Ragtime is the music most commonly thought of when talking about syncopation. Another way to say it is “irregular rhythm”. I am discovering that pop music is also full of syncopation. An old song “The Best Is Yet to Come” by Mr. Coleman has a lot of syncopated beats and you can feel the syncopation, especially if you know the song just by saying the words, From the tree of life, I just picked a plum.
There seem to be two problems musicians face when dealing with this type of syncopated pattern. The first is how to correctly read the rhythmic patterns. Maybe you can use this tip to help if you find playing syncopated notes somewhat challenging. First, you need to change each of the oddly placed quarter notes to two eighth notes, and then convert them to tied notes. Now you can count the beat.
So before we had eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, eighth note tied in a bar. Now we can easily count, 1 and, 2 and, 3, 4 and because we have three sets of eighth notes and one quarter note. The second problem is playing the melody with a real rhythmic feel. To make this happen, place accents on notes that occur on normally downbeats. Any music dictionary will tell you to change the accent of a note or chord to a downbeat or downbeat.
Going back to our original song, the accent would look like this:
Outside of tea tree of lifeME single selected me pleaseem. Anticipating and feeling the beat are common words applied to Cuban music. These irregular patterns are very necessary for playing in your piano practice regardless of the genre of performance. So, spice up your game with more syncopation!
