Animals As Leaders – The Woven Web Breakdown
Introducing “Steering Wheel Rhythms” to the PatrickRFBlakley.com percussion articles! Steering wheel rhythms are going to become a regular installment with sheet music representing certain parts of various songs. Usually, the songs will involve quite intricate rhythms or phrases and they’ll also tend to be from songs that make us want to pound them out on our steering wheels!
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Now let’s check out the fun with the Animals As Leaders song The Woven Web!
Some interesting things to note on this rhythm overall is the use of sixteenth-note rests and thirty-second notes interspersed within the rhythm. There are a few obvious sixteenth-note rests written in the phrase, but keep in mind there are a few more hiding after the three eighth-notes as well. This creates nice gaps that break up the rhythm and further exaggerate the overall feel of the breakdown, especially when factoring in the guitar pitch choice using those eighth-notes. The other side of the equation is the thirty-second notes (sometimes called hertas). We see three actual pairs of these fast notes, but we need to also look at the triplet modulation using sixteenth-note triplets to have a similar effect. The coolest part of the fast herta groupings is that the two found within the triplets move directly into one in the sixteenth-notes. This is a great use of metric modulation and creates a nice variety while also pushing forward with the rhythm. Speaking of duple to triple feels, you might also notice that the first two measures and last two measures are built exactly the same: Six counts of duple feel followed by two counts of triple feel. With the crazy rhythm changing within the phrase it’s very interesting that the framework stays the same both times!
Download the PDF of this Steering Wheel Rhythm here!
If you have any suggestions for an upcoming Steering Wheel Rhythms post please let me know in the contact page!
