Rhythm on the Grid.

00Introduction

This guide is a companion to The Rhythm Code, a book by the songwriter and producer Tamas Bodzsar about how rhythm works in popular music. It explains the book’s ideas from the very beginning, in the language of step sequencers and MIDI rather than sheet music, and every idea comes with an example you can play.

A Theory of Rhythm

When musicians talk about music theory, they nearly always mean pitch: intervals, scales, chords and keys. There are countless books and courses about those. Rhythm gets far less attention, even though music depends on it just as much. A drummer playing on their own is already making music. A chord held on its own is not, at least not yet. It becomes music when it is placed somewhere in time, among other sounds.

The book sets out to fill that gap. Its claim is that good rhythm in popular music, whatever the style, follows a system, in much the same way that melodies and chords follow a key, and that the same principles apply to every instrument and every genre. The book calls that system the Rhythm Code, after its title; this guide calls it the book’s system until The Sixteen Places shows what it is. Once you understand it, you can use it on purpose.

Rhythm as a System

Think about how a key works. A key is the family of notes a song is built from: C major, for instance, uses the seven white keys of a piano, with C as home. If you hear a few notes of a song, you can often tell that it is in C major, even though you have not heard every note of the scale. You can do that because you know the system behind the notes. The melody, the chords and the bass line each give you clues, and all the clues point the same way.

The book argues that rhythm works in the same way. The parts of a song give clues to a hidden rhythmic system, and once you know what to look for, you can see that the clues agree. Millions of songs are in C major and still sound completely different from each other. In the same way, thousands of songs can share this rhythmic system and still sound nothing alike. That is why the book insists that its method is not a copy-and-paste pattern. You cannot copy and paste a key, and you cannot copy and paste this system either. You use it to make rhythms of your own.

You probably already use parts of it without knowing. Many songwriters absorb it from the music they love and use it by instinct. The aim of the book, and of this guide, is to make that instinct conscious, so that you can use it deliberately and much faster. The book compares this with harmony. You can write songs without knowing what a chord is, but knowing how chords are built and arranged makes the work far easier and quicker.

The book also sets itself apart from academic studies of rhythm. Mathematicians and musicologists have written a great deal about why certain rhythms sound good, but their results are formulas and algorithms, and a formula does not tell you what to play. Knowing the physics of a vibrating string, as the book puts it, does not make anyone a better guitarist. The book aims to be practical: a theory for people who write and produce music.

Equipment

Only your ears and this page. Headphones help, and wired ones are best, because wireless headphones add a small delay.

If you make music on a computer, keep your DAW open as well. A DAW (digital audio workstation) is the software that producers record and arrange in, such as Ableton Live, Logic Pro or FL Studio. Several chapters ask you to try things in it. Inside a DAW, notes are stored as MIDI: data that records which key was played, when it started, how long it lasted and how hard it was played. The piano roll is the DAW’s grid for MIDI notes, with time running from left to right and pitch from bottom to top. You never need to read sheet music.

Reading a Grid

Every example in this guide is a small step sequencer, like the one in a drum machine or the piano roll of a DAW. Time runs from left to right. Each row is one part: a drum, the bass, the chords or a melody. Each column is one step, a small slice of the bar.

The row along the top counts through the bar: “1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &” on an eight-step grid, or “1 e & a 2 e & a” and so on, on a sixteen-step grid. (A bar is one group of four beats; The Grid explains.) In a few examples that row is labelled Place and numbers the eight places of the bar instead; there, 3 means beat two.

A coloured block is a note. Its left edge is the moment the note starts, and its length shows how long the note lasts. Drum hits are short marks, because a drum hit has almost no length. While an example plays, a highlight moves along the grid so that you can follow it. A note with a coloured outline is the one that changes between versions, and a larger hit is accented, which means played louder.

Under the grid is a row of ones and zeros, called the binary row. It is explained properly in The Grid. For now, just notice that a 1 appears wherever a note starts. The Show dots button under it switches the ones and zeros for the book’s own dots.

Using the Examples

• Play starts an example and Stop ends it. Only one example plays at a time, so starting one stops any other.
• BPM (beats per minute) is the tempo. Use − and + to slow an example down or speed it up. Slowing down is the best way to hear exactly where each note falls.
• Click adds a metronome: a click on every beat, with a stronger click at the start of each bar.
• Click the name of a part, at the left of its row, to mute it, and click it again to bring it back. Muting parts one at a time is one of the best ways to listen.
• Where an example has several versions, buttons above the grid switch between them. You can switch while it plays, which makes the differences easy to hear.
• Some examples include a clave, a two-bar rhythm you will meet in The Son Clave. Its strokes are shown as dots on the bottom row, and the Clave button turns it on and off.
• Where you see Edit, you can change the pattern yourself. Click a note to select it. Then move it earlier or later with ◀ and ▶, make it shorter or longer with − and +, or delete it with ✕. Click an empty step to add a note. Reset puts everything back as it was.

On a phone, tap wherever this guide says click. At the end of each chapter there is a button to mark the chapter done. Your ticks are saved in this browser, and the contents list shows how far you have got.

The Songs

The book makes its case with transcriptions of well-known songs, from Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder to Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande. Those transcriptions belong to the songs’ writers, so they are not reproduced here. Instead, every idea they demonstrate has an original example in this guide, and many chapters end with a table of songs to listen to, what to listen for in each, and the page where the book shows it. Traditional patterns, such as the claves, the tresillo and the 6/8 bell, are given in full, because they belong to everyone.

The book says it chose songs that are both very popular and, in the author’s opinion, very well made, and that the techniques they show are not rare exceptions. Once you know what to look for, you will hear them in song after song. The book also offers MIDI files of its examples on the author’s website, whose address is printed on its copyright page.

In the book: p. 7, About the Songs in This Book; p. 9, What Is Rhythm?; and pp. 13–15, It’s Not a Copy-Paste Pattern.

01Listening and Transcribing

Before you can improve the rhythm of your own music, you need to hear rhythm clearly in other people’s. That starts with a different way of listening.

Why does one song groove when another, with an equally good melody and an equally good sound, somehow does not? The book’s answer, again and again, is the rhythm. To find out what a good rhythm is made of, you have to listen for it on purpose.

Listening on Purpose

Most of the time, music is in the background. We hear it while we cook, travel or work, and our attention is elsewhere. Listening on purpose means turning that round. Sit somewhere quiet, choose a song you like, and do nothing else while it plays. The music is in the foreground, and it has all of your attention.

Then ask questions of it. What makes this song sound good? What is the rhythm doing that you like? The easiest way to answer is to take the song apart one instrument at a time. Play it several times, and each time follow a single part. What is the kick drum playing? Where does the snare land? What is the bass doing? Where do the words of the vocal start?

Here is a short groove to practise on. It has six parts. Play it, then click the part names to mute everything except the bass, so that you hear the bass on its own. Let it go round four times, and try to remember exactly where its notes fall. Then bring the other parts back one at a time, and notice how each one fits around the others.

With a real song you cannot mute the parts, but you can do the same thing with your attention. It takes practice. At first everything blurs together. After a while you will find that you can follow one part all the way through a song.

Transcription

The next step is to write down what you hear. Writing music down from a recording is called transcribing. The book strongly recommends it, because a rhythm you have written down can be looked at, compared and understood in a way that a rhythm you have only heard cannot.

You do not need sheet music for this. A DAW’s piano roll or step grid is all you need, and to begin with you only need to write down the rhythm, not the notes. For now, a bar is a group of four beats, and a sixteenth grid gives each beat four steps; The Grid explains both. Here is one way to do it.

1. Load the song into your DAW, set the project to the song’s tempo, and line the song up so that its first beat sits on a bar line. If you don’t know the tempo, use your DAW’s tap-tempo feature or look it up, then adjust it until the drum hits stay on the grid lines.
2. Loop two bars.
3. Set the grid to sixteenths, so that each beat is divided into four steps.
4. Choose one part, say the kick drum, and listen only to that. Draw a short note wherever it hits. Ignore pitch for now and put every note on the same key.
5. Play your notes along with the song. If one is out, move it until it sits exactly with the recording.
6. Do the same for the snare, then the bass, then the vocal. For the bass and the vocal, mark only where each note starts.

At first the patterns you draw will probably look random. That is normal. You do not yet know what to look for, and patterns only become clear when you do. The rest of this guide gives you those things to look for, one at a time. Once you know them, you will start to see them everywhere.

Music as a Language

The book compares learning music with learning a language. You learn a language by hearing a great deal of it, but hearing alone is slow. It goes much faster when you also have context, something that tells you what you are hearing: the pictures in a film, for instance, or a teacher, or a grammar book. The author says he learned much of his English by watching films in English.

Music works the same way. You can listen to songs for years without being able to make music like them, because you do not know where to look. Listening with a few clear ideas about where to look is much faster. The ideas in this guide are those ideas. The more songs you listen to with them in mind, the more fluent you become, and the book calls that fluency musical literacy. As it grows, you will start to notice that some songs simply have better rhythm than others, and you will be able to say why.

In the book: pp. 17–19, The First Step.

02Starts and Lengths

What is rhythm? The question sounds too simple to ask, but the book’s answer is not the one most music lessons give, and the whole method depends on it.

Lengths and Rhythms

Music lessons usually teach rhythm as a set of note lengths: the whole note, the half note, the quarter note, the eighth note and the sixteenth note, each lasting half as long as the one before. Search the web for “musical rhythm”, the book points out, and you get a chart of exactly these; it is also what music schools teach as rhythm.

The book points out that these are not rhythms. They are lengths, or durations, which music schools call rhythm values. A length tells you how long a note lasts, but not when it happens. A rhythm only appears when notes are placed one after another in time.

On a sixteen-step grid the lengths are easy to see. A whole note lasts sixteen steps, the whole bar. A half note lasts eight steps, a quarter note four, an eighth note two, and a sixteenth note one. Here is a single note held for each of these lengths in turn. Use the buttons above the grid to switch between them.

Notice two things. First, each version starts in exactly the same place, on beat one. Second, the binary row under the grid never changes, because it only records where the note starts. As far as rhythm is concerned, these five are the same: one note on beat one. What changes is the length, and length is a separate matter.

That gives us the definition that this whole guide uses. A rhythm is a pattern of starting points in time. In other words, rhythm is about where notes begin, not about how long they last.

Rhythm in Every Part

It is easy to think of rhythm as the drummer’s job. But every instrument has a rhythm, and so does every vocal line, because every part is made of notes that start at particular moments. The bass has a rhythm. The chords have a rhythm. A melody has two sides to it: its pitches, which notes it plays, and its rhythm, when it plays them.

The book makes a strong claim here. Although a few rules apply only to particular instruments, the rhythms of all the parts follow the same principles, and those principles do not depend on the style of the music. A funk bass line and a pop vocal follow the same rules of rhythm.

Here is one rhythm played by four different parts: a kick drum, a bass, chords and a melody. Switch between them while it plays.

The sound changes completely from one version to the next. The pitches change, the instrument changes, and some notes are longer than others. Yet the binary row stays 1000100100100010 every time, because the notes start in the same five places. All four parts are playing the same rhythm.

Hearing a Part as Percussion

This idea leads straight to the book’s main way of studying rhythm. To understand the rhythm of any part, whether it is a bass line, a chord part or a vocal melody, listen to it as if it were played on a drum. Notice where each sound starts, and set everything else aside for the moment: the pitches, the words and how long each note is held.

Here is a short melody, first as a melody and then played on a conga drum. On the drum the pitches disappear, and so do the lengths, because a drum hit dies away almost at once. What is left is the rhythm, and it is exactly the same. The binary row confirms it.

This is a useful habit in its own right. When you transcribe a melody, try tapping its rhythm before you work out its notes. With the pitches out of the way, the rhythm is much easier to hear.

The Role of Length

None of this means that length does not matter in music. It matters a great deal to how a part feels. Short notes sound bouncy and light, and long notes sound smooth and heavy, as you will hear for yourself in Feel. The book’s point is narrower: length does not change which rhythm you are hearing. Two parts that start their notes in the same places are playing the same rhythm, however long their notes are. For that reason, everything that follows looks at starting points first.

In the book: pp. 9–11, What Is Rhythm?, and pp. 23–24.

03The Grid

To compare rhythms, you need a clear way to write them down. The book uses a simple grid and a row of ones and zeros. If you have used a drum machine or a DAW, you already know most of it.

Bars, Beats and Steps

Almost all popular music is in 4/4 time, which means it is counted in groups of four beats. Each group is a bar, also called a measure. When you tap your foot to a song, you are tapping the beats, and you can count them “one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four”.

A step sequencer divides each bar into equal steps. The usual choices are eight steps or sixteen.

• With eight steps, each step is an eighth note, so there are two steps to each beat. You count them “1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &”, saying “and” for the step between two beats.
• With sixteen steps, each step is a sixteenth note, so there are four steps to each beat. You count them “1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a”.

Your DAW most likely shows sixteen steps to the bar. The book uses eight, for reasons explained below, and calls each of the eight positions a place. Place 1 is the first eighth of the bar, place 2 the second, and so on up to place 8.

The Binary Row

The book writes rhythms in what it calls a binary system. Each place in the bar gets a digit: 1 if a note starts there and 0 if nothing starts there. So a bar with a single note on beat two is written 00100000: nothing on place 1, nothing on place 2, a note on place 3, and nothing on the rest.

This is not the author’s invention. Musicologists and mathematicians often write rhythms this way, because it makes rhythms very easy to compare: two rhythms are the same if their rows are the same. The book also draws the same information as a row of boxes, with a dot in each box where a note starts and an empty box where none does. Every binary row in this guide can show either form: press Show dots under it to switch from ones and zeros to the book’s dots.

Here is that single note on beat two, drawn first on an eight-step grid and then on a sixteen-step grid. Switch between the two versions.

The sound is identical. Only the drawing changes. On the eight-step grid the binary row is 00100000, and on the sixteen-step grid it is 0000100000000000, because beat two is the fifth sixteenth of the bar.

Remember from Starts and Lengths that a binary row says nothing about length. A note held for a whole bar and a note that lasts a single step have the same row if they start in the same place. That is exactly what we want, because we are interested in where notes start.

Naming the Places

The book names the places of a bar in two ways, and this guide uses both. Each beat can be called by its number, beat one to beat four, or each of the eight positions can be called by its place number. The two systems fit together like this.

So the beats are places 1, 3, 5 and 7, and the “and”s between them are places 2, 4, 6 and 8. When this guide says “place 6”, it means the “and” of three, halfway between beat three and beat four. A snare drum on beats two and four, the most common snare pattern in pop music, is on places 3 and 7.

It is worth learning this by heart, because the rest of the guide uses it all the time. Odd places are beats and even places are “and”s. To find the place of a beat, double the beat number and take away one: beat three is place 5, and beat four is place 7.

The Smallest Unit

How finely should you divide a bar to write down a song? The book’s answer is to find the shortest note length that the song uses often, and to divide the bar into steps of that length. It calls this the smallest unit, and it is the song’s pulse: the fastest steady layer of the rhythm. For most songs the pulse is the eighth note or the sixteenth note. The hi-hat or the shaker often plays it, so listen to those when you are not sure.

Three Ways of Writing a Rhythm

After the book’s first edition, readers asked: what about sixteenth notes? The answer is that the same rhythm can be written in more than one way, and the way it is written does not change how it sounds.

Here is one rhythm written three ways: in eighth notes at 100 BPM, in sixteenth notes at 50 BPM, and in quarter notes at 200 BPM. Play the three versions one after another. They sound exactly the same, because in every version each step lasts the same 0.3 seconds. Then turn on Click. Now you will hear the difference, which is only in the counting: each version puts its beats in a different place, while the notes stay exactly where they are.

Which way is best? The book writes all its examples in eighth notes, whatever the tempo of the song, for two reasons. Eighths are the easiest of the three to read at a glance. And writing everything the same way puts every example into one system, so that rhythms from different songs can be compared directly.

The Book’s Grids in Your DAW

That choice has a consequence you need to know about if you work in a DAW, because a DAW counts at the song’s real tempo. Put the two ideas together: the book always draws the song’s pulse as an eighth note. When a song’s pulse is the sixteenth, the book counts the song at double speed. For many modern songs, two of the book’s bars of eighth notes fill a single bar of sixteenth notes in your DAW. In effect, the book counts those songs at double their tempo.

Here is a simple beat written both ways. The first version is drawn the book’s way, in eighths over two bars at 200 BPM. The second is drawn the way you would program it in a DAW, in sixteenths over one bar at 100 BPM. They sound identical.

Look at the snare. On the book’s grid it lands on place 5 of each bar, which is beat three. In the DAW version it lands on beats two and four, where you would expect a snare to be. Neither drawing is wrong. They count the same music at two different speeds.

So when one of the book’s grids shows the snare on beat three of every bar, read each of its bars as half of a DAW bar. This matters most for the clave, which you will meet in The Son Clave. The book draws the clave over two bars of eighths. In a DAW at a pop tempo, the same clave usually fits into one bar of sixteen steps. This guide shows the clave both ways and always says which one it is using.

In the book: pp. 21–24, How Rhythm Is Analyzed, and the naming of places on p. 26.

04Downbeats and Upbeats

Now that every place in the bar has a name, we can ask the first big question of the method. Does it matter which places your notes start on? The book’s answer is that it matters enormously, and that most musicians underestimate it.

The Two Kinds of Place

The places that fall on the beats themselves, places 1, 3, 5 and 7, are the downbeats. They are where you would tap your foot. The places between the beats, places 2, 4, 6 and 8, are the upbeats. They are the “and”s, where your foot is in the air.

Play this example and switch between its three versions: the downbeats alone, the upbeats alone, and both together. The top row of the grid numbers the places from 1 to 8.

The downbeats sound solid and settled, because they coincide with the beat. The upbeats sound lighter and more restless, because they fall in between. Both are perfectly regular, but they have very different characters.

On a sixteen-step grid in your DAW the same places are easy to find. The downbeats are steps 1, 5, 9 and 13. The upbeats, the “and”s, are steps 3, 7, 11 and 15. The remaining steps, the “e”s and “a”s, are finer subdivisions. That holds when your DAW runs at the tempo the book counts. For a song the book counts at double speed (see The Grid), its downbeats fall on the DAW’s beats and “and”s, steps 1, 3, 5, 7 and so on, and its upbeats on the “e”s and “a”s.

The Balance Between Them

The book’s first major claim is that the variety and balance between downbeats and upbeats largely decides how good a rhythm sounds. A part with almost every note on a downbeat tends to sound stiff and heavy, however good its pitches are. Moving some of its notes onto upbeats gives it life and movement.

According to the book, many songs in every style have weak rhythms for exactly this reason: too many notes on the downbeats. It adds that even highly trained musicians are not always aware of the difference. It can seem a small detail at first, but once you start listening for it, you will hear it everywhere.

The Upbeat Test

The book demonstrates this with a game, and you can play the same game here. Below is a melody that sits mostly on upbeats. A bass and a cowbell play on beats one and three underneath it, so the downbeats are always clear. The second version moves each of the melody’s upbeat notes one place earlier, onto a downbeat. Nothing else changes: the pitches are the same, in the same order, and the gaps between the notes are almost the same.

Play the first version, then switch to the second while it is still playing. Most people hear the second version as heavier and clumsier. The book reports that this works on non-musicians too. The author tried it on his wife, who is not a musician: she could not say what had changed, but she said the downbeat version sounded like a bear stomping about, and the original was more danceable. The author also describes a band rehearsal where the trumpet player moved a melody like this onto the downbeats as a joke, and everyone laughed at how wrong it sounded.

That is the real lesson of the game. Listeners feel placement long before they can name it. They will not know why a rhythm is good or bad, but they will feel it.

The Role of the Downbeats

Now try something else with the same example. Mute the bass and the cowbell, so that only the melody is left, and switch between the two versions again. This time the difference is much smaller. With nothing marking the beat, you cannot tell which notes are on the beat and which are between beats, so the two versions sound much alike.

In other words, an upbeat only sounds like an upbeat against something that marks the downbeats. That is why salsa, a style full of upbeats, keeps a cowbell playing a plain pattern on beats one and three all the way through a song. The cowbell gives the listener the downbeats, and everything else can play against them.

A Mix of Both

Do not draw the wrong conclusion from this. Upbeats are not good and downbeats bad. The book compares them to yin and yang: a rhythm needs both, and the melody in the game is an extreme example, with nearly every note on an upbeat.

There is no formula for the right mix, either. Nobody can tell you that a good melody has exactly three upbeats in every bar. What matters is that you feel the difference between the two clearly, so that you can trust your own judgment. If a melody or bass line you have written sounds dull and you cannot say why, try moving some of its notes onto upbeats and listen again.

Balancing With Another Part

The balance does not have to come from a single part. A melody can sit firmly on the beats while another part fills the upbeats around it, and the song as a whole still feels balanced.

In the first version of this example, a melody sits entirely on downbeats, over a bass and a simple drum beat. It is fine, but it is static. The second version adds a plucked part that plays only on the upbeats. The melody has not changed at all, and yet the groove starts to move.

The book believes that most modern songs need to be at least a little danceable, and this balance is one of the main ways to achieve it. Tempo makes no difference. Slow songs, which nobody dances to, use the same principles as fast ones; in the book’s view, tempo has no bearing on whether a rhythm is good.

Small Changes of Placement

Small details of placement matter more than you might expect. Here are three lines of a melody. The first two lines have the same rhythm. In the third, one note is different: its last note lands on a downbeat, beat three, where the first two lines had it half a beat later, on an upbeat.

Play the version as written, then the version that sings the third line like the first two. In the second version the change is gone, and the third line no longer lands the way it should. It sounds like a repeat instead of a development.

The book tells of a student who recorded a cover of a song built on exactly this kind of detail, and sang the one different note like the lines around it. That one note was enough to make the cover sound wrong. The book singles out Ed Sheeran here. It credits him with a fine sense of rhythm and a constant search for the right balance of upbeats and downbeats. It also notes that when he performs, he sings his melodies with exactly the rhythm of the recording. That care matters, because the effect depends on details like these.

Listening List

Listen to each song with the named part in mind. If you can, clap on beats one and three as you listen, so that you can feel which notes fall between your claps.

In the book: pp. 25–32, Upbeats – Downbeats.

05Anticipations

Moving a note from a downbeat onto the upbeat just before it is one of the most useful moves in the book. The result has a name: an anticipation.

Definition of an Anticipation

An anticipation is a note that starts on an upbeat when nothing in the same part starts on the downbeat straight after it. The note feels as if it belongs to that downbeat, but it arrives one place early, an eighth note ahead of time. In other words, the ear hears an anticipation as the next beat’s note, coming in early.

You can anticipate a single note, and you can anticipate a whole chord. The book notes that this is sometimes called syncopation, the general word for emphasis that falls off the beat. “Anticipation” is the more exact name for this case, because it says what the listener hears: a beat arriving early.

Here is an example with three versions. It is one bar with two chords, A minor and then F, over a kick on beat one and a hi-hat on every beat.

• In [A], the F chord starts on beat three, place 5. Both chords are on downbeats, and there is no anticipation.
• In [B], the F chord starts one place earlier, on the “and” of two, place 4, and is held over beat three. Nothing starts on beat three, so this is an anticipation.
• In [C], the F chord also starts on place 4, but it is cut short, and there is silence on beat three. This is an anticipation too.

Listen to [A] and then to [B]. In [B] the change of chord arrives a little early, and the bar suddenly leans forward. Then compare [B] and [C], and look at their binary rows. They are identical, because the binary row only shows where notes start, and in both versions the chord starts on place 4 and nothing starts on place 5. As far as rhythm is concerned, [B] and [C] are the same anticipation, held for different lengths.

In the book’s view, anticipations are what give music its interest and excitement, while a part with every note on a downbeat sounds dull. Anticipations are what make a part feel as if it is leaning into the next beat.

The Anticipation Test

This point is easy to get wrong, so it is worth taking slowly. An upbeat note is not automatically an anticipation. It depends on what happens on the next downbeat.

The test is simple. Find the note on the upbeat, and look at the same part on the downbeat straight after it. If nothing in that part starts there, the upbeat note is an anticipation; other parts may still play on that beat, as the hi-hat does here. If another note in the part starts there, the upbeat note is not an anticipation, because the downbeat still has its own note and nothing has been brought forward.

In this example the F chord comes on the “and” of two, as in [B], but another F chord starts straight after it, on beat three.

Look at the binary row: there is a 1 on place 4 and another 1 on place 5. The upbeat chord now sounds like a quick push into beat three, not like beat three arriving early. That is a perfectly good rhythm, but it is not an anticipation.

Mishearing Anticipations

Because an anticipation sounds like the beat it replaces, it is often mistaken for that beat, especially at a fast tempo. Even experienced players hear the anticipated note as the downbeat itself.

The book tells a story about this. The author, then a trumpet player in a band, once wrote out the horn parts of Whitney Houston’s I’m Knockin’. The song opens with an anticipation: its very first bass and horn note comes on the last upbeat before beat one. At rehearsal, the saxophone player complained that the parts seemed to be written late. He had heard the opening anticipation as beat one, so the correctly written part looked wrong to him.

Here is a riff that shows the same thing. In the first version it starts on beat one. In the second, its first hit comes an eighth note early, on the last upbeat of the loop, and beat one itself is left empty.

The moved hit is drawn at the far right of the grid, on the last “and” of bar two, because it belongs just before the loop comes back to beat one. Turn on Click, let the loop come round once, and listen to how that hit leads into the bar. Even though you can see that it is on an upbeat, your ear probably still wants to hear it as the start of the bar. That is how strong an anticipation is: it takes over the role of the beat it anticipates. It is also what gives the riff its energy. Played on beat one, as in the first version, the same riff is noticeably plainer.

Anticipations Everywhere

Look back at the upbeat melody in Downbeats and Upbeats. Four of its eight notes are anticipations: the notes on places 2 and 4 of each bar, each with an empty downbeat straight after it. Most lively upbeat parts get much of their character this way. Take the anticipations out of a part, and it falls back onto the beats. Mark the anticipations in the transcription you saved in Listening and Transcribing.

Anticipations are one of the main tools of the whole method. In later chapters you will see that the most important places in a groove are often anticipated rather than played on the beat.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 33–36, Rhythmic Anticipations.

06The Quarter-Note Anticipation

An ordinary anticipation brings a note one place early, an eighth note ahead of the beat. There is a stronger kind that brings a note two places early: a whole beat ahead.

The Note on Beat Four

Because it arrives a quarter note early instead of an eighth note, the book calls it the quarter-note anticipation. It has only one home in the bar. It starts on beat four, place 7, and it is heard as the next bar’s beat one, arriving a whole beat early.

Like any anticipation, it only counts if the beat it replaces is left empty in that part. Nothing in the part may start on the “and” of four or on beat one of the next bar: the next note can come on the “and” of one, place 2 of the next bar, at the earliest. If a note starts on beat one, the note on beat four is just a note on beat four.

Here it is with three chords: C, then G, then A minor. The G chord belongs to bar two.

• In the first version, On the bar line, the G chord starts where you would expect, on beat one of bar two.
• In the second, A quarter early, held, the G chord starts on beat four of bar one and is held across the bar line. Nothing starts on beat one of bar two, so this is a quarter-note anticipation.
• In the third, the G chord again starts on beat four, but a new G chord is struck on beat one of bar two. Because beat one has its own start, this is no longer a quarter-note anticipation.

Play the first two versions one after the other. It is a powerful effect, and you hear it at once: the change of chord seems to jump ahead of the bar line and pull the music into the next bar. Then play the third version. The early chord is still there, but because the chord is struck again on beat one, the bar line is marked as usual and the pull disappears.

The Link to the Clave

The quarter-note anticipation is more than a strong effect. It is closely tied to the clave, the two-bar rhythm at the centre of the book, which you will meet in The Son Clave. The clave has a bar with three strokes, its 3 side, and a bar with two, its 2 side. As later chapters show, the quarter-note anticipation usually falls on beat four of the 3 side, just before the 2 side begins, and when it does, it helps the listener tell the two bars apart.

The book points out that it is not limited to that side, though. It sometimes appears on the 2 side instead, and one of the songs below does exactly that. The author has used it on the 2 side in one of his own songs, simply because it sounded good. The 3 side is its usual home, but your ear decides.

It does not have to be a held chord either. A single drum hit, a short stab, or even a shout on beat four does the same job, as long as nothing in that part starts on the next beat one. You will hear examples in The Hidden Clave.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 37–38, The Quarter Note Anticipation.

07Stops

The next idea is the book’s own, and the whole method depends on it. It is called the stop.

Definition of a Stop

A stop is a note that is not followed straight away by another note. On the grid, it is a starting point with at least one empty place after it. In other words, a stop is the last note before a gap in the starts.

If you are checking your own sixteen-step transcription, first decide how the book would count the song (see The Grid). If it would count it at double speed, each sixteenth is a place, and a stop is a start with an empty sixteenth after it. Otherwise a place is two sixteenths.

The length of the note does not matter. A note held for a long time, so that you hear no silence at all, still counts as a stop if no new note starts on the next place. Remember that the binary row only shows starts. In the binary row, a stop is simply a 1 followed by a 0.

That means a stop can be several different things:

• the start of a long note;
• a short note followed by a rest, such as an eighth note with an eighth-note rest after it;
• a note on a downbeat or a note on an upbeat, because either can be followed by a gap;
• the last note of a run. In a run of four eighth notes, each of the first three is followed by another note, so only the fourth is a stop.

Here is a melody that contains all four kinds. In this guide, a stop is marked with a small ring under the note.

Walk through it place by place. The first note, on place 1, is held for half a bar, and nothing starts until place 6, so it is a stop: the start of a long note. The note on place 6 is short and has two empty places after it, so it is a stop on an upbeat.

In bar two, four notes run one after another on places 1, 2, 3 and 4. Only the last of them, on place 4, has an empty place after it, so only that one is a stop. Finally, the note on place 7 of bar two has an empty place after it before the loop comes round, so it is a stop on a downbeat.

The Importance of Stops

Why single out these notes? The book’s reason is practical: look at a line’s stops and you see the system it is built on, which the notes in between can hide. There is also a simple way to hear why they stand out. In a busy line, the ear holds on to the notes that have space after them. A note followed straight away by another note passes quickly and leads the ear onward. A note followed by a gap has time to be heard. It is where a phrase lands or pauses for breath, and so it is the note you remember.

You can test this. Here is a busy melody with ten notes, only three of which are stops. Next to the melody’s name is a button marked stops only. Press it, and the melody plays just its three stops.

With only three of its ten notes left, the line still has the same shape. It lands in the same places and has the same feel, only simpler. The stops are the skeleton of the rhythm, and the other notes hang from them.

Look at the last note of the melody, on place 8 of bar two. It is not a stop, even though it is the last note of the loop, because the loop comes straight back round to a note on place 1. Whether a note is a stop depends on what comes next, and that includes the start of the loop.

Stops in the Book’s Analysis

Stops are what make the rest of the book possible. A busy vocal or bass line is very hard to analyse note by note, because there are so many notes. Its stops, though, are few, and they are easy to compare with a pattern. In later chapters you will compare the stops of lines with the clave, and you will see that in song after song the stops fall on the clave’s strokes.

That, the book says, is where its system lives. Once you know where stops tend to fall, you can build grooves of your own instead of copying a stock pattern, such as a standard bossa nova beat. Ring the stops in the transcription you saved in Listening and Transcribing.

In the book: pp. 45–46, Stops.

08Precise Placement

Knowing where notes should go is one thing. Putting them there, exactly, every time, is another. This chapter is about the second, and about a simple way to practise it.

The Need for Precision

You have seen that moving a single note by one place can change a whole line. That knowledge only helps if you can control where your notes land. A note meant for an upbeat that drifts onto the downbeat, or an anticipation played late, changes the groove as surely as a wrong pitch changes a melody.

The book stresses that even highly trained musicians sometimes struggle here, especially at fast tempos: they do not always feel the difference between an upbeat and a downbeat, and they mistake one for the other. It also stresses that this is not only a skill for live players. If you are a producer who plays parts into a DAW, or programs them, you need the same awareness of exactly where each note falls.

The Precision Practice

The book’s remedy is a plain, slow exercise. It is not exciting, and the book admits that most readers will not do it. But the author says that the handful of musicians he knows who did it went from mediocre timing to professional timing.

1. Set up a click or a simple backing track at 60 BPM. The book suggests a program such as Band-in-a-Box, which plays a virtual backing band in any style, or a simple beat in your DAW. Whatever you use, you must be able to slow it right down.
2. Choose one place in the bar, for example place 2, the “and” of one.
3. Play one note on that place every second bar, and nothing else. The empty bar in between gives you time to feel the place coming round.
4. Keep going until the note lands exactly on the place every time.
5. Raise the tempo by one BPM, to 61, and repeat. Then 62, then 63. The book is firm that you should not cheat by jumping ahead.
6. Carry on, one BPM at a time, towards 200 BPM. Then start again with each of the other places in the bar.
7. As your control grows, play short riffs and melodies the same way, and practise starting them on different places. Learning parts of real songs like this makes it much less dull.

Why such small steps? At a slow tempo there is time to notice exactly where each note lands, and where melodies begin and end. Each increase is too small to throw you, so your accuracy comes with you as the tempo rises.

Checking Yourself

How do you know whether you are accurate? The book’s answer is to record yourself. Any microphone and any recording software will do, because this is practice, not a record. Set your DAW to the same tempo as the click, record, and look at where your notes fall against the vertical grid lines. Notes that sit right on the lines are on time. Notes just before or after them are early or late.

The drill below does that measuring for you. Choose the place you want to practise with the buttons marked “1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &”, press Start, and listen to two bars of the click. Then press Tap, or the space bar on a computer, each time your place comes round. It comes round once every two bars, and its box lights up to show you where it is.

After each tap, the drill tells you how many milliseconds early or late you were, and marks the tap on a ruler that runs from 60 milliseconds early to 60 milliseconds late. When you have tapped six times in a row within 25 milliseconds of the place, it offers to go one BPM faster. Twenty-five milliseconds is a fortieth of a second, which is tight enough to sound right in a groove.

In the book: pp. 39–41, Consciousness About the Placement of the Notes.

09Editing Placement

You now have the tools for placing single notes: the difference between downbeats and upbeats, the anticipation, and the stop. This chapter shows how to use them on your own music, starting today.

A Method for Improving a Line

Start with whatever you have in mind, however plain it sounds. It might be a melody, a bass line, a horn part or a vocal line. The book recommends writing it into a MIDI editor, such as the piano roll of your DAW, because you can then hear every change straight away.

1. Write a short idea of two or four bars.
2. Find a note on a downbeat, and move it one place earlier, onto the upbeat before it. If nothing now starts on that downbeat, you have made an anticipation.
3. Listen. Does it sound better? If it does, keep the change. If not, undo it.
4. Try the same with another note, and listen again.

The aim is a more interesting rhythm, even if the difference is slight. The book admits that this can feel tedious, but it is exactly these small details that make music better, and sometimes a few small moves bring a whole part together. Always judge by ear. The point is not to follow a rule but to make the line sound better.

A line with too many notes on the downbeats usually sounds dull, and the cure is more anticipations. How many is up to your ear: add them one at a time and listen. Some lines want only a few, and some, like the upbeat melody in Downbeats and Upbeats, are full of them.

There is no single right answer. You might move the note on beat three of bar one onto the “and” of two, or the last note onto the “and” of two in bar two, or both. Try a few combinations and keep the one you like best. To compare it with the original, write your moves down first (for example, “beat three of bar one to the ‘and’ of two”), press Reset to hear the original, and then make the moves again.

The Start of a Motif

Placement also matters at the start of an idea. A motif is a short musical idea, a few notes long, from which a melody or a riff is built. The book observes that less experienced writers tend to start every motif on beat one. It is a natural habit, because beat one feels safe: you start together with the beat.

The trouble is that when every idea starts on beat one, your songs start to sound alike. Hit songs start their ideas all over the bar, and they do not always end them on beat one either.

Here is one three-note motif starting in four different places: on beat one, on the “and” of one, on beat two, and an eighth note before bar two. The notes and the spacing between them never change.

Each starting place gives the same three notes a different character. On beat one, the motif sounds square and settled. On the “and” of one, it sounds lighter, more like speech. Starting an eighth note before bar two, it becomes a pickup, a lead-in just before the bar line, which pulls the listener into the next bar. It is not an anticipation, because the next note lands on beat one. If all your motifs start on beat one, try starting some of them elsewhere on purpose.

To do that with confidence, you need to be able to start a phrase on any place in the bar, deliberately. That is exactly the control that the precision practice in Precise Placement builds.

In the book: pp. 43–44, How to Use What You Have Learned so Far?

10The Tresillo

So far we have looked at single notes: whether they fall on downbeats or upbeats, and whether they anticipate a beat. Now we turn to whole patterns. The first is a three-note rhythm you have heard thousands of times, whether or not you know its name.

Three Notes, Spread Evenly

Here is a small puzzle. Take a bar of eight places and put three notes in it, as far apart from each other as possible. You cannot make all three distances equal, because eight does not divide by three. Measured from one note to the next, the most even answer has distances of three places, three places and two. That puts the notes on places 1, 4 and 7. The last distance runs from place 7 round to place 1 of the next bar.

That rhythm is the tresillo, its Cuban name, from the Spanish for a group of three. Count it against the beat: the first note is on beat one, the second on the “and” of two, and the third on beat four. Unmute Beat to hear a kick on beats one and three underneath it. The tresillo leaves beat three empty, with its middle note arriving just ahead of it, and that gives the rhythm its strong forward lean.

The idea behind it, spreading a number of notes over a number of places as evenly as they will go, is called maximal evenness. Mathematicians and musicologists have studied it closely, because so many of the world’s most popular rhythms turn out to be maximally even.

Tresillo and Habanera

The book notes that in the United States the tresillo is often called the habanera, and it treats the two names as one rhythm. Strictly, they are close relatives rather than twins. The habanera adds a fourth note, on beat three, which fills the gap that the tresillo leaves.

Switch between the two. The habanera is steadier, because it marks beat three. The tresillo, with beat three left empty, has more lean. You will hear both in a great deal of music.

The Tresillo in Different Styles

The tresillo belongs to no single style. Rockabilly bass players of the 1950s leaned on it heavily, playing it in every bar while the drums kept a plain backbeat, the snare on beats two and four. Listen for the long, long, short pattern of the bass.

Modern reggaeton is built on it too. In reggaeton the tresillo usually runs at sixteenth-note speed, so it fits twice into each bar, and it is shared between the kick and the snare. Here are three common versions of the beat. The first, called dembow, is the classic reggaeton pattern. In each, the kick and snare between them hit the tresillo’s three places in each half of the bar. Press Clave to show the tresillo underneath.

The tresillo runs through pop as well, as the songs at the end of this chapter show. It is also one half of the son clave, the subject of the next chapter.

Other Numbers

Maximal evenness works for any number of notes and any number of places. Five notes spread over sixteen places gives a rhythm known as the bossa nova clave. Five over eight gives the Cuban cinquillo. Seven over twelve gives the 6/8 bell pattern of West African and Afro-Cuban music. Rhythms made this way are also called Euclidean rhythms, after Euclid’s ancient method of dividing one number by another, which can be used to work them out.

Try it yourself with the generator below. Set the number of notes and the number of places, and it spreads the notes as evenly as possible. Start at rotates the pattern so that it begins at a different point. The preset buttons load some well-known results.

The book’s evidence comes from an unexpected place. The software company Propellerhead, makers of Reason, once released a free app called Figure, made for people with no musical training. You chose how many notes each instrument should play, the app decided where to put them, and the result nearly always sounded good. Set three notes and it played a tresillo. Set five and it played the bossa nova clave. The book doubts that the app had Latin rhythms hidden inside it; far more likely, it was simply spreading the notes evenly. To the book, this suggests that rhythms like the tresillo were discovered rather than invented: they are what you get when you spread a few notes evenly through time.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 53–56, Why the Son Clave?

11The Son Clave

This chapter introduces the rhythm at the centre of the whole book, the one it calls the rhythm that conquered the world.

Five Strokes Over Two Bars

The son clave is a rhythm of five strokes spread over two bars. One bar holds three strokes and the other holds two. The bar with three strokes is called the 3 side, and the bar with two strokes is the 2 side.

Look at where the strokes fall. The 3 side has strokes on places 1, 4 and 7, which is the tresillo from the last chapter. The 2 side has strokes on places 3 and 5, which are beats two and three. Counted in beats, the 3-2 clave goes: one, the “and” of two, four; then two, three.

The clave is named after the side that comes first. If the 3 side comes first, it is a 3-2 clave. If the 2 side comes first, it is a 2-3 clave. Switch between the two versions above. The pattern is the same, repeating for as long as the music lasts. Only the starting bar changes. Which bar comes first matters, though, because the music around the clave is arranged to match it, as you will see.

Unmute Beat to hear a kick on beat one of each bar. It helps you hear how the strokes sit within the bars.

The Name and the Instrument

Clave is Spanish for “key” or “code”. It is also the name of the instrument that usually plays this rhythm: a pair of sticks of very hard wood, struck together to make a sharp, high and very loud click. In traditional Cuban son, the style the son clave is named after, one member of the band plays the pattern on the claves throughout the song. The recordings of the Buena Vista Social Club are the best-known example. In timba, the modern Cuban style, there is a drum kit, and the drummer often plays the clave on a plastic block. In the kpanlogo music of Ghana, the same rhythm is played on a bell.

Origins

Musicologists generally believe that the rhythm reached Cuba from West Africa, carried by enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic. The book traces it much further back, to Baghdad, which a thousand years ago was one of the great centres of learning in the world.

There, in the thirteenth century, the music theorist Safi al-Din wrote the Kitāb al-Adwār (“The Book of Musical Modes”). In it he recorded a rhythm called al-thaqil al-awwal, which the book identifies as the son clave. Safi al-Din lived through the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258. Nobody knows whether the rhythm travelled between these places or was found independently in each. A written record is only the earliest proof that people knew a rhythm, and the rhythm itself may be much older.

The Spread of the Clave

The book’s larger claim is that the son clave is now the most widespread rhythm in popular music. It finds it in R&B, rock, rockabilly, jazz, pop, hip-hop, country, EDM and even metal, played or hinted at by artists far removed from Latin music.

It also corrects a common misunderstanding. Playing the clave does not make music sound Latin. Plenty of songs in other styles are built on it and sound nothing like salsa. And the clave can be present in a song even when nobody plays it. That sounds like a contradiction, and The Hidden Clave explains how it works.

The book adds an important warning: the clave and its system are two different things. It insists on this because its first edition often called the system “the clave”, and readers took it for a pattern to copy. The clave is a fixed pattern of five strokes, which you could copy and paste. The book’s system, which you will meet in The Sixteen Places, is something larger that the clave fits into. The son clave is simply the easiest way into it.

The Tresillo Inside

Five notes spread nearly evenly over two bars can make several different claves. Why should the son clave, rather than the more evenly spread bossa nova clave, have become the favourite? The book offers a theory based on a neat symmetry. In a 3-2 clave, take the first, third and fifth strokes. They are six places, six places and four places apart. That is the tresillo’s pattern of 3, 3 and 2, doubled in length. In other words, the son clave contains a tresillo at half speed.

The accented strokes in the top row are the first, third and fifth. The second row plays only those three, so that you can hear the slow tresillo on its own. A rhythm with a slower copy of another popular rhythm inside it has a strong internal logic, and the book suggests this may be part of its appeal.

Clapping the Clave

Most people clap along to music on beats one and three, or on two and four. The book suggests a new habit: clap the clave instead. Once you start doing this, parts of songs you thought you knew well begin to line up with your claps in ways you had never noticed. The book also suspects that you will find you already use the clave by instinct in your own music.

The groove below is written the way a producer would program it, with the whole two-bar clave fitted into one bar of sixteen steps. Remember from The Grid that two of the book’s bars of eighths often equal one DAW bar of sixteenths. In 2-3, the two strokes of the 2 side fall in the first half of the bar, on the “and” of one and on beat two. The three strokes of the 3 side fall in the second half, on beat three, on the “a” of three and on the “and” of four.

Listening List

Clap the clave along with each of these, in the direction given.

In the book: pp. 47–52 and 57–60, The Rhythm That Conquered the World.

12Other Claves

The son clave is not the only clave. It has two close relatives that you will also hear often, and each differs from it by a single stroke.

The Rumba Clave and the Bossa Nova Clave

Compare the three claves below, in both directions. The buttons switch between them, and you can switch while the example plays to hear exactly where each one differs.

• The rumba clave moves the third stroke of the 3 side one place later, from beat four (place 7) to the last upbeat of the bar (place 8). That one change makes the 3 side lopsided and pulls it towards the next bar. The rumba clave comes from Cuban rumba, a style made by drums and voices.
• The bossa nova clave moves the second stroke of the 2 side one place later, from beat three (place 5) to the “and” of three (place 6). It is named after Brazilian bossa nova. It is also the most evenly spread of the three: five notes over sixteen places, as far apart as they will go. You met it among the presets in The Tresillo.

Unmute Beat to hear each clave against a cowbell on beats one and three. It makes the moved stroke easier to hear.

The book treats all three as ways of using the same system. When a line in a song does not quite match the son clave, it often matches one of these relatives instead.

Claves in Other Parts

A clave does not have to be played on claves. Any part can play it. Here is a bass line in which every note starts on a stroke of the rumba clave in 3-2. Look at the third note, on the last upbeat of bar one. That is the stroke that makes it a rumba clave rather than a son clave.

And here is a guitar part whose chords play the bossa nova clave, also in 3-2, over a steady beat. Press Clave to hear the clave itself alongside the guitar, and you will hear that the guitar is playing exactly its rhythm.

The book points out that in bossa nova itself, the guitar does not play the clave. The bossa nova guitar has its own, busier pattern, and the clave is usually played by the drummer instead, as a rim click: the stick is laid across the snare and knocked against its rim. In other styles, though, a guitar or keyboard part that plays a clave exactly is common, as the songs below show.

Remember the distinction from The Son Clave: a clave is a pattern you could copy, while the book’s system, which The Sixteen Places describes, is not.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 49 and 56, and the song examples on pp. 66 and 77–82.

13Turning and Crossing

A clave runs right through a song, two bars at a time. This chapter covers two things that can happen to its direction: a song can turn on the clave, and two parts can cross it.

The Direction of the Clave

The clave is a two-bar pattern, made of a bar A and a bar B that alternate for the whole song. Whether a passage is in 3-2 or 2-3 depends on which of the two bars its phrase starts with. If the phrase starts on the 3 side, the music is in 3-2. If it starts on the 2 side, it is in 2-3. In its transcriptions, the book marks the start of each phrase with a double bar line, so that you can see the direction at a glance.

Usually the alternation of A and B carries on unchanged from the beginning of a song to the end, and every section starts on the same side. But there are two ways in which the direction can change.

Turning

The first is called turning. The clave itself carries on exactly as before, but a section of the song has an odd number of bars. Because the clave takes two bars to come round, an odd-length section ends halfway through a clave cycle, and the next section starts on the other side.

For example, suppose a song starts in 2-3 and its verse is seven bars long. Bar 1 of the verse is a 2 side, bar 2 is a 3 side, and so on, until bar 7, which is a 2 side. The chorus begins on bar 8, which is a 3 side. So the chorus is in 3-2, even though the clave never changed. The song has turned on the clave.

Play the example and follow the strip of bars. Each bar is marked 2 or 3 for its side of the clave. The verse has seven bars and starts on a 2. The chorus starts on a 3. Listen to the clave at bar 8: the chorus’s first beat lands together with a clave stroke, because the 3 side starts with one, while the verse’s first beat had none, because the 2 side is silent on beat one. The chorus is five bars long, also an odd number, so when the loop goes back to the verse, the music turns again and the verse starts on the 2 side once more.

Crossing

The second way is crossing the clave. The clave is crossed when two parts follow it in opposite directions at the same time: one plays as if the music is in 3-2, while the other plays as if it is in 2-3.

In this example the kick plays the first, third and fifth strokes of a 3-2 clave. In the first version, the melody follows the same 3-2 clave as the drums. In the second, the melody is the same idea moved into 2-3, so the two parts pull against each other.

Listen to the second version with the clave on. The melody’s strong notes no longer line up with the kick’s, and the two parts seem to pull in different directions. Some listeners find this exciting, and others find it confusing.

Cuban musicians care a great deal about which way the clave runs; to them a crossed clave sounds wrong, so in Cuban music it is generally avoided. In pop it happens more often, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because the writers were not thinking about the clave at all. The book takes a relaxed view. It notes that even a celebrated salsa recording crosses the clave in one of its parts, and concludes that there are no strict rules: if it sounds good to you, it is a choice like any other.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 58–59 and p. 72.

14Rhythm Without Rests

A stop needs a gap after it. So what about a line that never pauses, with a note on every single place? It has no stops at all, and yet it can still carry a clear rhythm. This chapter explains how.

The Top Notes

Here is a piano line with a note on every place: sixteen notes over two bars. Its binary row is all ones, so the binary system has nothing to tell us about it.

Play the first version, where every note is equally loud. It sounds like a continuous stream. Now switch to the second version, where the highest notes are played louder. A rhythm appears inside the stream. The highest notes fall on places 1, 4 and 7 of each bar, and that is the tresillo. The third version plays only those top notes, so that you can hear the tresillo plainly.

Why does this happen? The ear tends to follow the highest notes of a line as if they were a separate part, living a life of their own even though the same instrument plays them. Higher notes are heard more clearly, and players tend to play them louder without thinking about it. So the top notes form a rhythm of their own, with stops of their own, inside a line that never rests. Even in the first version, with every note at the same volume, you may already hear the tresillo faintly. The louder version just makes it unmistakable.

Octaves

Salsa and timba pianists use this effect all the time. Their typical part is a continuous figure called the tumbao, or montuno, in which both hands play almost without a break. Many of its notes are doubled in octaves: the same note is played on two keys at once, such as a C and the next C up. That makes the doubled notes louder than the rest, and so they work as the line’s stops.

In salsa the piano plays much the same kind of pattern from song to song. Timba is a more recent Cuban style, close to salsa, and in timba the piano part is different in every song. It is so distinctive that you can often recognise the song from its piano alone, the way you might know a Red Hot Chili Peppers song from its bass line.

The author writes timba piano parts this way himself, treating the octave notes as stops. When he recorded himself into MIDI, he noticed that his octave notes came out with a higher velocity. Velocity is MIDI’s measure of how hard a key is struck, and it sets how loud the note sounds. He had been playing the octaves louder without meaning to.

Ragtime piano does something similar. In ragtime the left hand marks the beats, with bass notes alternating with chords, while the right hand plays a syncopated line. In Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, the book points out, the right hand’s octaves outline a 2-3 bossa nova clave. Here is an original example built the same way.

In the first version the right hand plays single notes, and you hear a continuous line over the left hand’s steady beat. In the second, five of its notes are doubled an octave higher. Those five fall on the strokes of a 2-3 bossa nova clave. Press Clave to check: the doubled notes and the clave line up exactly.

Accents

Loudness alone is enough to create a rhythm, even with no change of pitch. A run of sixteen equal hi-hat notes has no rhythm beyond its pulse. Accent some of them, playing those louder and the others softer, and a pattern appears.

In the second version, six of the hats are accented: the first, fourth and seventh sixteenth of each half of the bar. Those six make a tresillo in each half, at sixteenth-note speed, like the reggaeton beats in The Tresillo. There are no rests and no stops, yet you hear the tresillo clearly, because the accented notes stand out as if they were a separate part.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 61–64, Rhythm Without Rests.

15The Hidden Clave

The clave can be the backbone of a song even when no instrument plays it. How can a rhythm be there if nobody plays it? The answer is that the parts of the song each give clues, and together the clues add up to the clave.

This is the heart of the book’s analysis of real songs. Most of its song examples come from this part of the book, and the table at the end of this chapter lists them. Here we look at the main kinds of clue one at a time, with an original example for each.

Two Sides From One Note

Start with the simplest clue of all. A riff that repeats the same bar over and over says nothing about the clave, because every bar is identical. There is no bar A and bar B, just the same bar again.

Now change one note in every second bar, and the two bars become a pair. Each bar now has its own character, which means each one can match a side of the clave.

The first version plays a chord on beats one and three of every bar. The second version moves the second chord of bar two an eighth note earlier, onto the “and” of two. That is an anticipation, and it is the only difference, but it is enough. The two bars no longer sound alike, and the loop now has two sides. The book shows a famous funk guitar riff that does exactly this.

Now look at the third version, which adds a single vocal note in bar two, and press Clave. Between them, the riff and the voice now hit four of the five strokes of a 2-3 clave. Neither part plays the clave, but together they nearly spell it out. In the funk song the book analyses, the vocal does this too: its very first phrase, which is the title of the song, starts on one of the two clave strokes that the guitar leaves out.

Stops on the Clave

Busy lines, like most vocal melodies, have too many notes to compare with the clave one by one. This is where stops come in. Remember from Stops that a stop is a note with an empty place after it, and that stops are the notes the ear holds on to. In song after song, the book finds that the stops of a vocal or bass line fall on clave strokes far more often than chance would explain, even when the line has plenty of extra notes in between.

Here is a melody with eight notes. Five of them are stops, marked with rings, and every one of those five sits on a stroke of a 2-3 clave. The other three notes each lead straight into a stop, so they are not stops themselves.

Play it with the clave on, then press Clave to turn the clave off. Even without the clave sounding, the melody carries it: the notes you hear most clearly are exactly where the clave strokes would be.

Starts on the Clave

Stops are the most important notes for this kind of analysis, but the book adds that the first note of a phrase matters too. The opening note of a motif, especially in the vocal, often falls on a clave stroke. The book finds this particularly often with hooks and song titles, the most important words in a song.

In the first version, the vocal motif starts on the first stroke of the 2-3 clave, on beat two. In the second, the same motif starts on beat one instead, and the first bar loses its pull. In one song the book analyses, the singer adds two wordless syllables, an “oh, oh”, on clave strokes just before the chorus. They add nothing to the lyric, but they mark the clave, and the book does not think that is a coincidence.

Pieces of the Clave

Listen to the parts of a well-arranged song one at a time and they can seem to have nothing to do with each other. The drums play one thing, the keyboard another, the vocal something else. Line each part up against the clave, though, and they turn out to follow the same system. That, the book argues, is why they sit so well together.

Several parts can even share the clave between them, each playing only a few of its strokes. In this example the kick plays two strokes, the snare plays one in each bar, and the keys play a single chord on beat four of bar one. That chord is a quarter-note anticipation, from The Quarter-Note Anticipation. Together the five hits make a complete 3-2 son clave, although no single part plays it.

Mute the parts one at a time and listen to how little each one plays. Then switch to the second version, where the chord is replaced by a shout of “hey” on the same place. The quarter-note anticipation does not have to be a held chord. A single percussion hit or a shout does the same job, as long as it falls on beat four with nothing in that part on the next beat one.

Notice the snare as well. It plays only one note in each bar, and because those two notes sit in different places, they tell you which bar is which. A single well-placed note in each bar can be enough to mark the two sides of the clave.

Room to Vary

Songs do not follow the clave in every bar, and the book is clear that they do not need to. A line that hit every clave stroke in every bar would soon become predictable and dull, so melodies vary and grooves change from bar to bar.

Sections of a song can also contrast with each other. A verse might follow the clave closely and the chorus ignore it, or the reverse. What matters is that most bars fit. When they do, the listener still feels the pulse of the clave, even through the bars that break away from it.

This is not limited to fast or funky music, either. Slow ballads follow the clave too. In one slow song, the author only noticed the clave once he had transcribed the melody and could see it written down. That, the book says, is why transcribing matters: some patterns are easier to see than to hear.

Listening List

These are the songs the book uses to show the hidden clave. For each one, find the part named, listen several times, and clap the clave along with it in the direction given.

The book’s other song examples are in The Quarter-Note Anticipation, Other Claves, Turning and Crossing and The Sixteen Places.

In the book: pp. 65–91, The Clave in Songs.

16The Sixteen Places

This chapter brings us to the book’s central idea, the one that gives it its title. It begins with a question that puzzled the author when he first studied Latin music.

Playing on the Clave

Salsa musicians often say that every instrument plays “on the clave”. But they plainly do not all play the clave rhythm. That would sound absurd, and in modern Cuban music there may be nobody playing the clave at all. So what does playing on the clave actually mean?

The clave has five strokes, but two bars of eighth notes have sixteen places. Notes are played on the other eleven places too, all the time. The author was sure there must be a system for those eleven places as well, something more sophisticated than a fixed five-note pattern.

The Map

After transcribing a great deal of Cuban music, he found one, and drew it up as what the book calls a map. The map covers all sixteen places of a two-bar clave and rates each place by how likely a stop is to fall there. It uses three ratings:

• Most frequent: places where stops fall most often.
• Occasional: places where stops fall now and then, but not typically.
• Rare: places where stops are seldom used. Rare does not mean forbidden. A stop can go on any place, but on these places it is unusual.

This map is what the book calls the Rhythm Code. Notice that it rates stops, not every note. That is why Stops mattered so much: a busy line can have notes all over the bar, but its stops tend to follow the map.

The full map is drawn on page 94 of the book. It is the author’s own work and is not reproduced here, but its main tendencies are easy to describe and easy to hear.

He built the map from Cuban music alone. The surprise came when he laid it over pop songs and found that they fitted it too. The first song that showed him this, the book says, was Pharrell Williams’s Happy: he was stunned that a pop hit matched a system he had worked out for arranging Cuban music. That is the book’s central claim. The same map describes funk, soul and pop as well as salsa.

The Map’s Tendencies

So where do the stops fall? Mostly on the clave’s strokes, but not exactly. The map rates five places as the strongest. Four of them are clave strokes. The fifth is not a stroke at all: it is the upbeat just before the first stroke of the 3 side. That first stroke itself is not among the strongest places, because lines usually anticipate it by an eighth note instead of stopping on it.

This explains something the book notices in song after song: melodies that seem to avoid the first stroke of the 3 side. You might expect the 3 side, with three strokes, to hold more of the strongest places. But in 2-3 the anticipated note sits at the end of the 2-side bar, so the 2-side bar holds three of the strongest places and the 3-side bar only two. The book warns readers not to be confused by this.

At the other end of the scale, the map rates two places as rare. The book names one of them in its text: the second beat of the 3 side, a fact that becomes useful in Drumbeats.

Here is that tendency in sound. In the first version, a melody plays the clave strokes exactly, with every stop on a stroke. In the second, the note on the 3 side’s first beat moves an eighth note earlier, to the last upbeat of bar one.

Switch between the two while the clave plays. Both work, and plenty of songs copy the clave exactly, as the first version does. But the anticipated version is the more common choice, and the book finds that it often sounds better. The line leans into the 3 side instead of landing squarely on it.

Copying the Clave or Using the Map

So there are two ways to use all this. You can take a clave, son, rumba or bossa nova, and use its rhythm directly for a motif or a groove, as a copy-and-paste pattern. Many songs do exactly that. Or you can use the map, which gives you all sixteen places, tells you which ones tend to work best for stops, and leaves you free to make a rhythm of your own. A line written with the map will often match the clave on most strokes, anticipate the 3 side’s first stroke, and put a few stops on other good places in between.

The map also works in either direction. Turn the clave round, from 2-3 to 3-2, and the map turns with it: its strong places move to the other bar. So the same line against a 3-2 clave has a different pulse and character from the same line against 2-3. With sixteen places, three ratings and two directions, the possibilities are practically endless.

The Map as a Guide

The book says this many times, and it is worth saying here too. The map describes tendencies, not laws. Context matters, and your ear has the final say. What sounds good in a particular song matters more than following any rule.

Nor is it a yes-or-no choice. You do not either follow the system or ignore it. A line can follow it closely, loosely or hardly at all, depending on the style, the mood, the tempo, the instrument and the number of notes, and above all on your instinct. The book shows this with a bass line in two extreme versions, made for a promotional video. One has no anticipations at all, with every note on a downbeat. The other is full of anticipations, follows the system closely and sounds very funky. Most real music sits somewhere between the two.

Checking a Rhythm Against the Clave

You can check any rhythm with this tool. Click the boxes on the top row to write a rhythm over two bars. You only mark where notes start; the tool works out your stops from the starts, as in Stops: a start with no start straight after it. Choose 2-3 or 3-2, and the tool tells you how many of your stops land on clave strokes, how many anticipate the 3 side’s first stroke, and how many fall elsewhere.

Try writing in the rhythm of a line from a song you know, or a line of your own. If most of its stops land on strokes or on the anticipation, the line fits the system. If many fall elsewhere, try moving some of them and listen to the difference. For scale, the hit songs in the table below put between about half and four-fifths of their stops on the map’s strongest places. Note too that the tool counts a stop on the first stroke of the 3 side as a clave stroke, although the map rates that place lower. Remember that “elsewhere” is not wrong. It is just less common.

Listening List

The book measures several songs against its map, all of them far outside Latin music, counting how many of their stops land on the strongest places and how many on the rare ones.

In the book: pp. 93–105, The Rhythm Code.

17Two-Bar Thinking

This part of the guide turns from analysing songs to making grooves. It starts with the simplest structural choice of all: how long your groove lasts before it repeats.

One Bar or Two

A groove is the repeating pattern that a rhythm section plays: the drums, the bass and often the chords. The simplest groove repeats every bar. It is easy to make, and it can work, but it tires the ear quickly, because it says the same thing over and over.

Stretching the groove over two bars, so that the second bar answers the first, is the simplest way to make it more interesting. You saw in The Hidden Clave that a single changed note can be enough to do this.

In the first version, the bass plays the same bar twice. In the second, bar two answers bar one with different notes in different places, and the loop becomes a two-bar phrase, a question and an answer. The book calls this a two-bar period: a bar A followed by a bar B. Moving from one-bar grooves to two-bar grooves, it says, is a step from simpler rhythm to more sophisticated rhythm.

Musical Sentences

The book compares grooves with sentences. If you write only very short sentences, your writing sounds simple, even childish. Medium-length sentences are the easiest to follow. Very long sentences, like the ones in a legal contract, are hard work for most readers, even when they are perfectly correct.

Musical phrases work the same way. A period that is too short sounds simple and repetitive, and a period that is too long is hard for most listeners to follow. The tresillo repeats every eight places and the son clave every sixteen. Some traditions use far longer cycles: the book mentions Bulgarian folk music with cycles of 33 units, and Indian classical music with cycles of up to 128. That music is wonderful, but most listeners find such long cycles hard to follow. Two bars sits in the comfortable middle, and the book suggests this is one reason why the two-bar clave became so popular.

Longer Grooves on a Two-Bar Clave

A two-bar clave does not limit you to two-bar grooves. The clave can keep repeating every two bars underneath a groove that runs for four, eight or even sixteen bars before it repeats. The book mentions a Jamiroquai bass line with a twelve-bar period that still fits the two-bar clave all the way through.

Here a bass line runs for four bars before repeating. Bars one and two state an idea, and bars three and four answer it with different notes on nearly the same places. Press Clave: the clave repeats every two bars underneath, and the bass line fits it in both halves.

Longer grooves repeat less, and that keeps them fresh. But repetition is also part of what makes a groove catchy, so there is a balance to find. Push the length too far, and the part stops sounding like a groove at all and starts to sound improvised.

In the book: pp. 70–71, and guideline 3 on p. 120.

18Building a Groove

All the analysis so far leads to one practical question. How do you use these ideas to make a good rhythm from scratch, or to improve one you already have? The book answers with a step-by-step method, and this chapter walks through it.

The Starting Point

The example here is a bass line, but the same steps work for a vocal melody, a horn line or a drum beat. The book takes a real bass line and first makes it plain, by removing all its anticipations so that every note sits on a downbeat. Then it rebuilds the groove in four steps. The book’s line comes from Jamiroquai’s Too Young to Die, and after the four steps it ends up almost identical to the original: for the book, the proof that the method works. This guide does the same with an original line.

Our starting line is four bars long and in 2-3, so bars one and three are the 2 side and bars two and four are the 3 side. Every note is on a beat. Play it first. It is not bad, but it is predictable, and it plods.

The Four Steps

Now make four changes, one at a time, and listen after each. The buttons above the grid let you hear the line after each step, and the notes outlined in red are the ones that step changed.

1. Anticipate the 2 side by a quarter note. Find each note on beat one of a 2-side bar, and move it a whole beat earlier, onto beat four of the bar before. That makes it a quarter-note anticipation, the strong effect from The Quarter-Note Anticipation. Do this only where no other note already starts on that beat four. In our line, the note on beat one of bar three moves back to beat four of bar two. The note on beat one of bar one moves back to beat four of bar four, at the end of the loop.
2. Anticipate the 3 side by an eighth note. Find each note on beat one of a 3-side bar, and move it one place earlier, onto the last upbeat of the bar before. As The Sixteen Places showed, this note usually sounds better anticipated than on the beat. In our line, the notes on beat one of bars two and four each move to the last upbeat of the bar before.
3. Use the 3 side’s middle stroke. Find each note on beat three of a 3-side bar, and move it one place earlier, onto the “and” of two. That is where the clave has the middle stroke of its 3 side. Because this stroke only occurs on the 3 side, it helps the listener tell the two sides apart.
4. Leave space. Take out a note that crowds the strokes. In our line, the note on beat two of each 3-side bar goes, and the anticipated note before it is held a little longer. The note that goes was not a stop, but it filled the space after the anticipation; without it, the anticipation rings on and the move to the “and” of two sounds cleaner. It also sat on the second beat of the 3 side, one of the places the book’s map rates as rare.

Now listen to the start and to step four, one after the other. Already after step three, every stop in the line falls on a clave stroke or on the anticipation of the 3 side; step four lets them breathe. The line sounds as if it had been written for the clave, yet it started as a plain line on the beats. Nearly all the pitches are the same as before. Only the placement has changed.

Using the Steps Freely

The steps are a method, not a formula. If you take them in a different order, you will get a slightly different groove. If you stop after one or two, the line will be simpler than the finished version but still better than where it started. The book suggests that even the first two steps may be all that the music you are working on needs. And, as with the map, listen after each step and keep only what sounds good.

The book’s own four steps, on pages 107 to 112, are close to these but not identical. Its third step uses the map: it moves any stop that falls on a place the map marks as rare one place earlier, so that the stop becomes an anticipation. Its fourth step is our third, the move onto the 3 side’s middle stroke. This guide puts “leave space” in its place, because the map is not reproduced here and because thinning out a line is something you can judge by ear. Our fourth step does take notes off one of the rare places, though not because they were stops.

In the book: pp. 107–112, How to Develop a Groove.

19Drumbeats

Many songs start from a drumbeat, and the beat alone can already decide which way the clave runs. This chapter shows how to read the direction from a beat, and how to write beats that set it up.

Kick and Snare

In a drumbeat, the kick drum and the snare carry the groove. Hi-hats, shakers, congas and other percussion decorate it. They add energy and texture, but they do not decide what the groove is.

Play this beat, then mute the hat, the shaker and the conga by clicking their names. The beat sounds plainer, but the groove is still there, because the kick and snare carry it. Now bring the decoration back and mute the kick instead, and notice how much of the groove disappears.

A word about the snare. In this guide, as in the book, “snare” means whatever plays the backbeat on beats two and four. In modern productions that might be a snare drum, a hand clap, a finger snap, a rim shot, or even a burst of noise. They sound very different, but they all do the same job.

The Kick and the Direction

You have seen songs where the snare gives a clue to the clave. But the book estimates that the snare plays a plain two and four almost all the time, and a plain backbeat is the same in every bar, so it says nothing about the clave. That leaves the kick. Most of the time, the kick is the part that tells you whether a beat is in 3-2 or 2-3.

The beats in the rest of this chapter are written the way producers program them, in one bar of sixteen steps. As The Grid explained, at pop tempos the whole two-bar clave fits into that one bar at double speed. In 3-2, the 3 side takes up the first half of the bar, beats one and two, and the 2 side takes up the second half, beats three and four. In 2-3 it is the other way round.

The first version is one of the most common beats in pop. The kick plays on beat one and then, instead of playing again on beat three as you might expect, it comes early, on the “and” of two. That second kick is an anticipation, and the two kicks match the first and third strokes of a 3-2 clave. Press Clave to see them line up. With only two notes, the kick makes the direction obvious.

The second version keeps that kick and moves the second snare from beat four to the “and” of three, the first stroke of the 2 side. A plain backbeat sits in the same place in both halves of the bar, so it cannot tell the two clave bars apart; now the halves differ, and the snare marks the clave too. The third version is a much busier kick, with seven notes, but its pattern still makes 3-2 obvious.

Longer Kick Patterns

One small change every few bars stretches a beat into a longer pattern. Here the common two-kick beat plays for one bar, and in the second bar the kick adds one extra note, on the first stroke of the 2 side. The pattern now repeats every two bars instead of every bar, which makes it less repetitive, and the extra kick lands on the clave.

A Plain Verse and a Clave Chorus

A kick on every beat, the “four on the floor” of house and disco, says nothing about the direction, because every beat is the same. A few kicks on clave strokes say a great deal. Switching from one to the other between sections is a simple way to give a chorus more lift than the verse.

In the verse version, the kick plays on all four beats. In the chorus version, it plays three notes: on one, on the “and” of three and on the “e” of four. All three sit on strokes of a 3-2 bossa nova clave, and the last of them is the stroke that only the bossa nova clave has. The book describes a well-known pop song that does exactly this, with a kick on every beat in the verses and a kick resembling the bossa nova clave in the chorus.

The book adds one more clue for reading a kick. If a kick plays on the second beat of a clave bar, that bar is most likely the 2 side, because, as the map in The Sixteen Places showed, the 3 side rarely has a stop there. On a sixteen-step DAW grid, with the whole clave in one bar, that place is the “and” of one or the “and” of three. In 3-2 it is the “and” of three, like the kick on the “and” of three in the chorus above. In 2-3 it is the “and” of one.

Kick and Bass Together

The kick and the bass are usually partners. They do not play every note together, but they share the most important ones, so that the kick underlines the bass line and gives it weight. Here the kick doubles four of the bass’s notes in each bar, and three of those shared notes fall on strokes of a 2-3 clave.

When you write a beat for an existing bass line, a good place to start is to put kicks under the bass notes that fall on clave strokes, and leave the rest of the bass line on its own.

Kicks Without a Direction

Some kick patterns give little or nothing away. They might skip both the kick on the “and” of two and the 3 side’s middle stroke, or play only on the beats. Then listen to the other parts instead. The book describes a song whose kick makes the direction hard to read, while the saxophone plays the bossa nova clave at the start and the snare plays a son clave pattern in the pre-chorus.

Beats From Your Styles

The book does not cover these, but they are useful for practice: four beats from styles that many producers work in. Look for clave strokes in each one, using what you have learned, and press Clave to check. Boom bap, trap and neo-soul each have a kick on the “and” of three, so they lean towards 3-2; the house kick, on every beat, gives nothing away. Try the swing control too, which Feel explains.

Listening List

In the book: pp. 113–117, Starting With a Drumbeat.

20Five Guidelines

The book closes its method with five guidelines for using it in real songs. Each one loosens the system a little, so that you use it as a tool rather than as a set of rules. Here they are, with what each one means in practice.

1. Few Notes

Not every groove has to be a busy funk part. It depends on the style of the music, and on its mood and character. You have seen examples where a part plays only a few notes and still makes the two sides of the clave clear.

This bass line plays just three notes in two bars. All three are on strokes of a 3-2 clave, and the second, on beat four of bar one, is a quarter-note anticipation. The groove has two clear sides, and yet nothing busy is happening.

2. Parts Without the Clave

You can choose which parts follow the clave and which do not. The snare might mark the sides of the clave, or it might keep a plain two and four while the other parts follow the clave around it. Both are valid choices. Even Cuban songs have passages where the rhythm section plays a one-bar groove while the other instruments follow the clave. A two-bar groove is more sophisticated than a one-bar groove, but more sophisticated does not automatically mean better. It is a different choice, suited to a different style.

3. Longer Grooves

As Two-Bar Thinking showed, the clave lasts two bars, but your groove can last two, four, eight or sixteen bars before it repeats and still fit the clave throughout. Too much repetition makes music dull: a two-bar groove is less repetitive than a one-bar groove, and a four-bar groove less again. But repetition is also one of the most important tools in songwriting, so do not overdo the length. A groove that takes too long to repeat starts to sound improvised.

4. Bars Outside the Pattern

Be flexible. You have seen songs where one bar in four, or one bar in eight, does not match the system, and sometimes a bar that breaks the pattern is exactly what a groove needs. The system is a guide that stops you pushing notes around at random, because it tells you which places tend to sound better. It does not replace your judgment. If something sounds good to you, then it is good.

5. Sections Without the Clave

Different sections of a song can treat the clave differently. You have seen a kick that plays a plain beat in the verse and a clave pattern in the chorus. The book also points to Shallow, whose verse melody clearly follows the system while its chorus does not seem to. The contrast between sections is a useful tool in itself.

The Principle Behind Them

All five guidelines say the same thing in different ways. The system tells you which places tend to sound good, so that you are not working blind. Your ear has the last word. The book’s view, put simply, is that the only real rule in music is whether it sounds good.

In the book: pp. 119–121, How to Use the Rhythm Code to Create Songs.

21Feel

The book deals only with where notes start on a straight grid. Producers work with four more things that shape how a groove feels: how long notes last, swing, small shifts off the grid, and how hard each note is played. Apart from the accents in Rhythm Without Rests, the book has little to say about them, but they are worth knowing, because they change the feel of everything else in this guide.

Note Length

Remember from Starts and Lengths that length does not change which rhythm you hear. It does change how that rhythm feels. In this example the bass plays the same rhythm twice, a tresillo in each bar, first with short notes and then with long ones. The binary row is identical.

The short version bounces. Each note pops and leaves space behind it, so the groove feels light and funky. The long version pushes forward. Each note runs into the next, so the groove feels smooth and heavy. Same rhythm, different feel. When a bass line sounds right in rhythm but wrong in feel, try changing its note lengths before you change anything else.

Swing

Swing delays every second subdivision of the beat. On a sixteen-step grid, it moves the second and fourth sixteenth of each beat a little later, while the first and third stay where they are. Most DAWs and drum machines have a swing control, usually given as a percentage.

At 50 per cent nothing moves, and the grid is straight. At about 66 per cent, each delayed note sits two-thirds of the way through its pair, which is a triplet shuffle. Most hip-hop, neo-soul and a good deal of house sit somewhere in between, often around 56 to 62 per cent.

Drag the swing control slowly from 50 towards 66 while the example plays, and listen to the hi-hats in particular. The pattern on the grid does not change at all: the same steps play in the same order. Only their timing shifts, and the groove goes from stiff to loose to rolling.

Behind and Ahead of the Beat

Good players do not always play exactly on the grid. They often place notes a few milliseconds early or late on purpose, and the listener feels the difference without hearing it as a mistake. A snare played slightly late sounds relaxed and heavy, the laid-back feel of much neo-soul. A snare played slightly early sounds urgent and driving.

The three versions look identical on the grid. In the second, the snare is 30 milliseconds late. In the third, it is 20 milliseconds early. Switch between them while the example plays and listen to the mood change. Most DAWs let you shift a whole track by a few milliseconds, or nudge single notes, to get this effect.

Ghost Notes and Velocity

Velocity is MIDI’s word for how hard a note is played, which mostly decides how loud it is. Ghost notes are very quiet hits between the main ones. They fill out a groove and make it feel more human without changing its shape, because they are too quiet to register as stops.

The small squares in the second version are ghost notes on the snare. Notice that the binary row counts them as starts like any other notes. It is their low velocity that makes them sink into the background. Accents, from Rhythm Without Rests, are the same tool used the other way: a high velocity makes chosen notes stand out.

Not in the book, which mentions accents (p. 64) but not swing or timing.

22The Tonality Code

At the end of the book, the author turns the same kind of thinking from rhythm to pitch. The question is the same as before: of all the possibilities, which ones do songs actually use, and how often?

Twelve Notes, Used Unequally

Western music has twelve different notes in each octave. In principle a song could use all twelve equally. In practice, songs use them very unequally.

Most songs stay in one key, and a key uses only seven of the twelve notes. In C major those seven are C, D, E, F, G, A and B, the white keys of a piano. On top of that, most melodies, and vocal melodies in particular, lean hardest on just five of the seven: the pentatonic scale. In C major the pentatonic scale is C, D, E, G and A, and the other two notes of the key, F and B, are used less often.

Notes from outside the key do turn up, even in songs that never change key, but usually as quick passing notes on weak places, stepping between two notes of the key. These are called chromatic notes.

So the twelve notes fall into three levels: the five pentatonic notes, used most; the other two notes of the key, used less; and the five notes outside the key, used least. The book draws this as a chart, on the same principle as its rhythm map, and calls it the Tonality Code.

Counting a Line

Here is a bass line in C major, written for this guide to show the pattern. Below it is a chart that counts how many times each of the twelve notes appears.

The five pentatonic notes account for almost every note in the line. F and B appear once each, and there is one note from outside the key, E♭. Look at where the E♭ falls: it is a quick note on the last upbeat of bar two, stepping from D up to E. It joins two notes of the key, and the line never stops on it.

The book counts a real bass line the same way: Jamiroquai’s Too Young to Die, in E♭ major. Its five pentatonic notes are by far the most used. The other two notes of the key appear less often, and the three notes from outside the key appear only as chromatic steps between notes inside it, never on important places. The book adds that this is only one bass line from one song: treat the three levels as a tendency to check, not a law.

You can do this with any line, your own or a song’s. Write it out, count each note, and see how the notes divide between the three levels. A line that used all twelve notes equally would sound as if it were in no key at all, and a line that never leaves the pentatonic scale can sound safe. Most good lines are somewhere in between, and counting shows you where.

Data and Intuition

The book expects some readers to object that music should come from intuition alone, and that bringing data into it spoils something. Its answer is that analysing thousands of songs made the author a much better writer, and that knowing what usually works does not stop you using your intuition. It means you are not working in the dark: you can see what the music is doing, which is a real advantage.

In the book: pp. 123–125, The Tonality Code.

23Other Metres

Everything so far has been in 4/4: four beats to a bar. That count is the music’s metre, written as a time signature. What about music in three, like a waltz? The book’s system was built for 4/4, but two of its ideas carry straight over.

The Book’s Focus on 4/4

The author built his system from Cuban salsa, which is all in 4/4, and then tested it on pop music, which is nearly all in 4/4 too. By pop, the book means anything you might hear on the radio, including hip-hop, EDM, R&B, rock and country. Listeners mostly prefer music in four, the book argues, which is why so little popular music is in any other metre. So the book never analysed songs in 3/4 in detail. Still, two of its ideas work in any metre.

Upbeats and Downbeats in Three

A bar of 3/4 has three beats. Divided into eighth notes, it has six places: the downbeats on places 1, 3 and 5, and the upbeats on places 2, 4 and 6. The balance between them works exactly as it does in four. A melody entirely on the downbeats sounds stiff, and moving some of its notes onto upbeats gives it life.

In the first version, every note of the melody is on a beat. In the second, three notes move onto upbeats, two of them as anticipations, and the line starts to move in the same way that the melodies in Downbeats and Upbeats did. Finding the right balance takes the same practice and the same ear in any metre.

Two-Bar Periods in Three

The second idea is the two-bar period: a bar A answered by a bar B. That works in any metre too, and Afro-Cuban music has a famous two-bar pattern in three. The book calls it the afro clave. It is better known as the 6/8 bell pattern, because it is usually played on a bell, and it is the same pattern that you met as seven notes in twelve places in The Tresillo.

Look at it written in 3/4, as two bars of six places. The first bar has a note on each of its three beats, plus one more on its last upbeat. The second bar has notes only on upbeats. And that last upbeat of bar one is an anticipation of bar two’s first beat, which is left empty. So bar A states the beat, and bar B plays against it. The son clave has a contrast like this too: its 2 side sits on beats two and three, while its 3 side, the tresillo, leans against the beat.

The second version plays exactly the same pattern counted in 6/8, with two beats to the bar instead of three. Unmute Beat in each version to hear the two ways of counting it. The book leaves pop music in 3/4 and 6/8 for a possible future edition.

In the book: pp. 127–128, Other Time Signatures.

24Notes on the Book

The book is a practical guide and well worth reading alongside this one. A few points are worth keeping in mind as you do, either because the book overstates something or because this guide treats it differently.

• Earlier work. The book presents itself as probably the first theory of rhythm as a system. It does mention mathematicians’ and musicologists’ studies of rhythm, but sets them aside as formulas a musician cannot use, and others had gone further than that. The computer scientist Godfried Toussaint wrote at length about maximal evenness, the clave and Euclidean rhythms. Writers on Afro-Cuban music, such as David Peñalosa in The Clave Matrix (2009), had already analysed how every part of a groove relates to the clave across its sixteen pulses. The book’s real value is that it makes these ideas practical for songwriters and producers.
• Length matters to feel. The book says that note lengths have almost nothing to do with rhythm. It is right that the starts decide which rhythm you hear, but length changes how that rhythm feels, sometimes a great deal. Feel lets you hear the difference.
• Grids at one speed. Every example in the book is drawn in eighth notes, whatever the song’s tempo. That keeps the examples consistent, but it means that many of its bars are half a bar in a DAW. The Grid explains how to translate between the two.
• Tresillo and habanera. The book treats them as one rhythm. They are close relatives, but the habanera has an extra note on beat three. The Tresillo plays both.
• Ancient flutes. The book mentions 40,000-year-old flutes tuned to the pentatonic scale. The oldest known flutes, from caves in southern Germany, are made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, but how they were tuned is not known.
• A notation habit. In its sheet-music examples, the book writes every upbeat note as an eighth note and every downbeat note as a quarter note, whatever its real length, so that upbeats are easy to spot at a glance. If you read the book’s notation, do not take those lengths literally.
• What it leaves out. It says nothing about swing or about playing ahead of or behind the beat, and little about velocity beyond accents. Feel covers the basics.

The book also tells the author’s own story: how studying and transcribing Cuban music led him to his system, and how his first song, Con Clave Y Tambó, found listeners in many countries (pp. 47–48). His timba piano part from Timbailando, released under the name Barrio Latino Hungría, is on p. 62, and he plays it on the recording.

ABook Index and Glossary

Book Index

Glossary

2 side, 3 side

The two bars of a clave: the bar with two strokes and the bar with three.

Accent

A note played louder than those around it.

Anticipation

A note on an upbeat with nothing in the same part starting on the next downbeat. It is heard as that downbeat arriving early.

Backbeat

Beats two and four, where the snare usually plays.

Bar

A group of beats, four of them in 4/4 time. Also called a measure.

Beat

The steady pulse you tap your foot to.

Binary row

A row of ones and zeros: 1 where a note starts, 0 where none does.

Bossa nova clave

The son clave with the 2 side’s second stroke moved one place later. The most evenly spread of the claves.

BPM

Beats per minute: the tempo.

Chromatic note

A note from outside the key, usually a quick step between two notes of the key.

Clave

A two-bar rhythm of five strokes, three in one bar and two in the other. Also the pair of wooden sticks that plays it.

Crossing

Two parts following the clave in opposite directions at once, one in 3-2 and one in 2-3.

Dembow

The classic reggaeton beat, built on the tresillo.

DAW

Digital audio workstation: software for recording and producing music, such as Ableton Live, Logic Pro or FL Studio.

Direction

Whether a phrase starts on the clave’s 3 side (3-2) or its 2 side (2-3).

Downbeat

A place on the beat: places 1, 3, 5 and 7 of an eight-place bar.

Euclidean rhythm

Another name for a maximally even rhythm.

Four on the floor

A kick drum on every beat of the bar, as in house and disco.

Ghost note

A very quiet note between the main hits.

Groove

The repeating pattern of a rhythm section.

Habanera

The tresillo with an extra note on beat three. In the United States, the name is often used for the tresillo itself.

Key

The family of notes a song is built from, with one of them as home. C major uses the seven white keys of a piano.

Maximal evenness

Spreading a number of notes over a number of places as evenly as possible.

Metre

How the beats are grouped: four to a bar in 4/4, three in 3/4. Written as a time signature.

MIDI

The data a DAW stores for each note: which key, when it starts, how long it lasts and how hard it is played.

Motif

A short musical idea, a few notes long.

Octave

The distance from a note to the next note of the same name, such as from one C to the next C up. Notes doubled in octaves sound louder.

Pentatonic scale

A five-note scale: in C major, C, D, E, G and A, the major scale without F and B. Melodies use these five most.

Piano roll

A DAW’s grid for MIDI notes, with time running left to right and pitch from bottom to top.

Pickup

A lead-in note or two just before the bar line.

Period

How long a groove or phrase lasts before it repeats: one bar, two bars, four bars and so on.

Place

The book’s name for each of the eight eighth-note positions in a bar.

Pulse

The shortest note length a song uses often, and so the step size of its grid.

Quarter-note anticipation

A note on beat four heard as the next bar’s beat one, with nothing starting on that beat one.

Rim click

A drum sound made with the stick laid across the snare so that it strikes the rim.

Rhythm

A pattern of starting points in time.

Rhythm Code

The book’s map of the sixteen places of a two-bar clave, rating each by how often stops fall there.

Rumba clave

The son clave with the 3 side’s third stroke moved one place later.

Son clave

The best-known clave: a 3 side on places 1, 4 and 7, and a 2 side on places 3 and 5.

Snare

In this guide, as in the book, whatever plays the backbeat on two and four: a snare drum, a clap, a snap or a rim shot.

Step

One position on a sequencer’s grid: an eighth or a sixteenth here.

Stop

A start with nothing starting straight after it.

Swing

Delaying every second subdivision, from straight (50%) towards a triplet shuffle (about 66%).

Syncopation

Any emphasis that falls off the beat.

Timba

A modern Cuban dance style close to salsa, with a drum kit and a piano part different in every song.

Tonality Code

The book’s chart of how often songs use each of the twelve notes.

Transcribing

Writing music down from a recording.

Tresillo

Three notes over eight places, with distances of 3, 3 and 2 from note to note.

Tumbao

The continuous piano figure of salsa and timba, also called the montuno.

Turning

A section with an odd number of bars, which moves the next section onto the clave’s other side.

Two-bar bell (6/8 bell)

A two-bar pattern of seven strokes in a metre of three, played on a bell; the book calls it the afro clave.

Upbeat

A place between beats: places 2, 4, 6 and 8 of an eight-place bar.

Velocity

How hard a MIDI note is played, which sets how loud it is.

Rhythm on the Grid is an independent study companion to The Rhythm Code by Tamas Bodzsar (2022). Every example is original or traditional, and the songs named are for listening.