identical sequences. In fact we would now
get three different sequences containing four notes each. This polyrhythm
would generally be referred to as three-into-four.
Since the dominant characteristic of a polyrhythm is that it guaran-
tees the rhythmic displacement of sequenced and/or accented notes,
the use of polyrhythmic ideas within passages can be very helpful in
bringing about more creative and less predictable sounding licks and
lines. The highlighted sections of the following examples illustrate the
actual sequence being used, while the dotted lines illustrate the 16th-
note context in which they’re being applied.
