A Systematic Approach to Odd Subdivisions Gary Chester’s classic book, The New Breed, contains thirty-nine “systems,” which are essentially grooves that you play with two or three limbs while the remaining voices work through a series of reading material. This approach forces you to apply everything you work on in a musical context while solidifying your time, independence, reading, counting, ambidexterity, and more. This idea is scalable to work with any type of material. We can use a similar approach to isolate any type of rhythm or concept by creating our own systems specific to whatever we’re working on. Then, instead of using full pages of reading material, we can isolate any problematic rhythms piece by piece. A good system needs to outline the subdivision you’re working with while accenting the pulse—in this case, quarter notes—in a way that’s recognizably musical. Exercises 1 and 2 present systems designed for working […]

January 2020 Issue