Ragtime is the music most commonly thought of when talking about syncopation. Another way of saying it is “irregular rhythm.” I’m 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 rhythms 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 that musicians face when faced with this type of syncopated pattern. The first is how to correctly read rhythmic patterns. Perhaps you can use this tip to help you 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 rhythm.
So before we had eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, tied eighth note in one bar. Now we can easily count, 1 and, 2 and, 3, 4 and because we have three sets of eighth notes and a quarter note. The second problem is playing the melody with a real rhythmic feel. To make this happen, place accents on the notes that occur on the normally weak beats. Any music dictionary will tell you to change the stress 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 lifeYo fair selected me pleaseum. Anticipate and feel the beat are common words applied to Cuban music. These irregular patterns are very necessary to play in your piano practice regardless of the playing genre. So, spice up your game with more syncopation!
