http://soundcloud.com/jonas-tamas-guitar/locrian-locusts-polyrhythm

This polyrhythm idea is from my first album Sharp Guitars From A Flat Planet. The song is called Locrian Locusts, because I used two variations of the Locrian scale throughout the song. In this segment, the original Locrian scale is used, along with some chromatic passing tones. And in the second half of the song I have utilized a dark and obscure scale called "Locrian Nat.6", which is part of the harmonic minor modal system.

The main idea of this riff is an one-bar theme, played in bar 1. As you can see in bar 2, the same theme returns, but this time it is a bit longer, making this bar a 7/4 as opposed to 6/4 in the first bar. The 3rd bar is the same as the first one, and in bar 4 I have played only the first seven notes of the main theme, and added 9 more notes, which constitute the closing of the cycle. It is always advisable to create some extra movement in the 4th bars of the themes, to create a bit of a tension. However, these additional 9 notes have similar tritone-based chromatic lines, resembling the original theme. So the continually changing bar lengths for the first 4 bars are: 6/4 - 7/4 - 6/4 - 8/4.

As you can hear in the sound clip, after these first 4 bars the guitar solo enters. Throughout the solo the rhythm guitar plays the same 6/4 - 7/4 - 6/4 - 8/4 theme described above, but this time the drums play a straight 4/4, so the starting points of the original four bars appear at different places in bars 5-12. This is a great and playful way to create interesting rhythm structures. In bar 11, the original theme ends at the sixth note of this bar. After that point, I play 2 additional notes in this bar, and 8 new notes in the last bar (in a similar, tritone-based manner). These additional notes are played to round off the 8 bars of 4/4.


http://soundcloud.com/jonas-tamas-guitar/locrian-locusts-polyrhythm


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