I was messing around trying new ways to practice polyrhythms and discovered these excercises. I found them to be very useful in terms of changing up the rhythm and learning to break away from the obvious and audible beat of the drummer (If for example the drummer is play a 4/4 beat you can really change things up and play a crazy triplet/accent every 4th triplet polyrhythm). This is useful if at a certain point in the song you want to really catch the listener by surprise and take them through a journey.

You will need a metronome for this that clicks a different sound at the end of every 3 or 4 beats. You should be able to set the metronome to play in triplets, quarters, and halfs.

If you don't have a feel for triplets already, I suggest you first set your metronome to triplet feel and just jam over that for a little bit.



Now, set your metronome to play in half notes (or quarter) at the lowest bpm possible (atleast 40). What you want to do here is play triplets over the pulse of the beat. That is, play the triplets as if the metronome was set to triplet feel. Some of you will find it difficult to play one feel over another. It is tricky at first but once you really get the hang of it you won't even hear the half note clicks.

Once you get the hang of it, start going back and forth between dividing your measures into fourths and thirds. So play one measure in thirds and try to go right back into fourths seamlessly. I found this to be tricky because as I would play the triplets I wouldn't hear the clicks of the quarter notes anymore. It would just be noise to me and it would take a half second or so to revert back to quarter note form. The goal here is to be able to do this seamlessly. Keep increasing the tempo of the metronome by 10 bpm once you get the hang of the current tempo.

Now switch your metro to triplet feel and play quarter notes over the pulse. After doing it the other way, switching the metronome this way and playing quarter notes seemed to require the same learning curve as before. Go through the same process as you did with the other feel, reverting back and forth between thirds and fourths once you really get the hang of it and gradually increasing the tempo.

This is just the beginning of this. I am trying to find other good rhythm excercises you could do with a metronome. One other I discovered is setting your metronome to quarter notes, playing in triplets, and accenting every 4th triplet. This is pretty tough because as you concentrate on accenting the 4th its easy to lose the triplet feel because of the quarter clicks. Still practicing that one!