AUM162: Week 3

For this week, we talked about groove, quantisation, and transcribing rhythm; also vital for our Milestone 1 project, and also a topic I wanted to know more about as I enjoy using groove in my compositions.

There were some rhythmic groove concepts that we learnt, some of which I hear all the time or use but don't really know the names of them or their definitions. With a shuffle feel, it's based off triplet rhythms (Purdie shuffle my favourite shuffle rhythm and it suits the kind of groove I want in my compositions), and a swing feel is mainly heard in jazz and hip hop. Playing before or after the beat feel brings out a very loose and lazy feel (I use this a lot) and how loud/hard the notes are played deals with velocity as they can be accents or ghost notes, which I mainly play around with on drums.

Since I started to compose and experiment with different kind of rhythms, I've never really went back to the "robotic feel" of playing directly on time, as it kills the laid-back-groovy feel of my tracks. But say if it was for a heavy metal or an EDM track that I was mixing for a client, I would definitely have to use quantisation, as those particular genres and others as need tight sounding rhythms and adding groove just wouldn't provide the same energetic feel that it's known for.

Our activity for the end of the lesson was to go onto SAE's sound library to find some drum/beat loops and then transcribe it on our DAW's. I haven't done transcribing in a while so it was good to get back into it, as it really helped me analyse rhythm and instrumentation in tracks. Especially in some of my reference tracks, transcribing also helped me identify the feel/groove to then try and apply it to my own compositions. I wanted to challenge myself so I chose jazz drum loops, as some them were in 3/4 and had some complex drum breaks and rhythms, which I wanted to try and transcribe.

What I hope to learn how to compose this trimester (hopefully for the last project) is to incorporate polyrhythms. It's always been an interest of mine but I never really had the time to do some research on it nor practice but now that this class 's main focus is improving music composition and music theory, I'll definitely have the time and motivation to focus on it.