Imposing 7 over 5/8

NerfLad

Silver Member
Playing 7 over 5/8

Here's a short (60 second) video where I generally wank around trying to get more comfortable with odd time. The 7/5 idea somehow came out very naturally earlier yesterday or today so I decided to document it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbEKidpIRbo

-Eric
 
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Sick playing man.

I'm not sure but from what I hear, it's not 7/8 over 5/8, but you're subdividing by 7 and playing that inside the bar of 5?

Or maybe I'm not getting it. That's cool though.
 
Sounds nice. I like the Yankee Slickers videos too-you must be their new drummer? I dig the Southern rock boogie sound. Use to spend a lot of time in Florida.
 
Thanks all. I wasn't really sure what to call it. I'm fitting a bar of seven into the same space as the 5/8. "Seven over Five", written as a fraction 7/5 looks the same as the way we write time signatures in digital form so it gets confusing.

Playing it is extremely similar to playing 4 over 3 in 6/8. Beat 4 of the 5/8 and beat 5 of the 7/8 line up exactly.
 
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Sounds nice. I like the Yankee Slickers videos too-you must be their new drummer? I dig the Southern rock boogie sound. Use to spend a lot of time in Florida.

Cool! Thank you. Yes I am the drummer of that band right now. However they formed around 10 years ago and there's only 1 original member (the leader) left so we are planning on changing the name ASAP.
 
Beat 4 of the 5/8 and beat 5 of the 7/8 line up exactly.
No, they shouldn't line up! You can work it out "mathematically", there is a formula that works
for every polyrhythm:

First, subdivide your 5 notes of the 5/8 into 7 even spacings (7 because you want to play
7 against the 5). Then play every 5th note of that (starting with the first). Write that out and
you see that the notes actually never line up exactly, the 3rd and 4th are just very close
because of the fast septuplet-subdivision. Hope I managed to write it more or less clearly :).
 
When you think about 5 even spacings and 7 even spacings during the same amount of
time, is it logical that they meet each other before the cicle ends?

You can even do it graphically, measure it out, whatever. Or do it with numbers:

If you string 5 things 7" long together, and 7 things 5" long together, these items are:

The string with the 7" things: 7, 14, 21, 28, 35
The string with the 5" things: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35

Although very near (20 and 21, 30 and 28), they never meet until 35 - meaning on 1 of
the next bar.
 
As far as I can hear, he doesn't play even 5s with the bass drum while playing 7 on the snare.

Right, but he's playing beat 4 on the bass drum. Beat 5 of the seven and beat 4 of the five fall in the same place at this tempo, or close enough not to be separately resolved by the ear. You are right, one comes before the other and at slow enough tempos (see audio file), you can hear the flam. At more practical tempos the difference in placement is down to what I consider "micro timing". The other musicians in the room aren't going to perceive them as being rhythmically distinct unless they get their spectrometers out.
 

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