Syncopated rhythm pattern

Hey guys, check out the syn­co­pat­ed rhythm pat­tern I prac­ticed today with one of my beat­box stu­dents. You can prac­tice it togeth­er with the audio file. Down­load it for free in this post!

A syn­co­pa­tion means com­bin­ing a weak sound with a strong one, for exam­ple shift­ing the accent from “one” to “and”. If you want to do it, just short­en the accent­ed note and make the unac­cent­ed one longer. Syn­co­pa­tion means shift­ing a cho­sen note by a spec­i­fied rhyth­mic val­ue. In this case, the [Pf] snare has been moved for­ward by an eighth note. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, it should fall on ‘two’ and ‘four’, but it falls on ‘two-and’ (first bar) and ‘four-and’ (sec­ond bar).

Here is a sim­ple exam­ple:

You can also down­load an audio file (3 min, 5 mb), which is a looped ver­sion of this syn­co­pat­ed rhythm pat­tern.

Syn­co­pa­tion is very pop­u­lar in African drum music, where the shifts are so lit­tle (but clear nonethe­less), that a spe­cif­ic term ‘micro­tim­ing’ had to be coined. It’s also char­ac­ter­is­tic for jazz, in which case the shifts with­in a phrase change the entire song pulse. That’s what we call ‘swing’.

Learn more about syncopation from my beatbox e‑book!

All the quo­ta­tions in this post come from my book “Human Beat­box — Per­son­al Instru­ment” that you can down­load here for what­ev­er you pay — it’s a free dona­tion!

Down­load the beat­box e‑book man­u­al!

Should I make more tuto­ri­als like this? Please let me know in the com­ments!