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Listen from 5'09" to 5'53".

Polymeter is responsible for many of my favorite morsels. In this example, The section (which you’ll hear twice) is comprised of 24 bars, but the bass and the guitar take different roads to get there. The guitar phrasing takes the traditional road, sounding off in 8 bars of ¾, while the bass does something pretty cool: 2 bars of 7/4, 2 bars of 7/8, and 1 bar of ¾ to fill it all out. I find this to be especially smooth because 3/4 and 7/4 meet at 21 bars (3 bars of 7, or 7 bars of 3), and after doing so, the bass and guitar both need only play 1 bar of ¾ to round things off nicely.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.

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This track is a nice example of polymeter. Two elements in counterpoint, one in 4/4, and the other in 7/4, and come together every 29th beat (1 beat after 7 measures of 4, or 4 measures of 7) to move to a new chord, except for the last measure. This differs from polyrhythm in that the rhythms are not “stretched” to fit into a given measure length. They are allowed their natural course, everyone staying in the same tempo. Every last measure of a 4 bar phrase has an extra beat of 4/4 added which breaks things up a bit. The intro is also worth noting; it counts out 8 bars of 4/4 instead of 7, sneakily hiding the counter-element that gives this track its charm.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.

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Listen from 3'10" to 3'50".

Rhythmic variation is all too common, but this is a particular style of rhythmic shifting that I’m quite fond of, called augmentation. In this excerpt, the hi-hat keeps the beat with a consistent quarter note, while everything else plays a rhythm in unison that shifts over time. The rhythm in question starts on an off-beat and moves through various feels while retaining a similar character. From 8th note triplets (3 notes in the space of 2 8ths), it moves into a 16th note backbeat feel, to quarter note triplets, to dotted 8th notes. Each one of these rhythms extends the length between notes, all the while retaining the overall tempo of the track, creating a distinctive effect.

After the dotted 8ths, the band explores the same concept but shortens the divisions instead, going from 8th note triplets in groups of 4 (3 + 1), to 16th notes in groups of 5 (3 + 2). This final rhythm, being a 5 16th note grouping, implies a polymeter: 5/16 against 4/4. This is eventually confirmed when at the very end, the band cleverly uses the downbeat of the 5/16 pattern as the new quarter-note pulse, essentially slowing the tempo of the song down. If interpreted this way, they’ve created a metric modulation, a technique that if prepared properly can be quite effective. By carrying over an old rhythm, keeping the speed of that rhythm the same, but changing the pulse, the tempo has effectively changed while (hopefully) making it all feel a bit smoother than a direct tempo change would.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.