A cool exercise Jon showed me last night. Tap quarter notes on your foot, and play the following patterns with your hands:
Start by treating the Rights as accents. Once you’ve gotten that, you can take the idea wherever you want to go.
If played in 4/4 time, note that the five pattern will repeat every five bars, the seven every seven bars. Used this way in the context of 4/4, you achieve the true “over the bar” feel.
Like everything in the universe, these are relative. I wrote these patterns out in odd times of 5/4 and 7/4 for the sake of understanding them on paper. The patterns can be applied in any meter.
