Now it’s time for some real excitement people! Let’s look into the concept of Rhythmic Superimposition shall we? Do you remember me ranting about Scale Superimposition in my Pentatonic Finder tutorial? Well, this is sort of the same, but with rhythms. If you recall, in the previous examples, we took one example, and varied the rhythm in that, without changing the idea. What we will do now, is to take a lick, an idea if you may, and ignore the notes of it. Instead we will use the rhythmic figure that makes up that lick, and superimpose that on ANY other thing we ever play! And I do mean everything! (Not that there will be room enough for that here, but as I said, YOU have to do the work =)). Sounds strange? Weird? Co-co? What the blimey is he talking about? Good! Let the curtains of confusion fall, and rhythmic enlightenment commence!
Here is example 3a, the root of all evil (or good rather) for the following examples. A pretty straight forward funk lick in G min pentatonic, originating from the intro to The Pimp Brothaz Theme Song (Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of these jesters of Funkadelica ☺)
Go that down? Good, now let’s look closer at example 3b shall we? What we have here is a common pentatonic rock lick, using the G Dorian blues scale. These kind of licks can be heard on any Paul Gilbert record, or players of that style (including myself I might add).
Once you have that down, let’s move on to example 3c. Yey! As you see, we have here the exact same notes and order of notes as in the previous example. However, what I have done is I have used the rhythm from figure 3a, and superimposed that onto the lick in 3b. No we’re cooking! Once again, this is something you should be able to do in actual live improvisation, in any style, tempo or with any technique. This is much harder than it sounds (and it doesn’t sound easy). To just learn these examples and use them as licks, is not enough, Learn the concept, and apply, apply, apply them to every lick you know!
Cool with that? Then click next for example 3d-e!