AT THE SAME TIME!!! In the right hand is tripleted crotchets, the left has straight quavers. How am I supposed to play that? The piece is 'Ombre' by Ludovico Einaudi if anyone knows it! The left hand also has some pretty nasty leaps in other places (Octave chord, next quaver the 7th above the top note, then the next quaver a sixth above that) which apart from not having quite enough notes to get the bottom octave in is hard to do without looking at the keyboard! Any advice gratefully recieved!
Thanks
Rosemary

Copy out one bar's worth of the music onto manuscript. Then from each note head of the triplets draw a vertical line straight up, this might help you to visualise "where" (in relation to the quavers) as opposed to when the notes are played.

I don't know how useful that'll be for you, my teacher was forever telling me "Cold cup of tea" which made absolutely no sense at all because she didn't tell me which syllable applied to which note in which hand - oh, the time wasted!

In the end, I just feel it. As my funk playing friends would say: "You just gotta groove it, sit on it..."

The problem is that they happen in the middle of each other...

Can you clarify?

Cold cup of tea could be quite good I think!



And once you get used to it, you just gotta groove it, dude !

I think with "nice cup of tea"

the duplets fall on nice and of, the triplets on nice, cup, tea.

Could be wrong though... can't do it myself

edit: yeah like andy said - - and sorry, I knew the "nice" not the "cold", sorry to be confusing!

Lol thanks Oddball - bit late for me now! Playing Debussy's Arabesque firmly got those sorted.

Hehe, yes, it certainly does.

Listen here Rosemary: 3 Against 2

Try counting 'nice cup of tea' to this.

In Phillip Glass song titled 'Opening' the same ryhthm has to be played on the piano throughout the whole song. Took me two hours to get it right, and after I got it, I never forgot it lol! It is now easy to play! I dont know why I couldnt get it before.

I can only explain it for myself, however! I tried, but i find it difficult to explain it in words.

*Confused* My left hand has 4 notes to play, my right 3

OOOH

*feels stupid*

Misread your post.

What Rosemary's asking is how to play 3 triplet crotchets against 4 quavers. What I think most people have assumed, and what they've described using @nice cup of tea' is triplet quavers against straight quavers - not the same thing and, in my book anyway, more difficult than the 'three against two' quavers.

If you divide the triplet crotchets into 12 semiquavers, and then divide the quavers equally against the semiquavers you'll see that it goes something like:

triplet crotchet:::1----------------2----------------3
semiquavers:::::1---2---3---4---5---6---7---8---9---10---11---12
quavers:::::::::::1------------2----------- 3-------------4


so you play the second quaver immediately before the second crotchet, the third quaver half way between the 2nd and 3rd crotchet, and the 4th quaver immediately after the 3rd crotchet. Ugh! Good luck.

Thank you! At least I understand how it goes now - playing it will be another thing entirely though!

As someone has already said it's really how you feel it. What I'd do to start with is take that bit really, really slowly, count in semiquavers until I got familiar with how it fits together, then, very gradually speed it up until you forget about the counting and you start to feel that it fells right. edit: sorry about the spelling (three glasses of wine!!!!!)

With 4v3, I know how it works on paper, but it doesn't seem to help....the only way I can do it is by trying to separate my brain. I try and visualise two halves of my brain and two ears each doing a separate one, and sometimes that works.

I've been waiting for someone to bring this up for quite a while

The equivalent to "nice cup of tea" in four-against-three is "this isn't hard at all". Imagine saying it in 12/8 time, with "this" "is" "hard" and "all" on the beats. "Isn't" is a quaver followed by a crotchet, "hard at" is a crotchet followed by a quaver.

Say "this isn't hard at all" in this rhythm and beat it out with your fingers. Assuming left hand is doing the four straight quavers and right hand is doing the triplets, then you should beat "both, left-right, left, right-left" (swap hands if necessary).

£20 to the usual address.

There were 4 against 3s for one of my G8 pieces. I couldn't find a way to count it properly, so instead I practised hands separately until the rhythms were secure and then just put them together. It may well have been out of time, but it was fast enough so that nobody could tell...that's probably not the "correct" way to learn it, but I seemed to get away with it *shrugs*

Try bar 4 of Chopin's Nocturne 1, Op 9, No. 1: the time signature is 6/4, the bar has 12 quavers in the left hand, 22 in the right!

Indeed. I've been trying to play these groups of 11 v 6 for years. (There is also a 20 v 6 phrase occurring later in the piece!) Unfortunately without success. Which is a shame, because apart from these parts this Nocturne is actually not too difficult. Anyone got a phrase to help with these?

Verrrr reminds me of Debussy Arabesque- number of sleepness nights I had over that.

It's all in a another topic, something liek "Grade 8 problem" with the face....

Is "Help!" the phrase you were looking for?

Seriously, I've been told it's more or less impossible unless you cheat by playing 6 vs 3 then 5 vs 3, just making it a little rubato, then repeat.

It's surprising how much music is not only easier when you "cheat" (i.e. play it not quite as written) but almost or actually impossible if you don't. In one of Gershwins arrangements in "Meet George Gershwin" there is a bit where the fingering instructions tell you to play a B and C together, but rather than with different fingers, both with the left thumb! I had spent all my life trying to avoid such fudging until I saw that! Then there is Debussy . . .

"Elephanticide hiccuping trouser press" and "Diddly-dum Welsh Assembly doggie in the window plus VAT" respectively.

Not really. Don't have the Nocturne in front of me but in most of these cases you concentrate on the faster notes and make the 6 (or whatever it might be) fit in with them. The effect of the fast run is more important than the pulse, and as long as both hands hit their next note at the same time NOBODY is going to be listening out for whether they are mathematically accurate in the bit you're talking about.



Rule 1 for professional pianists: if in doubt, cheat. There are many, many times when the basic fingering technique which worked for everything pre-Grade 5 or so just won't work in more advanced pieces. Getting round this definitely isn't "fudging" so don't worry about it - though to judge from your post I suppose you no longer worry about it at all.

(In case melody_maker happens to be reading this, nothing in the last paragraph applies to playing Bach ... )

I would just like to say that that is perfectly valid fingering - using the thumb to play 2 notes - not "fudging" at all

I've always done it by setting two metronomes of differing speeds and pitches off against each other, or writing it out in my composition program and listening to how it sounds.

The metronome one certainly sounds confusing!!

And I eventually ended up purchasing a recording of my Debussy and played it exactly as it sounded- speed, rhythm the lot. Hardly an individual's personal interpretation but hey I could play it!

I tend to do that.
Get each one playing in time then just go for it.

I just had a cello lesson where my teacher got me to play double-stopped 2v3.
It's fun!!!

You have a weird definition of fun!

Possibly, but I really do think it's fun! It's a work-out for the brain and the fingers....
Sadly, I've now worked out how to do the 2v3 double-stopping exercise I was doing, so I'm going to have to work out another one to try! 3v4, anyone? *shudders*

Right people have given some quite complicated answers to this, this is a method that'll work for all polyrhythms (2 against 3, 3 against 4 etc.). It's very simple.

First take the two numbers, 3 against 4, times them together to make 12. Then right out 1-12 on a piece of paper. To make them the same size I used 0, 1 + 2 again at the end.



Every 3rd beat put an x. staring on first:



And do the same with every 4th beat:



Now all you do it count aloud: 1(Both) 2 3 4(left) 5(right) 6 7(left) 8 9(right) 10(left) 11 12

Do this very slowly at first and build up speed, eventually you will be able merely to 'feel' the rythm and you won't have to count it in your head.


If you'd have done it for 3 against 2 you'd have



1(both) 2 3(left) 4(right) 5(left) 6.


This does work for them all, but some of them are quite long winded, eg 7 against 4



I must confess I don't really know what you'd do in that situation, perhaps in time that would seem natural as well, I've never been bored enough to try and count to 28 for fun.

I find it's easiest to get the rhythm right, either by just doing octaves on piano, or simply by tapping your hands. And then you'll find actually playing the notes in rhythm isn't that hard at all.

Yu could simply not play the Einaudi piece!!!

Contraversial!

Just feeling wicked for once!

It must be witching hour!

Maybe, but it's nearly my bedtime too!

I think if you were counting to 28, it might be too long winded to get a feel for the rhythm (unless it was intended to be a very slow piece).

Susie: me too

Another method is to create a midi file of two tones repeating the rhythm. Then you can simply listen to it and try and copy it.