ODD TIME GROUPINGS

Hello! Hope you don’t mind me popping my head in here for this month, but the invitation to offer some intermediate wisdom was a little too tempting! What we’re going to be exploring this month is grouping notes in three and five while still playing in 4/4. Very often when learning new patterns, scales, arpeggios, and so on, we come up with exercises that are designed to help us remember the pattern—but which stop short of developing new and unusual phrasing within it.

Let’s take a fairly simple example to start with and start to layer the complexity on top of it. Exercise 1 is an E Major scale played in four-note chunks...

EXERCISE ONE

So far, so easy to understand—right? We’re playing through the E Major scale, ascending in four-note chunks, starting on each consecutive note. And it’s particularly easy to follow because each phrase starts on the strong beats of 1 and 3 in