How to play (bass/guitar/sing/whatever) rhythmically...?!

Do you play much stuff in complex or compound time signatures? Or changing time signatures? That's definitely a good thing to play with. I went on a 'prime signature' binge, writing songs in 5, 7, 11 and 13 (I felt I'd learned enough when I got to 13 :P) and I learned loads over those 4 projects.

A lot of Paranoid Android's coolness, for me, comes from the changing between 4/4 and 7/8. Jonny Greenwood's guitar solo in 7/8 at the end has some particularly cool rhythms involved. When you're in an odd-number signature it's a bit easier to come up with unusual rhythms, simply because you're less conditioned to those meters and you don't have a million different rhythms ground into your musical memory (think of how many different rhythms you hear in 4/4 every day, even without properly listening to music). Cultural conditioning and all that.

Get to understand the ideas of syncopation and polyrhythm too, definitely good concepts to be able to employ when you're looking for something rhythmically 'interesting'. And you're into Tool, polyrhythms and syncopation all over the gaff.

Herb Powell wrote: »

YOu just kind of............feel it.

To a certain extent, yes, but if we're jamming in 4, and I start playing a 5:4 polyrhythm over the riff, and then you decide it'd sound pretty badass to play the 3:5 polyrhythm underneath my lines for a few bars before we both drop back into 4... Good luck just feeling that without some serious theory and practice behind you :pac: