Volume II of Mastering the Tables of Time introduces the more advanced World Timetable, which employs subdivisions commonly used in music of the world from countries including Africa, India, Greece, and Turkey, and explores the possibilities inherent to it by applying accents, rudiments, polyrhythms, grooves, and soloing applications to musical phrasing within its structure.
This World Timetable employs a rhythm scale that shifts its value groupings gradually, like the gears on a bike, from one to nine notes per beat as follows: quarter-notes, eighth-notes, eighth-note triplets, sixteenth-notes, quintuplets, sextuplets, octuplets, and nontuplets. While the numerical flow can continue, we will focus on these most common rhythmic groupings as applied to contemporary music.
Introduction to Volume II
Practice Tips & Applications
The World Timetable in Roundtable Form
Begin by setting a metronome to a slow pulse of around 40 to 60 beats per minute. Try playing and singing the rhythms. Below each measure are syllables that correspond to the subdivisions. They are a simple version of a language of vocal percussion from south India called konokol. How to count the subdivisions is a subjective matter. Western music has a codified method for counting in compound meters but only an agreed structure in simple meter for counting duple subdivisions of quarter, eighth and sixteenth-notes, and nothing beyond that. Furthermore there is no agreement at all in how to count triplets in any subdivision. The eastern method of konokol offers an alternative with a consistency that is particularly helpful for “getting the feel” of the asymmetric groupings of five, seven, and nine, which are less familiar to some musicians.
Video Demonstration 1 features the author soloing at the 2010 KoSA Winnipeg DrumTalk Festival over a bass ostinato in 5/4 time, utilizing many advanced concepts that will be explored in Volume II of Mastering the Tables of Time, including Subdivision as Polymeter and Phrasing Integration applications of the World and Standard Timetables, and beyond.
DOWNLOAD the PDF to see and LISTEN to the MP3 to hear the World Timetable in Roundtable Form at a tempo of quarter-note = 60 bpm with click track accompaniment.
